The Sci-Fi Movie Steve McQueen Didn't Want To Talk About

Steve McQueen was one of the coolest movie stars ever. He exuded steely confidence as Old West bounty hunter Josh Randall on the CBS series "Wanted Dead or Alive" and was so at home in that milieu that director John Sturges cast him as the second lead in his epic Western "The Magnificent Seven." It was a rapid ascent to the upper echelon of Hollywood's A-list after that, with McQueen captivating audiences with his tough, taciturn demeanor in classics like "The Great Escape," "The Cincinnati Kid," and "The Sand Pebbles" (for which he earned his first and only Oscar nomination for Best Actor).

1968 was the year McQueen became a full-fledged screen icon. He was a smolderingly sexy gentleman thief in "The Thomas Crown Affair," which found him throwing off wild sparks with co-star Faye Dunaway. Then he shifted gears to play San Francisco Police Department Lieutenant Frank Bullitt in Peter Yates' immaculately directed "Bullitt," an instant action classic that left every car enthusiast on the planet craving a Ford Mustang GT fastback. From this point forward (until he died from cancer in 1980 at the age of 50), McQueen was one of the industry's most in-demand stars.

McQueen was a serious man who was protective of his image. He rarely let himself get miscast (1978's "An Enemy of the State" being a notable exception, though I kinda like him in it) because he knew full well what he couldn't do. When Steven Spielberg sought to cast him as Roy Neary in "Close Encounters of the Third Kind," the star respectfully turned him down because he couldn't cry on cue.

Similarly, when it came to discussing his career, McQueen would talk about all of the aforementioned movies. There was one, however, that was a no-go area. McQueen hated "The Blob."

You'd think McQueen would be grateful to some degree for Irvin S. Yeaworth's B horror classic "The Blob." After all, it gave him his first starring role in a feature and went on to be a box office success. Perhaps he was sore that he turned down the offered 10-percent share of profits in favor of a larger up-front paycheck because he badly needed the money. ("The Blob" grossed $4 million against a minuscule $110,000 budget.)

In any event, whenever the film came up in an interview, he clammed up. Even when he was chatting with high school newspaper reporter Richard Kraus in 1980 on the set of "The Hunter" (which wound up being his last movie and last interview), he refused to address his first starring role. "Let's not talk about that," he told Kraus. "I don't want to talk about that movie. Next question." (This might sound incredibly mean, but "The Blob" was thrown out by a crew member who was in earshot.)

Had McQueen lived long enough to see "The Blob" get added to The Criterion Collection, perhaps he would've softened on the movie. Maybe he could've been persuaded to do an interview for the disc. Or maybe he would've bellowed "Criterion what?" and told them to buzz off. Regardless, McQueen had nothing to be embarrassed about. He's fine in the film — though the titular, human-devouring ooze did kind of steal his thunder.