I turned on one of the HD movie channels the other day — I love HD! — and there’s Al Lettieri, lying in a veterinarian’s office, menacingly fingering a little black kitten. “Don’t kill that cat,” I want to scream, but he doesn’t. Not yet, anyway. Big Al is one of the more menacing character actors of the ’70s, and the vet has just stitched him up, and he orders the vet’s over-sexed wife to wipe him down. Lettieri is pissed — he’s been shot and left for dead.

Meanwhile, some Texas low-lifes in suits are fixin’ to go after Steve McQueen and Ali MacGraw, who have their money, and they send a guy down to El Paso to wait for them, and the gunman stays at Dub Taylor’s, where they somehow know they’re heading, and Lettieri forces the vet and his wife — Howard from Mayberry and Sally Struthers, no less — he forces them into their car, and the wife is, how shall we say it, very cooperative, and soon McQueen’s picture is everywhere, everyone is recognizing him, and they’re all converging on El Paso.

And he shot-guns the cop car, he blows up the bubble-lights, and the trunk and the hood, and the scene is cut to the explosions, and the pieces rain down in slow-mo, for this is Sam Peckinpah territory … and I remember this scene from the first time I saw it, everybody’s after Steve and Ali, and MacGraw can’t act, and though it’s mondo un-PC, I root for McQueen when he slaps her around, thinking maybe he’ll smack some acting chops into her, but then I realize that McQueen can’t act, either, he’s just always, blessedly Steve McQueen . . .

No one in this movie can act, but it doesn’t matter much , because it’s about the action, baby, it’s about the suspense, like the scene on the train where nobody’s life is at stake, just the money, and McQueen endlessly pursues the guy with their money down an endless aisle, through the Vista car, pushing every guy in Texas out of his way, and the scene goes on and on, until you think that it’s too long, and the tension builds, just in a train scene . . .

Now they’re in El Paso, and McQueen shoots up other cop car at a drive-in, and they escape in a garbage-truck — a garbage truck — and they end up at the dump. Get it? The dump . . . that’s where their life of crime has taken them, and Ali has literally screwed McQueen out of prison but the ingrate’s not grateful, at least not at first, but there in the dump they reconcile . . .

Now everybody’s in El Paso — the guy the suits have sent, Lettieri and the meathead’s wife (poor old Howard’s strung himself up along the way), and the suits themselves are heading there in a convertible, holding onto their Stetsons in the wind . . .

Dub Taylor’s sold them up the river, the old alky, and there’s an incredible gun-fight, and they kill everybody — including that creep Lettieri — and they cop a pick-up truck, and lo and behold, it’s Slim Pickens!

Talk about your side-kick mojo.