LEE MAJORS IS A BIONIC MAN OF 'STEEL' WITH JENNIFER O'NEILL

Poster art for Steve Carver's blue collar action drama with Lee Majors titled STEEL Year: 1979

Any movie that spends time gathering up an eclectic lot of characters… and characters they are… in order to pull off an impossible challenge is probably gonna be cool, and STEEL, avoiding blue collar melodrama and corny clichés, is, for what it's worth, pretty darn close to lightweight popcorn perfection...

Fresh from his stint as the Bionic Man and having survived piranha in KILLER FISH, Lee Majors shows a little more range as a former steel worker…In fact he was a legend at his trade… who, thanks or no thanks to a bad accident, has an immense fear of heights...

Lee Majors and Jennifer O'Neill have a strong bond in STEEL

But that doesn’t mean he can’t find the best men for the job – and there’s a woman on board too, more than just a filler love interest as Jennifer O’Neill plays Cass Cassidy, the gorgeous and determined daughter of Big Lew Cassidy...

Enter the always-awesome George Kennedy, with so much screen time in the first fifteen minutes, setting up the situation/plotline to get a building up before he’s taken over by nefarious corporate weenie Eddie (Harris Yulin), you’ll wonder if he’s the main star after all...

Lee Majors, Richard Lynch and Albert Salmi in STEEL Rates: ***1/2

But an accident causes his death, and that’s when daughter Cass calls in Major’s Mike Catton to finish the difficult job in a short amount of time...

The best scenes are the gathering of the team, including the token pisser played by Richard Lynch… Spanish womanizer Terry Kiser… naïve/nervous kid Ben Marley and others including Roger E. Mosely as one of two burly dudes sharing a mutual man-crush, Robert Tessier as a muscular Indian, and Albert Salmi as a hot dog crane operator.

A Six Million Dollar Lee Majors drinks while drives coolly in STEEL

Like many films dealing with the kindhearted working class verses evil corporate clowns, STEEL never gets too overly emotionally or sympathetically involved in the underdog’s plight, being more of a LONGEST YARD replacing a football game with the construction of a building which, through rainstorms and several unpredictable catastrophes, becomes a formidable character in itself...

No matter how bad things get for our boys, with a funky soundtrack, an assortment of energetic roughnecks and a pivotal nail biting heist, you’ll still have a good time amidst all the blood, sweat, and tears.

A piece of manly poster artwork for Steve Carver's STEEL

Jennifer O'Neill as the ingenue in Steve Carver's tough guy flick STEEL

Jennifer O'Neill as the ingenue in Steve Carver's tough guy flick STEEL

Lee Majors is faced by Jennifer O'Neill in Steve Carver's STEEL