Steve McQueen is known today as one of the great leading men of Hollywood—a sex symbol and an icon of cool. Back in 1958, though, he was a TV star trying to break into movies, and doing it with a certain lack of Steve McQueen cool. The Blob was his first leading role, and it was not the stuff of Hollywood-icon-sex-symboling you might hope for if you were blonde Steve McQueen with a sex symbol inside you yearning to breathe free. In the film, McQueen played a very mature-looking teen (McQueen was 29) who plays second fiddle to a bunch of red jelly. The role called for the hero to be earnest and disturbed and then earnest again, as the Blob got bigger and bigger and took up more and more of the scene. The Blob has many virtues, but it does not necessarily make you sit up and say, “By crikey! That Steve McQueen—he is an icon of cool who will become a household name for the way he is disturbed and earnest when confronted with rampaging gelatin!”

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McQueen’s very next film, though, showcased what he could do when you stripped him of the gelatin and let him emote at broader length. The Great St. Louis Bank Robbery, released in 1959, was McQueen’s second-leading performance, and it was substantially more upscale. Celebrated documentary filmmaker Charles Guggenheim in the director’s chair brought a gritty authenticity to the heist plot, based on a real 1953 robbery gone hopelessly awry.

McQueen is George Fowler, a young (but not improbably young!) college dropout looking to regain the glory of his gridiron days—he still wears his letter jacket everywhere. He’s recruited by his ex-girlfriend’s brother Gino (David Clarke) to serve as the getaway driver for the heist. McQueen plays George as stoic and cool. But his naivete and ineffectuality bleed around the edges. He can be steady under pressure. But he desperately wants the money and lets the heist boss John Egan (Crahan Denton) bully him as a result. Egan even murders George’s ex-girlfriend Ann (Molly McCarthy) when he finds out George has told her about the heist. George suspects Egan has done something horrible but convinces himself that the gangster has just sent Ann away to Chicago.

In the finale, George is shot in the bank, and McQueen dramatically crawls around the floor, moaning and muttering and gasping with regret. It’s an Oscar-bait performance, and a bit over the top—George seems more like he’s drunk than like a guy who just got shot in the leg. But it’s Acting-with-a-capital-A; no tub of jelly steals that scene.

The Great St. Louis Bank Robbery was a quality picture with somber sturdy performances and direction. It set McQueen up for a career of action and dramatic roles, most notably The Magnificent Seven, which would become his first big hit in 1960. Yet, it’s virtually forgotten, while the substantially downmarket The Blob remains watched and beloved.

It’s not hard to figure out why. The Blob is wonderful, campy, goofy fun—yes, even unto icon-of-cool Steve McQueen pretending to be a teenager and getting upstaged by the special effects. The Great St. Louis Bank Robbery in contrast is just another morality play about how you shouldn’t steal and bad guys are bad. It showed that McQueen could play more serious and more challenging roles. But it’s also a reminder of why McQueen’s first lead remains a career highlight. Whatever his other achievements, he’d never quite escape the Blob.