The Essential Steve McQueen Collection DVD Set
Steve McQueen (1930–1980) was one of the top film stars of the 1960s and early 1970s. Though best remembered as a leading man of big and loud action movies such as The Magnificent Seven (1960), The Great Escape (1963), The Getaway (1972), and the hellish bore The Towering Inferno (1974), McQueen was at his best in smaller films like Love with the Proper Stranger (1963), in which he gives a sensitive and quite likable performance as the (Italian-American?!) man who impregnates Natalie Wood, and The Cincinnati Kid (1965), playing opposite (and against) fellow card shark Edward G. Robinson.
Last May, Warner Home Video released a package of six McQueen films on DVD, "The Essential Steve McQueen Collection."
Included are Bullitt (1968) Two-Disc Special Edition, The Cincinnati Kid, The Getaway Deluxe Edition, Never So Few (1959), Papillon (1973), and Tom Horn (1980). Of these, the thrilling Bullitt and the multi-star The Cincinnati Kid vie for the best-of-the-pack slot.
The Getaway is a mindless but enjoyable badgers-chase-cool cat romp; Papillon is an overlong escape tale set in Devil’s Island — though it offers one of McQueen’s best performances; while the box-office disappointment Tom Horn is an honorable attempt at an intelligent Western, though one that fails to reach its lofty goals.
The less said about the military melodrama Never So Few the better. John Sturges, the highly capable director of Bad Day at Black Rock and The Magnificent Seven is to blame for that film’s lack of direction.
Region 1 DVD (Canada / U.S. / U.S. territories) release date: May 31, 2005
- Number of discs: 6
- Closed captioned
- Color
- Bullitt Two-Disc Special Edition (1968) directed by Peter Yates, with Robert Vaughn, Jacqueline Bisset, Robert Duvall
- Commentary by director Peter Yates
- Theatrical trailer
- Vintage featurette: “Bullitt: Steve McQueen’s Commitment to Reality"
- Two feature-length documentaries:
- The Cutting Edge: The Magic of Movie Editing narrated by Kathy Bates
- Steve McQueen: The Essence of Cool directed by Mimi Freedman
- The Cincinnati Kid (1965), directed by Norman Jewison, with Edward G. Robinson, Ann-Margret, Tuesday Weld, Karl Malden, and Joan Blondell
- Commentary by director Norman Jewison (The Hurricane)
- Scene-specific commentary by David Foley and Phil Gordon, the hosts of Bravo’s “Celebrity Poker Showdown”
- Archival featurette “The Cincinnati Kid Plays According to Hoyle”
- Theatrical trailer
- The Getaway Deluxe Edition (1972), directed by Sam Peckinpah, with Ali MacGraw
- Commentary by DVD producer Nick Redman, plus authors Paul Seydor, Garner Simmons, and David Weddle
- “Virtual” audio commentary with stills featuring Steve McQueen, Ali MacGraw, and Sam Peckinpah
- Theatrical trailer
- Never So Few (1959), directed by John Sturges, with Frank Sinatra, Gina Lollobrigida, Peter Lawford, Richard Johnson
- Papillon (1973), directed by Franklin J. Schaffner, with Dustin Hoffman
- Tom Horn (1980), directed by William Wiard, with Linda Evans and Richard Farnsworth
List price: US$68.92. (At Amazon: US$48.24.) Prices subject to change.
A Warner Home Video release.
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