The Essential Steve McQueen Collection (DVD)

Born 75 years ago several studios are using the 75th anniversary of Steve McQueen's birth and the 25th anniversary of his death as a year of remembrance for one of the greatest and most charismatic actors the big and small screen have ever seen, but as you will soon come to see, life was never really all that easy for McQueen as Warner Home Video offers up 6 of his classic films as well as a feature-length documentary on the man and his life on a special 2-disc edition of Bullitt.

Prior to this collection I reviewed MGM's four disc set of Steve McQueen classics of which you can read here, and for those of you McQueen die-hards, New Line is also releasing the first season of his television show "Wanted Dead or Alive," but for now we are going to focus on a select six; Bullitt, The Cincinnati Kid, Never So Few, Tom Horn, Papillon and The Getaway.

For the most part, the past week has been a whirlwind of McQueen as I have watched ten of his movies and enough special features on the man to feel like I should know everything about him, but as I finished my viewings with the full-length McQueen documentary on the second disc of the Bullitt DVD I realized no one may know McQueen completely, he was a man with a past I would never wish on anyone and after all he endured and accomplished to be taken to his grave by cancer just doesn't seem fair.

As I watched these six films and the four of the MGM Collection (The Great Escape, The Magnificent Seven, The Thomas Crown Affair and Junior Bonner) I finally got my feel for what I liked most about McQueen and I primarily found myself favoring the films in which he played more of a supporting role, a role where he didn't have as much time to build a character.

McQueen was great at getting the audience attention with virtually no dialogue at all, he stole movies from leading actors as he did in The Magnificent Seven and then again in Never So Few. Whether it was a flip of a hat, a look, a one-liner or a drag on a cigarette McQueen was the essence of cool and you bought into that no matter what was going on around him.

Of this bunch my favorites certainly lie in Never So Few, Papillon, The Getaway and the violent Tom Horn (when that guy's head explodes you just aren't ready for it). Never So Few is a fantastic war movie and when McQueen beats up the MP right in front of Sinatra's character as Captain Tom Reynolds it is priceless. Tom Horn brings out everything gritty in McQueen as well as everything emotional the he had to offer as he plays the second to last role of his life. Papillon is a fabulous collaboration of two young stars as McQueen and Dustin Hoffman break out of jail in the true story of Henri Charriere's escape from Devil's Island, and The Getaway shows how tough McQueen can really be as a screaming blonde girl gets on his last nerve just before he pops her one, sending her to the floor.

Now, I know Bullitt and The Cincinnati Kid are the two heavy hitters in this set, and I did like Bullitt to a certain extent, but The Cincinnati Kid was boring and never really gained any momentum. The two commentaries offered on The Cincinnati Kid, one with director Norman Jewison and the other with those two tools from Bravo's "Celebrity Poker Showdown," did add a bit of life to the feature, but not enough for me to say I will ever watch it again. Bullitt, on the other hand, will find its way into my DVD player.

As for features yet-to-be-mentioned, Papillon and The Cincinnati Kid come with a couple of retro featurettes made during the year of the films' release, each DVD comes with a theatrical trailer and The Getaway comes equipped with a cool virtual commentary lasting about five minutes. Using archived interview footage of Steve McQueen, Ali McGraw and director Sam Peckinpah, the audio is pasted together and played over the opening sequence of the film, it is one of the few times you actually get to hear McQueen talk as there is not a lot of interview footage of him.

On top of the commentaries I have already mentioned, The Getaway comes with a commentary from a group of Peckinpah scholars and Bullitt contains an audio commentary with director Peter Yates, who, believe it or not, details the film as if he made it only days ago (not 37 years) as he is able to pick and point out several intricate details of the production, including detailing the classic chase scene point by point.

Disc two of Bullitt is where you will find the previously mentioned McQueen documentary, which includes comments from just about everyone including first wife Neile Adams, son Chad, third wife Barbara Minty, Alec Baldwin, Lord Richard Attenborough, Robert Vaughn, Don Gordon and several others as they tell the life story of Steve McQueen. It has a running time of nearly 90 minutes and is an excellent watch. Then there is a retro featurette, as I said before, and finally, the oddly placed featurette on editing in cinema, which has nothing to do with McQueen at all. The featurette is fabulous as it traces the lineage of film editors throughout time, but it was a really odd choice to include it here, then again, I am glad they did.

Overall, if I were to buy either the MGM collection of McQueen materials or this one I would certainly choose this one. That is not to say the other is no good, but the Warner collection contains a much broader list of titles and it also has six movies instead of four and in my limited scope of things more is always better. Each of these films sets itself apart from the next as McQueen plays an outlaw, a thief, a cop, a gambler, a convict and a wartime hero; it is just a matter of choosing which man you want to show up.