Rating: - Flawless
In The Great Escape and The Magnificent Seven, Steve McQueen gives worthy performances but they are more or less ensemble films. In ESCAPE you might argue that McQueen is the actual star and the other characters, vivid as they are, serve only to support him, but in SEVEN he's not even the main star. People like myself with action fever in our blood think the world of these two films, early exposures to adrenaline pumping, and we remember them with the same intake of breath we remember the first time we jumped out of a plane or got into a fistfight.

In JUNIOR BONNER, the action is more subtle, though the rodeo background is colorful and McQueen, a little more weathered, is even better than before. His tangles with Ida Lupino are legendary and she was never better than in this film, a nice valedictory on Sam Peckinpah's part to one of Britain's (and Hollywood's) finest actresses, a woman who could spit out nails when she wanted to and a fitting progenitor for McQueen's icy stare (she plays his mother). It's a softer and more lyrical Peckinpah film, unlike the later THE GETAWAY (also with McQueen, although not in this boxed set).

Finally there's Norman Jewison's remake/remodel of Steve McQueen as a dashing, dapper Cary Grant type in the sophisticated caper thriller THE THOMAS CROWN AFFAIR. To McQueen's credit, he was able to st-r-e-t-ch his screen image to accommodate the rapier verbal wit of the screenplay as well as do his customary "blue haze" screen stare. Faye Dunaway, as the curious heroine, is also very good and hardly mannered at all. When the film appeared, there was a lot of attention paid to their chess scene, which more or less frankly tried to imitate the baroque erotics of TOM JONES' famous "eating scene" with Albert Finney. Everything in the sequence is a complex double entendre, and often the actors are photographed in intense closeup, letting their eyes do all the talking for them. It works today, even though it has itself been imitated dozens of times since. On the entertaining commentary track Jewison acknowledges the prickly personae of his stars, and hints at how difficult they both could be, and he'll make you smile with some of his insider info.

This MGM set is released at a low (if not quite budget) price and has four great films in it. The competing McQueen set may have more discs, but it has more duds too. You pay your money, and you make your choice!