The Cincinnati Kid (1965); The Thomas Crown Affair (1968); Junior Bonner (1972) [Western Legends] – DVDs

THE CINCINNATI KID
***/**** Image A- Sound A- Extras B+
starring Steve McQueen, Edward G. Robinson, Ann-Margret, Karl Malden
screenplay by Ring Lardner, Jr. and Terry Southern
directed by Norman Jewison

THE THOMAS CROWN AFFAIR
*½/**** Image B Sound B Extras B
starring Steve McQueen, Faye Dunaway, Paul Burke, Jack Weston
written by Alan R. Trustman
directed by Norman Jewison

by Travis Mackenzie Hoover I imagine our American readers are astonished to learn that Norman Jewison is lionized in English Canada. Rest assured, it's not because we think his films are better than flimsy liberal mush (even if we pretend otherwise)–it's because for the longest time, he was the biggest fish in our cinematic pond. Until the rise of Cronenberg and his many disciples, Jewison was, expat or not, the highest-profile Canuck director in the game, and our nation's disbelief at his success has allowed him to seem more important than he actually is. Though he's good at nice-guy friendliness rendered with a modicum of craft, anything more ambitious comes off a little strained. Thus, his downplaying of the grim parts of The Cincinnati Kid makes the film a tolerable entertainment, while his self-consciously "creative" The Thomas Crown Affair wears out its welcome pretty fast.

I think it's fair to say that The Cincinnati Kid succeeds as a Jewison film because he isn't really aware of the gravity of its subject. While the brutality of '30s cardsharps duking it out for supremacy is beyond him (he hired Terry Southern to lighten blacklisted writer Ring Lardner, Jr.'s script), it at least allows him to stay out of the way of the action and let cool people be cool. And the erstwhile Coolest Man Alive does him proud: anchoring a lovely exercise in male masochism, Steve McQueen is his usual unflappable self as the small-timer looking to break into the big leagues. Of course the king of poker (Edward G. Robinson, a fine match for McQueen) has landed in New Orleans, and of course there's a big game, but things keep moving with people striking manly and/or sexy poses to the admiration of the gallery.

True, Jewison waters down the milieu considerably. Despite harsh performances from Rip Torn as a con artist looking to fix the game and especially Joan Blondell as a visiting dealer, the meanness and desperation of the individuals never registers save as tragi-romantic movers of the plot. Yet although this would have hobbled a film by Peckinpah (The Cincinnati Kid's original director), it actually curbs Jewison's tendency towards speechifying and turgidity. If you are unfortunately presented with Ann-Margret as a cheater at jigsaw puzzles (you had to be there), you don't dwell on the presentation. Mostly, you notice a bunch of people playing spiffy parts in a nicely- shot and designed setting. It's not genius, but it's surprisingly absorbing and worth a lazy afternoon.

It would be logical to assume that if reduced importance equals good Jewison, then no importance equals great Jewison. But you wouldn't have bartered on The Thomas Crown Affair, which is so hyper-aware of its mission to be fun as to prevent you from having any of your own. The lowest hack director would instinctively get out of the way of McQueen as the titular banker heisting his own bank and Faye Dunaway as the insurance investigator who first chases him, then falls in love with him. But as our Norman has clearly been to Expo '67 (a defining aesthetic event for Canadians), he foolishly lays on the split-screens with a trowel. The opening heist (and much of the rest of the movie) portends the credits of many a Stephen J. Cannell show, with enough separate panels that you're distracted from what's actually happening–an event that kills the already-wispy movie-movie plot.

Where Brian DePalma would later integrate split-screens into the flow of action and use them contrapuntally, Jewison fires them at you non-stop, and, coupled with some "elliptical" editing lifted from the French New Wave, the frantic results make The Blair Witch Project look like Carl Dreyer. The director is clearly knocking himself out trying to impress us, but all he does is underline the emptiness of the script, which has the temerity to propose a banker as an anti-establishment figure and includes the rich man in a glider as a symbol of the individual yearning to be free. Perhaps we wouldn't mind if we weren't being cued to greater stylistic import, but Jewison is no Seijun Suzuki; his limp attempt at a freak-out only underlines the squareness of his universe.

THE DVDs
The Cincinnati Kid arrives on DVD in a largely impressive presentation from Warner. The 1.78:1, 16×9-enhanced image is reasonably if not perfectly sharp, boasting creditable fine detail and saturation that doesn't subvert the film's muted palette. Up to the same level, the Dolby 1.0 mono soundtrack lacks brilliance but is several cuts above mediocre. Extras begin with a commentary by Jewison in which he alternately illuminates just how he softened the material and acknowledges the contributions of his collaborators. He reveals that he switched from b&w to colour in taking over for Peckinpah and that it was his idea to include "bookends" of a black shoeshine boy playing a penny-shooting game with McQueen. A second scene-specific commentary features Phil Gordon and Dave Foley of "Celebrity Poker Showdown" expounding on several scenes; though much of their time is spent on how little the former Kid in the Hall knows about poker, Gordon provides extensive background information on such topics as the photogenic quality of 5-card stud and the reason casinos use chips instead of real money. A 6-minute vintage featurette (in b&w) sees a technical advisor demonstrating various cheating techniques to Blondell, although it's swamped by its own bookends of clips from the film. Rounding out the package: The Cincinnati Kid's trailer.

The Thomas Crown Affair doesn't fare as well. MGM's flipper fullscreen/1 .85:1, anamorphic widescreen remaster looks fairly soft and poorly saturated, with a marked lack of sharpness in comparison to the other McQueen/Jewison film. The Dolby 2.0 mono sound is similarly middling, trapped in the middle of sharpness and roundness and never reaching a satisfactory compromise. Another Jewison commentary graces the disc, wherein he declares Crown a "protestor" (dream on, baby) and notes the incongruity of tough McQueen wearing a suit and tie. He also relates the defining impact that Expo '67 had on the film's style, heaps more praise on his collaborators, and laments the passing of '60's/'70's freedom. (No surprises, in other words.) The film's trailer completes the platter.

JUNIOR BONNER
***/**** Image B+ Sound B Extras A+
starring Steve McQueen, Robert Preston, Ida Lupino, Ben Johnson
written by Jeb Rosebrook
directed by Sam Peckinpah

by Walter Chaw Sam Peckinpah was tossed between the calms and gales of his specific genius. Victim to frequent rages over the gender war as perverted by men of suspect stock and women cast as instigators just by the fact of them, Peckinpah was no less fond of presenting elegies to masculinity (as he does as early as in his second film, Ride the High Country), finding the rituals of manhood (drinking, fighting, whoring) slowly losing their hold on a world fast civilizing itself. (Both themes, incidentally, share time on HBO's astonishing "Deadwood".) Starting with The Wild Bunch, Peckinpah seemed to want to pair his raging with his mourning (fury with remorse, like a recalcitrant abuser)–following that sanguine masterpiece, for instance, with the delicate The Ballad of Cable Hogue, then the furious Straw Dogs, the understated Junior Bonner, the sexy The Getaway, the dirge-like Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid, and the angry manifesto Bring Me The Head of Alfredo Garcia, until finally he lost his way to his own demons and the caprice of angry producers. Peckinpah at his best raises issues best not brought up around men, like obsolescence, like how maybe the last, desperate things that men do to preserve their dignity and their legacy can ultimately be considered impotent and embarrassing gestures–and so he casts actors in the twilight of their careers.

In Junior Bonner, released just one year after Straw Dogs, Steve McQueen plays the titular rodeo bull veteran, beaten to a pulp as the film opens by a particularly mean bull that he's destined to meet again in his hometown of Prescott, Arizona. Having been gone for a spell chasing rodeo buckles and groupies, Junior returns in time to see his father's home get turned into a gravel pit in part due to some shady wrangling by his brother Curly (Joe Don Baker), who's turned his back on a traditional way of life to pursue his "first million" in real estate and mobile homes. Junior's mother Elvira (the great Ida Lupino), a recipient of Curly's questionable largess, is lectured about smoking in front of her grandbaby by her daughter-in-law (a scabrous Mary Murphy) at a tense dinner–earning a glance from Junior that predicts Curly's defenestration post-dessert. The disintegration of the Bonner family (patriarch Ace (Robert Preston) starts the film in the hospital after totalling his car in a drunken stupor) mirrors the decline of the Marlboro Man mystique, while Ace's wish to spend his last years in untamed Australia sounds a lot like Joel McCrea's plea at the end of Ride the High Country that he be allowed to perish out of sight of the generation set to supplant him.

The unspoken compulsion at the root of Junior Bonner is that endearing male desire to show off for the womenfolk. It's the primal–and primary–urge underlying all of the action in the piece: Ace's forced sexual bravado for his long-suffering nurse; Curly's family-man aspect, struck before his sons at the expense of his brother and mother; and Junior's bravado with some dinged-up ribs before his new and temporary lady love (Barbara Leigh). Compare Junior's end-of-film ride of the bull that humbled him during the prologue to Sam Shepard as Chuck Yeager's breaking of the sound barrier in Philip Kaufman's The Right Stuff: both acts are performed against better judgment (while injured) in pieces essaying portions of Americana turning vestigial as pretty brunettes watch from the sidelines. There's something essential about boys playing men in front of the women they love, and where Peckinpah approaches that with bile in Straw Dogs, he approaches it with affection in Junior Bonner. It's the sort of wisdom that lures a great performance from McQueen, playing against his tough-guy persona here in one of the first films to show the toll that hard-living had taken on his looks ("grizzled" is the word), with the actor allowing himself to look beaten for almost the duration of the picture. Preston is, as he so often was, a fantastic salesman of an actor; matched with McQueen's resignation and Baker's greased-up sleaze, he discovers a measure of poignancy in his practised oiliness–Willy Loman (Harold Hill?) no longer able to sell himself the myth of himself. Peckinpah would fight the good fight for a while longer, but it's in his quiet "buffer" films that you can feel his acid resolve shaking.

THE DVD
MGM releases Junior Bonner in a would-be definitive DVD release that preserves the film in a vibrant, living 2.35:1 letterbox presentation that picks up every speck of dirt on Junior's battered horse trailer. (MGM's inheritance of the title from Anchor Bay's deal with Disney-owned ABC unfortunately precluded enhancing the image for anamorphic displays.) When Junior tells a couple of fellow travellers that this rodeo cowboy is "lonesome," a little speck of spit punctuating his state is restored to its proper spot on the proscenium after years of being indistinguishable from print debris. Peckinpah became known as one thing ("Bloody Sam") by the end of his career–what's forgotten in a lot of the conversations is how skilled a filmmaker he actually was. The Dolby 2.0 mono audio is fine if not fulsome, free of the distortions and tinniness that a lot of mono tracks of this age display. The centrepiece of the disc is a feature-length commentary featuring Peckinpah scholars Paul Seydor, Garner Simmons, and David Weddle, with the trio moderated by Nick Redman. It's an exceptional track that goes into deep analysis of the strategies of the picture–the fact that it opens in memory, continues into a series of delayed reunions, and resolves with an echo of the opening. It's a model of how a commentary should be recorded and a refutation that artist intentionality is ever as interesting as the critical tactic. In truth, and given my druthers, I would with few exceptions gladly spend the rest of my career interviewing only critics. This track is just one example of why. The MGM "great movies" montage opens the disc.

• The Cincinnati Kid
  102 minutes; NR; 1.78:1 (16×9-enhanced); English DD 1.0, French DD 1.0; CC; English, French, Spanish subtitles; DVD-9; Region One; Warner
• The Thomas Crown Affair
  102 minutes; R; 1.85:1 (16×9-enhanced), 1.33:1; English DD 2.0 (Mono); CC; English, French, Spanish subtitles; DVD-10; Region One; MGM
• Junior Bonner
  100 minutes; PG; 2.35:1; English DD 2.0 (Mono); CC; English, French, Spanish subtitles; DVD-9; Region One; MGM