Product Description

Disc 1: The Great Escape WS Disc 2: Rocky WS Disc 3: West Side Story P&S

Disc 4 Side A: Thomas Crown Affair (1968) WS Disc 4 Side B: Thomas Crown Affair (1968) P&S

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #55740 in DVD
• Released on: 2007-10-23
• Rating: PG (Parental Guidance Suggested)
• Aspect ratio: 1.85:1
• Formats: Box set, Color, DVD, NTSC
• Original language: English, French, German, Russian, Spanish
• Number of discs: 4
• Running time: 549 minutes

Amazon.com

The Great Escape: The Great Escape image of Steve McQueen (as "The Cooler King") astride his motorcycle has entered silver-screen iconography, alongside Brando on his bike from The Wild One. Based on a true story about a group of POWs who mount a daring breakout from a supposedly inescapable Nazi prison camp, this rousing and suspenseful WWII epic features an all-star cast, including James Garner, Richard Attenborough, Charles Bronson, Donald Pleasence, James Coburn, and David McCallum. --Jim Emerson

Rocky: The only remaining evidence that Sylvester Stallone might have had a respectable career, this 1976 Oscar winner (for Best Picture, Director, and Editing) is still the quintessential ode to an underdog and one of the best boxing movies ever made. After writing the script about a two-bit boxer who gets a "million-to-one shot" against the world heavyweight champion, Stallone insisted that he star in the title role, and his equally unknown status helped to catapult him (and this rousing film) to overnight success. The story is familiar, but it has been handled with such vitality and emotional honesty that you can't help but leap and cheer for Rocky Balboa, the chump turned champ (despite his valiant defeat in the ring) who stuns the boxing world with the support of his timid girlfriend, Adrian (Talia Shire), and grizzled trainer, Gus (Burgess Meredith). Oscar nominations went to all the lead actors (including Burt Young as Adrian's hot-tempered brother), but five sequels could never top the universal appeal of this low-budget crowd pleaser. --Jeff Shannon

West Side Story: The winner of 10 Academy Awards, this 1961 musical by choreographer Jerome Robbins and director Robert Wise (The Sound of Music) remains irresistible. Based on a smash Broadway play updating Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet to the 1950s era of juvenile delinquency, the film stars Natalie Wood and Richard Beymer as the star-crossed lovers from different neighborhoods--and ethnicities. The film's real selling points, however, are the highly charged and inventive song-and-dance numbers, the passionate ballads, the moody sets, colorful support from Rita Moreno, and the sheer accomplishment of Hollywood talent and technology producing a film so stirring. Leonard Bernstein and Stephen Sondheim wrote the score. --Tom Keogh

The Thomas Crown Affair: Millionaire businessman Thomas Crown (Steve McQueen) is also a high-stakes thief; his latest caper is an elaborate heist at a Boston bank. Why does he do it? For the same reason he flies gliders, bets on golf strokes, and races dune buggies: he needs the thrill to feel alive. Insurance investigator Vicky Anderson (Faye Dunaway) gets her own thrills by busting crooks, and she's got Crown in her cross hairs. Naturally, these two will get it on, because they have a lot in common: they're not people, they're walking clothes racks. (McQueen looks like he'd rather be in jeans than Crown's natty three-piece suits.) The Thomas Crown Affair is a catalog of '60s conventions, from its clipped editing style to its photographic trickery (the inventive Haskell Wexler behind the camera) to its mod design. You can almost sense director Norman Jewison deciding to "tell his story visually," like those newfangled European films; this would explain the long passages of Michel Legrand's lounge jazz ladled over endless montages of the pretty Dunaway and McQueen at play. (The opening-credits song, "Windmills of Your Mind," won an Oscar.) It's like a "What Kind of Man Reads Playboy?" ad come to life, and much more interesting as a cultural snapshot than a piece of storytelling. --Robert Horton

Customer Reviews

is this neglected classic EVER going to see a restored DVD release?
It would be stopping just short of a criminal act if this sinister gem were not preserved in a contemporary format for current and future generations, especially in light of the fact that the movie which is considered to be it's immediate inspiration, the legendary "London After Midnight" is a lost film.

One has to wonder why this title has been neglected in the race to commit so many vintage titles to dvd. Certainly, features with far less merit have found their way to this format.

Despite a script which feels muddled in places and a twist ending which leaves many viewers feeling cheated, "Mark of the Vampire" ranks among the greatest within the genre for stark, yet sumptuous, visual feasts and genuinely creepy atmosphere - it certainly meets and out-gruesomes the works which originated from powerhouse rival Universal at that time.

Best of all - it's brief, at least in it's current form. At only about an hour in running time, it's a quick and morbid morsel, just right on it's own, or for sandwiching between, say, a couple of those longer-running Universal monster classics. Still , it's a safe bet that fans of the movie and of it's stars want to see the nearly 20 minutes of missing footage discovered and restored.

Even though his role is a non-speaking one,(until the very end) Bela Lugosi still manages to out-vamp and out-menace even his own original Dracula screen performance. Carroll Borland (as Luna Mora) silently steals any scenes in which she appears; her unusual beauty and mute performance solidified the look and demeanor for several decades' worth of cinematic and TV undead females, and in no small way lives today in every goth girl.

Together Lugosi and Borland creeped the bejeezus out of me as a kid with their synchronized movements. Witness her amazing, all-too-brief flying scene (some of which was cut before the film's initial release), and then marvel that that image and the countless others in this film were all achieved in "real" life: all visual effects were made to occur in real time, in real life, and in 3 real dimensinons by artists and technicians for "real" in front of the camera, and in front of the actors, not simulated on some virtual set with the aid of a computer.

I can't recommend it enough.

Intriguing Vampire Tale(and not from Universal!)
I loved this one, and in some ways it is superior to Dracula(30). There is a strong cast with Lionel Barrymore and Bela Lugosi. This one has a good atmosphere that is worthy of Universal. This would make(and maybe it did in its heyday!) a good double feature with the original Dracula(30).

Good Entertainment
While this movie isn't exactly frightening, it does manage to entertain! The acting is good, effects are excellent for the times, and the plot twist at the end is nothing of what you expected! This is a recommended buy!