4 Hollywood Hunks Whose DVD Sets Have the Goods

By RICHARD CORLISS

Movie heroes come in a variety of styles and moods. They can offer a brilliant smile (Errol Flynn) or a poignant wince (James Dean), a charismatic squint (Steve McQueen) or an implacable Mount Rushmore stare (John Wayne). But the most venerated always come in one state: dead. Here are four deceased icons, and five DVD memorials, that actually justify the hype.

THE COMPLETE JAMES DEAN COLLECTION

Live fast, die young, and leave a beautiful memory. A sure recipe for film immortality; but death at 24, in the driver's seat of a Porsche 550 Spyder, doesn't allow much time for achievement. Dean managed it with just three starring roles, in East of Eden, Rebel Without a Cause and Giant. It helped that all three were excellent films; it helped more that Dean spoke a secret language to teenagers just as they were becoming a significant marketing niche. In his bruised blond beauty, young people saw what they thought they looked like inside. What they felt like too: loser-loners whose heroism only the camera could detect. Dean's acting style was a time capsule of 1950s alienation. But his appeal, and the cult of this dying faun, spans the decades.

STEVE MCQUEEN COLLECTION

Unlike Dean, McQueen, already 30 by the time he became a star in The Magnificent Seven, projected a full-grown, outdoor manliness, comfortable riding a stallion, a motorcycle or a race car. The characters he played faced long odds in a German POW camp (The Great Escape), at a poker table (The Cincinnati Kid) and in Faye Dunaway's arms (The Thomas Crown Affair), but the actor's wariness never failed him or failed to attract an audience. This DVD package and another, The Essential Steve McQueen Collection, are out this month: a 10-film fest honoring the silk-smooth roughneck, the Crown Prince of Cool.

ERROL FLYNN: THE SIGNATURE COLLECTION

This Tasmanian dreamboat used to rail at his swashbuckler stardom; he thought of himself as a character actor trapped in a leading man's body, and he ached to play serioso parts. But the bosses at Warner Bros. were no dopes; they knew that Flynn's roguish presence was made to add luster to grand escapades like Captain Blood and The Sea Hawk. Even George Custer could be a hero when Flynn played him, in They Died with Their Boots On. This handsome five-movie collection includes a fine documentary, The Adventures of Errol Flynn, that comes close to capturing the star's mercurial essence.

JOHN WAYNE: THE SIGNATURE COLLECTION

A towering movie figure, both uniting and divisive, Wayne can finally be seen as a superb actor, not a Vietnam-era political litmus test. He made more than 150 films, but three of the best are in this package. Stagecoach, his first western with director John Ford, made Wayne a star. Howard Hawks' Rio Bravo was the most genial and communal of Wayne's films, as Dean Martin and Ricky Nelson help him corral the bad guys. In Ford's The Searchers--about a man obsessed by the ravages done to his niece by an Indian chief--Wayne is a cauldron of racial, sexual and violent impulses. It's a searing performance in a dark epic, perhaps the greatest of all westerns. --By Richard Corliss