Steve McQueen exemplified film acting as a force of will. Born in 1930, a product of reform school who drifted through the Navy, oil fields, and carnivals, he may have lived the life Brando played, but he came of age before Brando’s generation rewrote the book on cinematic stature. He usually avoided elaborate make-ups, palpable anxiety, and verbal suppleness, preferring a quiet, pent-up steadfastness that crossed Bogart’s wariness with Mitchum’s reticence. A self-conscious specialist in screen walking, screen-posing, and screen-tumbling, he bet everything on presence, and won the bet. Robert Mitchum is said to have described McQueen’s acting as dull, perhaps sensing a poacher in his own backyard. They have in common animal naturalness, often characterized as cool. In their best roles, they act as though acting were beneath them.

McQueen also has a steely boyishness. Not the kind that attracts coddling of any kind – he is rarely effective with or even interested in women – but instead finds release in toys: motorbikes, fast cars, playing cards, guns, games, hats, horses, objects that focus his attention without distracting from his intense narcissism. His authority is remarkable. He wore his sandy hair in the same, short, artfully artless style in films set in every decade from the 1930s through the 1970s, as well as in the antiseptic Old West, and he rarely modulated his voice, preferring Garboesque close-ups to speeches of any length. But he is almost always credible, and his line readings are frequently canny.

His career, which barely exceeded two decades, began and ended as a bounty hunter. In 1958, after three years of minor parts on television and in a few movies, he landed the lead in “The Blob,” bargain-basement science-fiction film about teenagers battling alien glop, and a television Western, “Wanted: Dead or Alive.” This was a period in which the faltering studios were desperate for new stars, and McQueen was one of three – James Garner and Clint Eastwood were the others – launched by small-screen cowboy shows, of which his was the most bizarre.

Outfitted with a ludicrous sawed-off carbine that seems to clip onto his holster (he never actually raises his elbow to draw it), McQueen plays Josh Randall, a bounty hunter with a heart of gold – a mercenary who tithes rewards to the unfortunate, including survivors of people he inadvertently gets killed. A sampling of the first season’s 36 episodes (the show ran three seasons) proves that his bungling was more chronic than occasional, as was his propensity for being knocked unconscious. Restored to a gleaming black-and-white, the series is fast, violent, trite, pious, and clever enough to open with a bang but not avoid gaping wounds of illogic. The casts combine aging movie actors with young comers, from George Macready and Victor Jory to James Coburn and Charles Bronson (one episode involves Richard Arlen, Sidney Blackmer, Robert Strauss, and Darryl Hickman). The opening wraparound closes with a freeze-frame of McQueen looking adenoidal. His immaculately pressed saddle tramp is never real, but always watchable.

John Sturges put McQueen on the Hollywood track with a small role – little more than a cameo brawl – in “Never So Few” (1959), an affront to veterans, non-veterans, and filmgoers of every stripe, which Warner Bros. has included in the mostly pleasing “The Essential Steve McQueen Collection.” Frank Sinatra, who enters with a goatee to match the wave in his toupee (when he sits down with Brian Donlevy, they look like representatives at a wigmakers convention), romances Gina Lollobrigida into a stupor when he isn’t busy with mercy-killing and massacres on the China-Burma front. For this he is threatened with hanging, but receives congratulations instead.

Sturges saw that McQueen’s insouciance eclipsed the wattage around him, and gave him a major role in the immensely popular “The Magnificent Seven,” which along with their subsequent collaboration, “The Great Escape,” established his Hollywood bona fides. Both films (available on MGM DVDs) are very much of their day and hardly representative of the actor’s best work. In the first, he indulged in shameless scene-stealing that almost brought him to blows with Yul Brynner; it may have seemed nervy then, but now his constant playing with his hat looks neurotic. His motorcycle fenceleap in “The Great Escape” continues to spark the dreams of adolescent boys, but the picture, with its inanely cheerful score and blushing rectitude in the face of Nazi violence is, at best, distastefully entertaining.

Amid several unmemorable attempts at comedy, romance, and period melodrama, McQueen seemed taller, leaner, and altogether more prepossessing in Norman Jewison’s “The Cincinnati Kid” (1965, included in the Warner Bros. set), a knockoff of “The Hustler” with poker replacing pool. If the latter was about character, the former is about reading character, an ideal metaphor for acting, in this case a duel of old and new Hollywood. McQueen challenges the matchless Edward G. Robinson, who is introduced in the finest Mephistophelean entrance (emerging from the smoke of a train) since he entered squatting in steam in “Key Largo.” Robinson wins all around, but McQueen holds his own and their mutual appraisals make up for the schematic characteris-fate plot, as does an exceptional supporting cast and close-ups of a card shark’s hands (sitting in for Karl Malden and Joan Blondell), which mystify even in slow motion. (Mr. Jewison’s commentary track is informative, except when he says, twice, that jazz was born at Preservation Hall, which opened in 1961.)

The Warner Bros. box includes three other worthy films. The most durable is probably Peter Yates’s “Bullitt” (1968), which makes shrewder use of its San Francisco locale than “The Cincinnati Kid” does of New Orleans. Remembered for its vertiginous car chase, it captures the cynicism of the day and ultimately regenerated the police drama as the new Western: A lone cop battles official lassitude and creeping corruption. Yet the film doesn’t make a bit of sense. In addition to an eye-popping continuity flub (a hospital search in the middle of the night moves outdoors where the sun in shining), it has professional hit men who not only fail to make certain that their mark is dead but wait around in case he pulls through; they generate the big car chase for no reason. It doesn’t matter, because this is star-driven stuff, and McQueen is thoroughly in charge. Robert Vaughn is perfect as a smarmy D.A. and Jacqueline Bisset is strictly decoration, obliged to say lines like, “What will happen to us in time?” No wonder Steve looks fed up.

“The Getaway” (1972) is second draw Sam Peckinpah, mired, after an excellent credit sequence, in dawdling scenes between McQueen and the pitiful Ali MacGraw, who is truly impenetrable – by comparison, McQueen looks like a fount of emotion. When he finally starts knocking her around, you can’t be certain if it’s his character or the actor, trying to wake her up. Once the chase kicks in, however, the director begins to hit on all cylinders, and the film has some of the best set-pieces he ever shot, especially those involving a con man in a train station (the editing is ingenious); a sadistic subplot centering on Al Lettieri, an actor who exudes pure evil (which, of course, makes you wonder why no one in the film can see it); and a slam-bang shoot-out. The last is a feel-good massacre that leads to a sentimental ending in which the good thieves and killers get away from the bad ones, not to mention the law. A “virtual” commentary track has McQueen mumbling (no wonder he found dialogue a chore) about the virtues of killing someone for a reason.

If the finale of “The Getaway” disinfects Jim Thompson’s source novel, Franklin J. Schaffner’s “Papillon” (1973), billed as “The Greatest Adventure of Escape,” ignores the escape that made the source memoir an international sensation. The film focuses instead on prison conditions on French Guyana’s Devil’s Island and the camaraderie between McQueen’s Papillon and Dustin Hoffman’s counterfeiter Louis Dega. Hoffman’s broken smile, cracking voice, and inch-thick glasses scream ACTOR, not ineffectively, yet McQueen’s stillness controls the miseen-scene. Though not his best film (slow-mo falls and an ambiguous paradise don’t help), this may be his most intricate performance, particularly during the 30-minute episode in solitary, when he does a Renfield bit (“I eat bugs!”) and still retains unflinching dignity. It should have opened him up; instead (not unlike Brando’s “Last Tango in Paris”) it shut him down, leading to the consummate payday of “The Towering Inferno” and a long retreat, interrupted only by a tiresome hirsute adaptation of Ibsen and two bounty-hunter films – the Warner box includes the incompetent botch, “Tom Horn” – that document indifference and illness in the months before he died, in 1980 at 50.

A livelier McQueen, game for anything, is captured in the neglected Mark Rydell version of “The Reivers” (1969 from Paramount), an often funny, engrossing film that ultimately fails because it fails Faulkner, despite reasonably faithful adherence to the plot. The novel takes great pains to establish 11-year-old Lucius as leader and instigator of much of the action, lacking in the presumed innocence of boyhood. The filmmakers Opie-fy him and belabor his innocence. The film is additionally injured by the narration read by Burgess Meredith, licking his chops and turning each line into porridge, and a ghastly John Williams score that telegraphs every emotion. McQueen’s presence demands an increased role and sentimentalized interpretation of Boon Hogganbeck, which he handles well enough, notwithstanding a few too many “dumb” looks – pursed lips and wide eyes, as though he could not count to three backwards. But Rupert Crosse is an unforgettable Ned, cleaned up yet vital and sure, and McQueen gives him leave to walk away with the picture (as Ned does the novel).There are also fine cameos by Will Geer, Juano Hernandez, and Dub Taylor, expert set design, and excellent staging of the mudhole episode. “The Reivers” isn’t a McQueen picture, but it’s a measure of his talent that he knew it and acted accordingly.

Mr. Giddins’s column appears on alternate Tuesdays in The New York Sun.