Ia a lot of ways, The Thomas Crown Affair is an interesting point of confluence between the old school studio system and the burgeoning independent films that were beginning to come into their own in 1968.
With its split-screen technique and jazz-influenced score by Michel Legrand, Crown defied audience expectations and caused some critics to dismiss it a mere style over substance.
While it’s true that the film’s plot is not as complex as some might expect, as is true with any great heist movie, it’s not so much about the objective as it is the getting there.
In this case it’s not so much about the heist itself as the aftermath and the cat and mouse back and forth between Steve McQueen’s millionaire businessman Thomas Crown and Faye Dunaway’s insurance investigator Vicky Anderson.
Four strangers, both to themselves and their boss, pull off a bank job netting over two and a half million dollars. The bank calls in insurance investigator Vicky Anderson to try to track down the mastermind behind the heist. Anderson gas a reputation for being smart and ruthless and always catching her prey, though her tactics are not always above board.
The suspects are narrowed down to five, and as soon as she sees Crown’s picture, Anderson is sure that he is her man. She also appears to be somewhat enamored of him.Of course, this is completely believable, because it’s hard to conceive of anyone who wouldn’t be taken with McQueen, whose magnetism and charm, even when he is playing the character at his most callous, crawls off the screen and curls up into the viewers lap.
Of course, that’s not at all to slight Dunaway, who is as lovely in this picture as she has ever been and yet manages to keep her cool to such an extent that it is hard to tell, even as she insinuates herself deeper and deeper into Crown’s life, just who is playing whom.
Because that’s really what the film is. It’s about watching McQueen and Dunaway and their interactions. She wastes no time in letting him know that she is after him and he seems to be taking pleasure in finally having an opponent who is up to his intellectual level.
Both the actors and the characters are so charming that at times it’s hard to know, as an audience member just who to root for. Of course Crown is a crook, but there is always something appealing about the charming rogue.At the same time Anderson seems caught between her attraction to Crown and her duty to her employers and herself as an investigator.
I mentioned above that producer and director Norman Jewison incorporated a number of distinctive stylistic techniques, including split-screen into the film which gives it an interestingly modern look that goes beyond what most audiences of the day would expect to see in a typical Hollywood production. This appears to have come about as a result of McQueen having seen the film A Place to Stand at the 1967 World’s Fair and being so impressed by that film’s use of the technique that he convinced Jewison to incorporate it into Affair, even though he had already finished filming and was well on the way to having it completed.
Michel Legrande’s score is also of note, not just, as mentioned above, due to it’s jazz-heavy stylings, but also because he actually wrote it as long pieces which were then cut and the film was then edited to match the music pieces with Legrande himself involved in the editing process along with Jewison and award-winning editor Hal Ashy, who of course went on to be an acclaimed director himself.
All of this serves to raise The Thomas Crown Affair above the light fluff that it might have been to give it a place among the best-remembered and most fun films of the year. If you haven’t seen it, or perhaps have only seen the 1999 remake with Pierce Brosnan and Rene Russo, I highly recommend checking it out.
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