Grade: D
The Thomas Crown Affair was made in 1968, and it starred two of the 60s’ most stylish screen stars (Steve McQueen and Faye Dunaway) as a millionaire who pulls off the perfect heist and the insurance investigator who’s hired to get back the loot he’s lifted but falls for him.
A film with a plot like that doesn’t sound like it can go wrong but Roger Ebert was right when he called The Thomas Crown Affair “possibly the most under-plotted [and] under-written…film of the year.”
What bang the film has is only in the beginning. The shots split into multiple screens to show the robbers Thomas Crown (McQueen) has enlisted to rob a Boston bank en route to the heist. One’s landing at an airport in an airplane, another’s travelling by train, and one’s driving a station wagon down the street but they’re all accompanied by the same heavy and regular beat from Michel Legrand’s soundtrack. I was thrilled to see what these disparate souls had in common that could link them together through such a grave tune. “Where’s the showdown they’re all attending?” I wondered and who was going to shoot whom?
There is shooting in the robbery. That’s all the fireworks in the film over and done with in the first half an hour. McQueen spends the rest of the film taking Dunaway on expensive dates, cooking her lobster dinners in the coals of a fire on the beach, and playing chess with her but getting distracted by her pink lips and her bare arms. It’s extravagant and it seems to distract Dunaway’s insurance investigator Vicki Anderson from gathering one grain of evidence to prove Crown masterminded the robbery. The cop working with her complains to her that he’s running “a sex orgy for a couple freaks on government funds.” I sympathise.
The Thomas Crown Affair is a cat and mouse game played in high society but one where neither the cat or the mouse advances or retreats a single step for close to an hour and a half. Instead, they drink champagne in a sauna. It’s a glitzy but dull heist film.
This was great, William! Yeah, it's a film of its time--large on style, low on substance. Worth seeing for the sexy chess scene, which is iconic, and for Theodora Van Runkle's outrageous wardrobe for Faye Dunaway, also iconic! I generally hate remakes of anything, but if you haven't caught the remake of Thomas Crown Affair, with Pierce Brosnan and Rene Russo, I highly recommend it! It's a really fun lark of a film and far better!