THE THOMAS CROWN AFFAIR: Blu-ray re-issue (Mirisch Simkoe-Solar, 1968) Kino Lorber

How do you get the man who has everything? Faye Dunaway attempts to demonstrate in The Thomas Crown Affair (1968) – Norman Jewison’s modish heist caper, noted film critic, Roger Ebert once panned as the most “over photographed movie of the year”. Perhaps, Mr. Ebert was missing the point in the exercise; Jewison, exploiting Haskell Wexler’s uber-mod cinematography to illustrate the superficiality of our supremely wealthy protagonist. Thomas Crown (played to perfection as the cynical scamp by Steve McQueen) is rich, yet discontented. He toils not, but merely counts the zeros in his bank account, leading a supremely cultured existence – yet, all of it predicated on a lie: that money alone has bought him happiness. Crown is a beacon of the community. Alas, he is also deprived of the one essential necessary to make his world go ‘round – love. As silly as it sounds, Crown is not much without satisfying this thirst. Generally speaking, love equates to lust and a quick bump and grind, merely another disposable way to pass the time; that is…until he meets and begins to fall for siren, Vicki Anderson (Faye Dunaway).

Too bad for Crown, Vicki is an enterprising insurance investigator, hell-bent on using her rather perversely dynamic feminine wiles (and a killer wardrobe designed by Theadora Van Runkle) to outfox and seduce the deceptive and devilishly handsome millionaire. The Thomas Crown Affair is the quintessential story about the one that got away. It is also a tale of two temperaments, or rather – four: Crown vs. Vicki and Dunaway vs. McQueen. By all accounts, the shoot was a pleasurable one for director and stars. But McQueen was not above occasionally getting impatient with Dunaway – a chronic procrastinator, who infrequently delayed, either by arriving late on the set or simply forgetting to come out of her dressing room when called. Indeed, when viewing the film today – particularly the now infamous ‘chess as sex’ scene – one is immediately struck by the mileage Dunaway and McQueen get from a gesture and a glance to crank up the kink factor without ever uttering an erotic syllable or exposing any supple limbs.

Haskell Wexler’s cinematography is paramount to the film’s success – its use of the multi-dynamic image technique, first pioneered at Expo 67, creates kinetic traveling montages within a single frame, revealing various angles of the same event simultaneously. What is also evident, though perhaps only in retrospect, is how much of a time capsule The Thomas Crown Affair has become since. Depending on one’s point of view, Robert Boyle’s iconic art direction and Theadora Van Ruckle’s costume design has either dated very badly or remain the epitome of what swingin’ sixties fashion and frolicking was all about. My vote is for the latter, and in this regard, The Thomas Crown Affair is immeasurably blessed by the presence of McQueen and Dunaway as its clothes horses. They are two of the hippest cats from any generation, skulking about these Bostonian backdrops with an air of ultramodern confidence. Again, it’s all very superficial, and, deliciously so - a testament to style over substance, as the premise of this classic caper is rather one-dimensional at best and fraught with possibilities for failure.

The Thomas Crown Affair is not an easily digestible picture. You either buy into the implausible premise of a bored millionaire hiring thug muscle to pull off the ultimate bank robbery, simply for the sheer satisfaction of getting away with it, or everything completely falls apart. The money – an impressive $2 million – is incidental to the crime. But it does matter very much to the bank incurring the loss. And so, the chase for the man with the gold-plated lifestyle begins. The Thomas Crown Affair is superbly scored by Michel Legrand, who toys with the enigma that is Mr. Thomas Crown Esq. The now famous, oft repeated, though never equaled, Oscar-winning Noel Harrison rendition of ‘The Windmills of Your Mind’ perfectly encapsulates the jigsaw-puzzled romance of Crown and Vicki. “Round like a circle in a spiral, like a wheel within a wheel” these feral cats embrace the moody physicality of their impossible daring, all the while knowing it is doomed to extinction just as “the autumn leaves were turning to the color of her hair.” One can debate the illogical nature of both the song and the relationship it references, or simply run with the notion its poetic convolution has perfectly pegged the mystery behind two very troubled and confrontational people. Crown wants Vicki until he learns her secret. Too late to make a difference, this competitive Miss desperately realizes she could almost forgo another feather in her Halston, if only the man in question would take her in his arms for an eternity without fail or question. Alas, within the imperfect machinations of sixties’ cinema, neither gains satisfaction from this ‘affair’; the man, turning cold, aloof and vanishing into thin air; the woman, left to her own accord and rebuke in frustrated tears.

Our story begins in a seedy motel with the arrival of Erwin Weaver (Jack Weston), the last to be hired by a partially concealed Crown for his bank heist. Crown floods the room with some high wattage photog lamps to shroud his identity, using a microphone to distort his voice as the proposal is made: $15,000 for a few minutes work, driving the getaway car filled with several heavy bags of money stolen from a downtown depository. Weaver is nervous, but accepts the terms and the payoff. He buys a ‘woody’ station wagon with Crown’s money and waits for his cue. Crown telephones Weaver and the other accomplices – who have never met one another or Crown face to face, a single word setting their plans in motion – “Go!” Descending on the bank, Crown’s mercenaries don their dark glasses, effortlessly blending into the crowd until the moment of action. Their ambush goes off without a hitch. However, as Weaver hurries away, his path is momentarily obstructed by a truck unloading fresh eggs to market. Every second counts, and director, Norman Jewison manages a few tense moments along the way, with Weaver eventually making it to Crown’s prearranged drop off – a metal ash can along a grassy knoll in a remote part of Cambridge Cemetery.

Moments later, Crown arrives in his Rolls-Royce to collect the loot, hiding it inside his trunk, and later, flying across the Atlantic in his private plane to Geneva where he deposits his ill-gotten gains under an anonymous numbered account. Back in Boston the police are absolutely baffled. In fact, detective Eddie Malone (Paul Burke) is apoplectic. The bank commissioners send in their own private investigator, Vicki Anderson, offering her a handsome percentage for its recovery. Already suspecting an inside job, Vicki surveys the crime scene, perusing a series of photographs quelled from the bank’s surveillance dossiers. Almost immediately, she pegs Thomas Crown as her man. Malone, who harbors some sort of twisted attraction to Vicki, whom he otherwise cannot abide, misperceives her fascination in Crown as purely sexual. Indeed, it seems that way to Crown too – at first. Vicki is flirtatious during an auction of antiquities and later shows up unexpectedly at a polo match, presumably to adoringly photograph him on horseback with her handheld movie camera.

Crown, who has spent a lifetime exorcising his chronic boredom with every possible diversion a man of his wealth can exploit – including dune buggies and flying his glider at dangerous altitudes – has found his next conquest. It isn’t going to be easy. He knows what Vicki is up to and she knows he knows. The trick is in not caring about the reality of their situation, but playing the odds cagily against the house. Who will seduce who? The lure could so easily go awry. To expedite Crown’s capture, Malone places a police guard at Crown’s front gate. Malone and Vicki also take out an ad in the local paper that reads “Be A Fink for $25,000” an inducement to flush out Crown’s accomplices. If only they had something to tell. Unfortunately, none can claim to have ‘met’ the man in person. Tagging Weaver as one of Crown’s stooges, Vicki has a couple of officers steal his station wagon and later abduct his young son. Reuniting the boy with his father, Weaver reluctantly admits his complicity in the crime, but is quite unable to pick Crown out of a line up as the brains of the operation – not even when Vicki and Malone stage an ambush at the police station in which Weaver and Crown sit mere feet away from one another.

Now, the romance between Vicki and Crown kicks into high gear. She is bitterly determined to get to him no matter what, perhaps still unaware of her truer feelings already begun to turn in his favor. Inviting Vicki back to his home, Crown wastes no time igniting the obvious friction between them during a relatively platonic game of chess. He deliberately locks onto her gaze. She sensually caresses the various chess pieces to suggest what her fingers would rather be fondling. After Vicki wins the match, Crown paces for a moment or two, finally suggesting “Let’s try another game.” The two become locked in an immediate and very passionate embrace – a panoramic kiss lasting mere seconds that, in actuality, took five days to film. The next day, Crown takes Vicki on a perilous trek across the windswept beaches in his dune buggy. The violent abandonment with which he skirts a certain roll over is designed to shake Vicki from her complacency, but also to do more than hint she is skating on some very thin ice in their ‘relationship’. Sensing she desires more than simply perfecting the art of the chase, Crown tempts Vicki with the promise she may have all of him if she desires; alas, at a sacrifice to her reputation as a professional insurance investigator. Either way, it will be she who makes this judgment call – not he; as ice-water runs through Crown’s veins in ways as yet completely unanticipated by Vicki.

Desiring to shake Vicki loose of her obvious infatuation with Crown, Malone tells her that during their down time, Crown has continued to see Gwen (Astrid Heeren), an elegant playgirl from his own social caste. It is unclear whether Vicki becomes jealous after hearing this, but it certainly motivates her to press Crown into more explicit foreplay, hopefully to lead to his imminent incarceration. Inside a steam bath, Vicki lays all her cards on the table. She tells Crown she can temper the repercussions of his involvement in the theft, a decision flat out rejected by Malone. Determined to know whether or not Vicki is on his side once and for all, Crown decides to set another robbery into motion. He even tells Vicki when and where the heist is to occur. But the game comes with a new set of rules. If she allows him to get away for the second time, even as she possesses all the information necessary to apprehend him right now, then he will know she has chosen him over her reputation and he promises to make plans for their escape together to Europe without reprisals. If, however, the whole point of her seduction has been nothing more than a greedy means to play him for the fool, Crown assures Vicki she will be the one left holding the bag. Can she trust him? More apropos, does she want to?

The second robbery is set in motion. Unable to entirely shed her duty, and also possessing the stained prerogative of all women who believe they can have their cake and eat it too, Vicki attempts to play both sides against the middle. She has Malone assign all his available men for a massive sting operation. After one of the robbers places the money bags in the same ash can as before, Vicki and Malone nervously await Crown’s arrival. A few excruciatingly long moments pass before Crown’s Rolls-Royce appears on the horizon. Only this time it is being driven by an errand boy who promptly presents Vicki with Crown’s farewell telegram. In this high stakes’ gamble of love vs. duty Vicki has managed to lose everything. The film ends with a close-up on Crown, indeterminably pleased and/or disappointed with Vicki’s penultimate decision to sabotage their one chance for a genuine love affair over money; a commodity he has always regarded as utterly trivial and disposable.

The Thomas Crown Affair remains one of the most ingeniously conceived examples of cinema style trumping substance. Indeed, the whole story could have been pitched to the studio in four sentences or less. And truthfully, without the tangible screen sizzle between McQueen and Dunaway, there is not much to go on. The visual trappings – the modish glam-bam and cavalcade of clothes and bouffant hair-dos, the backdrop of power-brokering/uber-wealth beyond most people’s wildest dreams, the audiences’ chance to mingle with this untouchable class; all these enticements prove heavy icing on an extremely thin layer of cake. That such an elegant edifice never caves under screenwriter, Alan Trustman’s wafer-thin scenario is a minor miracle and undeniably a credit to Jewison’s prowess behind the camera. Here is a director capable of making style substantive to the telling of a fanciful yarn. Why do we believe in the affair? Because Jewison frames it in a sort of iniquitous chic, the moneyed playgrounds enough to hold our attention during the interminably long stretches where the screenplay has exceptionally little to offer except more of the titillating same.  

The other strength is undeniably the cast. Steve McQueen’s screen appeal has always been universal – as intoxicating to men (who wished they could be like him) as to women (who wanted to be with him). Many today forget The Thomas Crown Affair afforded McQueen the rarest of opportunities to break out of his already well-established mold as the roguish scrapper who, invariably, did not even own dress pants, much less a whole suit. But draped in three-piece finery herein, a pocket watch fastened to his plaid vest, his sandy tresses immaculately quaffed, and a flash of petty larceny transmitting from those inimitable and brilliant blue eyes, McQueen is as very much ‘at home’ in his fancy duds, exuding a not entirely quantifiable aura of dapper masculinity. In a career cut too short by his own vices, McQueen in his prime was, and remains a riveting performer, precisely because he does not quite fit into this ultra-chic backdrop, denying the complacency that comes from being privileged. Long ago, this ought to have eroded any sense of pleasure for Thomas Crown. Instead, McQueen plays Crown as though he were more to the manor ‘broken in’ than born, still the scrapper, but also a guy’s guy.

As for Fay Dunaway, she slinks across the screen as a femme fatale from a sexy B-noir thriller. Her insurance investigator is a deliciously manipulative minx. Using sex like a fly swatter, she comes down hard on any man deemed worthy of her fickle affections. Cribbing from the playbook of Hitchcock, as the cool blonde, Dunaway exudes amoral authority that is both possessive and yet devil-may-care. It is this contradiction between smarts and sensuality that leave both Malone and Crown bemused and bewitched. Dunaway’s Vicki is precisely the girl someone of Crown’s ilk desperately needs to make his life complete. Regrettably, Vicki is too brash and unscrupulous for her own good. To what end? Escapist to a fault and exuding more fun than narrative ferocity, the film endures because of its two stars. “Like a circle in a spiral, never ending or beginning on an ever-spinning reel…” these impossible lovers of The Thomas Crown Affair cling together better than its story. And this makes for something sinfully enjoyable – a kinetic and frenzied sexuality on the cusp of either full-blown eroticism or total annihilation. The film’s mystique is impossible to bottle and/or duplicate as 1999’s remake/misfire costarring Pierce Brosnon and Rene Russo woefully illustrates. Yet, with McQueen and Dunaway at the reins, how could it be otherwise…“like the circles that you find, in the windmills of your mind.”

Kino Lorber has a straight reissue with this Blu-ray remastered in 4K but still only offered to us in 1080p. Debatable how much a native 4K release could improve upon what’s here. Is this a perfect reissue? Well, no. As before, there are several instances of chroma bleeding to distract, and the occasional (very occasional) speckle of age-related wear and tear. But wow, do colors pop, as does contrast and fine detail throughout. Prepare to be dazzled by textures in Dunaway and McQueen’s wardrobe. Flesh tones are creamy and reveal makeup. The extensive use of the multi-split-screen in the cobbled together montages create a somewhat ‘dupey’ quality with amplified grain; part-in-parcel of the technique’s trickery and shortcomings. Arguably, a complete – and cost-prohibitive – recompositing of original elements would have corrected this ‘problem’. It also would have cost a small fortune. So, no. Not feasible. And truthfully, unnecessary too. It looks as good as it likely did when the movie debuted theatrically and that is good enough.  

The audio is still DTS 2.0 and, in several spots, suffering from over-modulation. Mono has its limitations. So, nothing to get overly excited about here. Except that a lot of the audio sounds as though it's hanging on by a thread. I would have loved to have heard The Windmills of Your Mind remastered in true stereo, especially since the track here crackles and breaks apart. It's appallingly subpar for a movie from this vintage. Kino regurgitates Norman Jewison’s commentary, that was included both on MGM/UA’s old DVD release, and later, the MGM/Fox Blu-ray and Kino’s first hi-def bite at this apple. Also ported over: an interview with Jewison, another with title designer, Pablo Ferro, and the 1967 featurette ‘Three’s A Company’ – containing invaluable on set interviews with cast and crew.  Finally, there is an audio commentary from historians, Lem Dobbs and Nick Redman, plus the badly worn original theatrical trailer. Of these extras, the interview with Jewison and the Dobbs/Redman commentary are the undisputed winners. Bottom line: if you already own the first Kino Blu there is no reason to double-dip here.

FILM RATING (out of 5 – 5 being the best)

4

VIDEO/AUDIO

4

EXTRAS

4