Thomas Crown organises a complex heist where the gang only meet when the operation is underway. He's a high finance swashbuckler who likes to tell his clients that they overpaid after congratulating them on their purchases and glides through modernist offices ticking with computers so up to date that they have screens in 1968, and endlessly ringing phones. What does someone like this want with a bank job return? Fun. As so much of this film's look and feel suggests the lifestyle so warmly presented in old Playboy magazine ads. He really is the kind of man who reads Playboy. And I mean reads. As every one of the well heeled young men suited up around the logos of Old Spice or Cutty Sark scotch, he is effortlessly accompanied by a stunningly beautiful young woman.
Enter Vicki Anderson freelance insurance investigator. She comes in with a screen filling shot coursing through the airport, big '60s sun goggles and stylish hat and a slinky jazz theme that means business. She's good at her job and traces the crime back to Crown in a few swift moves. And then the movie's big second act takes off as she closes in professionally and romantically on Thomas as the pair pound the dunes in a beach buggy, cook lobster on the beach or play erotically charged games of chess in his city mansion.
What stops this from getting too far into money porn is the investigation, staffed by real police headed by a tough egg whose fears over Vicki's loyalties border on horny jealousy. Without the horny jealousy part, we're wondering ourselves as we watch. Vicki is open about her suspicions to Thomas. He seems to enjoy the puzzle of how to change her course, if not by sexual seduction then by something more Faustian. His power, after all, depends on the effects of chaos in the monetary realm, not order and convention and his role does take on a Satanic tint.
When you've got a young Steve McQueen facing off against a young Faye Dunaway, framed in such pop art film making, you've pretty much got a sexy package that reaches across decades. McQueen had already established himself as a type. By the middle of the next decade, Francis Ford Coppola nixed the casting of him in the Willard role in Apocalypse Now as McQueen insisted on his character being that wise guy type which was utterly against that character's edgy secrecy. But here in the playboy setting his brand fit perfectly. That's not a slight. The thinking woman's hunk in perfect clothes and an athletic kind of disruptive energy is exactly what the role needs and what it got.
As a foil, Faye Dunaway's corporate bloodhound meets her adversary where he lives, in the margin where heavy intellect and sexiness are indistinguishable. In the company of the grunty cops she's all business and job centred, not a woman, even in 1968, that the senior guys kiss on the cheek instead of shaking hands. With Thomas, she's with her quarry who is also her match and her hardness of task yet allows some thrill in his seduction as it offers a challenge of keeping on track with her pursuit as well as having a strange kind of fun. Fresh from her nuanced turn as Bonnie Parker, she was imaginably heading towards her career best in Network.
Norman Jewison as director is clearly having a ball with the new technologies of film making. His use of split screen doesn't remind us of Richard Fleischer's in The Boston Strangler. They are both used practically to reveal essential information but where Fleischer's adds to the sordidness Jewison's serves to lighten the mood of the complex motion around the capers and procedure of the various players. It's less grimy paranoia than elevated Monkees episode.
Also, he might well have relished yet another new mood to his arsenal, coming in off the experience of the gritty Southern crime procedural In the Heat of the Night. After the fab fashion and games of Thomas Crown he went epic for Fiddler on the Roof but then hippy experimental for Jesus Christ Superstar and dystopian for Rollerball. He's a John Huston, that way, lots on the rap sheet but no known pattern, just a solid film maker.
And when a solid film maker gets the opportunity to fashion some high crime glamour just after the summer of love, invited to splash as much pop at the screen you are going to get this constantly enjoyable and cheeky piece of cinema. Then when you move on to auteurism-defying career choices (compare Robert Wise who went from Val Lewton horrors to upscale The Haunting and The Sound of Music, same thing) you are headed for a satisfyingly accomplished creative life. Oh, very worth pointing out that all this slinky editing was done by Hal Ashby, very soon to carve his own name with pride with the likes of The Landlord and Harold and Maude.
This might not strike you as the kind of film that warrants celebration as an anniversary for the lightness it appears to have but as an exercise in putting a gentle smile on a story of manipulation and white collar piracy without rendering the latter too cute, you won't do much better.
Viewing notes: The Thomas Crown Affair is hard to find on physical media. I rented it through Google Movies which suggests it's also available through Apple Movies.
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