The Thomas Crown Affair (1968)
Directed by Norman Jewison

Film Review

With a budget of six million dollars, The Thomas Crown Affair stands as one of the most expensive caper movies of all time, but the film's lavish production values and high stylisation can scarcely conceal the flimsy characterisation and threadbare plot.  Director Norman Jewison looks as if he was on a mission to make the most egregiously pretentious film possible outside a French film studio and uses dubious stylistic devices - split and multiple screens, excessive camera motion, etc. - to an almost ludicrous level of excess.  This artistic overload succeeds in masking the plot imperfections (just) but any intelligent spectator cannot help feeling that he is being slightly conned.

Irritating as this self-conscious show of frenzied artistic onanism is, the film is not entirely without charm and is certainly streets ahead of its vapid 1999 remake.  The heist sequence is well executed, even if the use of multiple screens needlessly muddles what is happening.  Steve McQueen and Faye Dunaway bring a subtle undercurrent of mischievous humour without which the film would be unbearably po-faced.  Their now famous chess scene, in which Miss Dunaway licks her lips whilst suggestively caressing the tip of her bishop should have earned the film an X certificate - it is certainly on a par with the raunchiest love scene in a French porno.  Although it has nothing whatsoever to do with the plot, another bonus is the Oscar winning title song Windmills of the Mind, one of Michel Legrand's best compositions.   The Thomas Crown is clearly the work of a deluded artist who has seen too many Claude Lelouch films, but that doesn't prevent it from being fun.

Film Synopsis

Millionaire financier Thomas Crown is bored with his life and so decides to mastermind the perfect bank robbery.  Hiring a team of complete strangers to help him in his heist, he succeeds in stealing $2.6 million from an American bank.  This he manages to smuggle out of the country and hide away in a Swiss bank account.  Insurance investigator Vicki Anderson is hired to recover the stolen money and, through woman's intuition, deduces that Thomas Crown is her man - in more ways than one...