The Thomas Crown Affair

I am watching The Thomas Crown Affair on DVD—the classic ’68 original starring Steve McQueen and Faye Dunaway—and listening to director Norman Jewison’s rambling, sometimes amusing commentary about the making of the movie. Just now Jewison is talking a bit about the versatile Jack Weston—an actor I loved, especially when he played bumblers—with whom he worked in several previous projects (including another McQueen film, The Cincinnati Kid) and who played Erwin, the luckless driver in Thomas Crown. I miss the roly-poly Weston, who died of cancer in 1996; I miss his sly smile, his raspy, distinctive whine and the way he could execute climbing hysteria like nobody’s business. (Check out his sniveling, conniving lawyer in the multi-talented Elaine May’s side-splitting 1971 comedy A New Leaf, or his turn as Rita Moreno’s lovable hypochondriac hubby in Alan Alda’s droll 1980 ensemble piece The Four Seasons.)

The Thomas Crown Affair is one of my very favorite movies, a stylish wink of a caper very much of its moment—costume designer Theadora Van Runkle’s wonderful wardrobe for Dunaway is pure sixties mod meets Paris chic—featuring then quite innovative split and multi screen effects (the bank robbery, the polo match) that must have startled and delighted 1968 cinema audiences as it startled and delighted me when finally I saw it start to finish and without commercial breaks, somewhere back in the ‘80s. Jewison and company make imaginative use of Boston locations, Haskell Wexler’s photography is creative, quirky and beautiful to look at, and the music is truly sublime, from the Oscar winning Bergman-Legrand love theme “The Windmills of Your Mind”—though between you and me I’ve always preferred the languid, sultry Dusty Springfield vocal to Noel Harrison’s brisk British recitation—to the jazzy high action sequences to Legrand’s lush scoring of the famous McQueen-Dunaway chess match (Jewison refers to it as “chess with sex”), the scene that epitomizes their tense, teasing cat and mouse romance.

This movie is also funny, with lots of amusing throwaways and odd bits of business. Witness the scene that directly introduces the glamorous, unscrupulous Dunaway character Vicki Anderson, the chopped exchange between Jamie, Gordon Pinsent’s harassed insurance company man, and Eddy Malone, Paul Burke’s tough, workaday cop (who seems almost an older, more hard-bitten incarnation of Adam Flint, the idealistic young detective he played on TV’s Naked City from 1960 to ‘63. Or the moment early in the film where Thomas Crown coolly strolls into the cemetery to retrieve the bags of money he’s just heisted from his own bank only to freeze in mid-grab at the unexpected tolling of a bell. Or the scene where Crown and the hapless Erwin sit opposite each other in a narrow police station holding room as Vicki and Malone watch breathlessly from behind a one-way mirror, waiting for the two to acknowledge one another. (It doesn’t happen of course; Crown is too smart for that.) And let’s not forget Vickie’s mischievous birthday presentation to Malone, the “Think Dirty” plaque.

There are also moments in Thomas Crown that are not funny but quite compelling, such as the stunning bank robbery sequence that opens the film (and has a documentary feel), where employees and customers stepping off elevators realize they’ve blundered into serious trouble and are quickly cowed into submission by the lethally efficient gunmen; there’s one young man who walks blindly into danger like the others, and you see first the confusion in his face and then his fright as he realizes his peril, almost involuntarily he makes a move to get away and is shot in the foot for the effort; he crumples to the hallway floor, his body clenched, and rolls around in spastic agony. You can’t even see his face now as he’s clutching his leg, just the hunched and rolling motion, but you feel the poor guy’s agony—from the moment I first saw the movie this scene struck me as one of the most realistic depictions of physical distress ever committed to film.

Also there’s that terrific terrace luncheon scene where an at first amused Eddy Malone needles Vicki—who has by now been monitoring every move Thomas Crown makes even though she is herself intimately involved with him—about Crown’s apparent romantic resumption with a former flame.

“You’re being had, Vicki girl” he teases her. ”Why,” she asks coldly. “Would you like to know where he went when he left you last night?” he grins, waving a surveillance report under her nose. “No,” she snaps, sipping her wine, before reversing herself to reach for the paper. She looks it over. “Her again,” she says dismissively. “Dirty old man.” But she is clearly rattled. Her food sits forgotten as she lights another cigarette, her mockingly playful self-assurance has vanished and her heavily lashed and mascara-ed eyes blink like warning signals. Malone watches her, increasingly discomfited.

Norman Jewison nearly didn’t cast Steve McQueen in this film; he wasn’t sure the combative, roughhewn actor could pull off a role a younger Cary Grant would have essayed with ease. But McQueen convinced Jewison to give him the part and for that we can be thankful; the reform school tough from Indiana completely transforms himself into the suave, moneyed Boston Brahmin. As Jewison notes in his commentary McQueen looks and moves differently in The Thomas Crown Affair than any movie he’d done before or since.

So does Dunaway; she is sleek and marvelous swanning around from one scene to the next in Van Runkle’s elegant sportswear, chic suits and soft, float-y dresses. She wears lots of hats in this movie and she looks smashing in all of them—and so do the men by the way; this is an era when men (of a certain age and social outlook, at least) were still wearing fedoras, porkpies and even homburgs.

Faye Dunaway has given many memorable, award-winning performances over the years but whereas I most admire her work in early films like Bonnie and Clyde, Chinatown, The Disappearance of Aimee, Network, Three Days of the Condor and Richard Lester’s wonderful Musketeer movies, I love her in The Thomas Crown Affair and never more so than at that brittle, bittersweet crescendo of an ending as Vicki helplessly realizes she has indeed been had, the games are over and she and Thomas both have lost something irreplaceable.