Watching "The Thomas Crown Affair" is an experience in stylish '60s chic. Does it hold up, with the presence of Steve McQueen, Faye Dunaway, Jack Weston, and Norman Jewison? Man, I wish it did! Well, it sort of holds up. The first 30 minutes does, anyway, with a bank robbery sequence featuring Weston, McQueen, Yaphet Kotto, and three D. B. Cooper lookalikes. Actually, this is where director Jewison makes his strongest push for a solid crime thriller, in the opening 30 minutes, before Dunaway shows up. After that, through no fault of hers, its all downhill.
McQueen is Thomas Crown, a Boston brahmin businessman in a three-piece suit and comfortable living quarters with a predilication for taking advantage of others. "You overpaid" is the way he breaks it to a group of businessmen he makes a deal with at the picture's outset, and that's his style through the rest of the film, whether it's telling bank-robbery associate Jack Weston why he shouldn't wonder about things ("No questions. What you don't know can't hurt you. You or me, Erwin boy") or investigator Faye Dunaway why she should just forego her job of sleuthing out the truth and hang with him in Europe for an extended vacation.
I'm a big Steve McQueen fan, but this time around I cared more about what happened to Jack Weston's character. This factored into why I liked "The Thomas Crown Affair" less than I wanted to. Steve McQueen is great when he's a badass, except when he's making too much of that fact. "Thomas Crown" makes too much of that fact.
Is it immoral to like a film that celebrates how the well-off take advantage of the less so? Well, I say so. Crown, an already rich guy who wants more, is certainly a questionable hero. So's Dunaway's Miss Vicki, an insurance investigator who maybe falls in love with Crown while trying to figure out whether he's the mastermind behind the big Boston bank robbery with which the film opens. After a while, I was hoping the pair would catch VD. Was I at fault, or them?
Oh, and I really don't like the title song, performed by Rex Harrison's son Nigel without the benefit of Daddy explaining where the virtues of "talk-singing" ended. "A circle in a spiral/A wheel within a wheel/Never ending, never beginning, in an ever spinning reel/As the images unwind/Like the circles that you find/In the windmills of your mind". Did that really pass for profound in the '60s somehow? The basis of "Thomas Crown Affair" is that crime pays, at least it did the 1960s, with Jewison directing and Haskell Wexler doing the cinematography. Watching McQueen and Dunaway riding a dune buggy on Cape Cod is to feel intimately connected with the 1960s, in a way no other Dunaway nor McQueen film does. That's not only what's good but what's great about this film.
But crime DOES pay, watching this film. Crown is a rascal, but not unlikably so. His relationship with Miss Vicki doesn't suffer from too much hand-holding, just cooking lobsters in the sand and taking the proper measure of one another. I wished McQueen's interest in bank robbery was more in line with the involuntary kind practiced in "The Getaway", but he's not a total bounder, and there's a strong enough suggestion of his taking a different path with Miss Vicki so as not to totally turn you against the zeitgeist of this film.
It's just that I wish the film had more going for it than a caper romance. However solidly '60s, it would have been nicer if "The Thomas Crown Affair" made it somehow more enjoyable to enjoy its sumptuous cinematography, its images of Boston in midsummer, its hang-gliding with gorgeous ladies in skimpy underwear.
"The Thomas Crown Affair" is a fun film, and one of the most beautiful McQueen ever made. But whatever its surface virtues, it makes for only a somewhat satisfying movie.
McQueen is Thomas Crown, a Boston brahmin businessman in a three-piece suit and comfortable living quarters with a predilication for taking advantage of others. "You overpaid" is the way he breaks it to a group of businessmen he makes a deal with at the picture's outset, and that's his style through the rest of the film, whether it's telling bank-robbery associate Jack Weston why he shouldn't wonder about things ("No questions. What you don't know can't hurt you. You or me, Erwin boy") or investigator Faye Dunaway why she should just forego her job of sleuthing out the truth and hang with him in Europe for an extended vacation.
I'm a big Steve McQueen fan, but this time around I cared more about what happened to Jack Weston's character. This factored into why I liked "The Thomas Crown Affair" less than I wanted to. Steve McQueen is great when he's a badass, except when he's making too much of that fact. "Thomas Crown" makes too much of that fact.
Is it immoral to like a film that celebrates how the well-off take advantage of the less so? Well, I say so. Crown, an already rich guy who wants more, is certainly a questionable hero. So's Dunaway's Miss Vicki, an insurance investigator who maybe falls in love with Crown while trying to figure out whether he's the mastermind behind the big Boston bank robbery with which the film opens. After a while, I was hoping the pair would catch VD. Was I at fault, or them?
Oh, and I really don't like the title song, performed by Rex Harrison's son Nigel without the benefit of Daddy explaining where the virtues of "talk-singing" ended. "A circle in a spiral/A wheel within a wheel/Never ending, never beginning, in an ever spinning reel/As the images unwind/Like the circles that you find/In the windmills of your mind". Did that really pass for profound in the '60s somehow? The basis of "Thomas Crown Affair" is that crime pays, at least it did the 1960s, with Jewison directing and Haskell Wexler doing the cinematography. Watching McQueen and Dunaway riding a dune buggy on Cape Cod is to feel intimately connected with the 1960s, in a way no other Dunaway nor McQueen film does. That's not only what's good but what's great about this film.
But crime DOES pay, watching this film. Crown is a rascal, but not unlikably so. His relationship with Miss Vicki doesn't suffer from too much hand-holding, just cooking lobsters in the sand and taking the proper measure of one another. I wished McQueen's interest in bank robbery was more in line with the involuntary kind practiced in "The Getaway", but he's not a total bounder, and there's a strong enough suggestion of his taking a different path with Miss Vicki so as not to totally turn you against the zeitgeist of this film.
It's just that I wish the film had more going for it than a caper romance. However solidly '60s, it would have been nicer if "The Thomas Crown Affair" made it somehow more enjoyable to enjoy its sumptuous cinematography, its images of Boston in midsummer, its hang-gliding with gorgeous ladies in skimpy underwear.
"The Thomas Crown Affair" is a fun film, and one of the most beautiful McQueen ever made. But whatever its surface virtues, it makes for only a somewhat satisfying movie.