A vehicle for Steve McQueen and Faye Dunaway, 1968’s The Thomas Crown Affair feels like a thrilling template for modern high-concept movies. Has Tom Cruise seen The Thomas Crown Affair? Although made in 1968, it certainly feels like a forerunner of his particular style of blockbuster. It has slick direction, action, suspense, romance, a memorable ... The Thomas Crown Affair | The 1968 thriller that feels remarkably like a modern blockbuster
A vehicle for Steve McQueen and Faye Dunaway, 1968’s The Thomas Crown Affair feels like a thrilling template for modern high-concept movies.
Has Tom Cruise seen The Thomas Crown Affair? Although made in 1968, it certainly feels like a forerunner of his particular style of blockbuster. It has slick direction, action, suspense, romance, a memorable theme song, and perhaps most importantly, plenty of opportunities for its star – in this case, Steve McQueen – to show off his physical prowess and affection for high-risk pursuits.
In a way, The Thomas Crown Affair is essentially a massive flex, to borrow a trendy term we’re sure the kids all use these days. Steve McQueen and co-star Faye Dunaway were at the height of their powers at the end of the 1960s – McQueen’s classic Bullitt also emerged in 1968, while Dunaway put in a zeitgeist-catching performance alongside Warren Beatty in Bonnie And Clyde the previous year. The Thomas Crown Affair feels tailor-written (by Alan R Trustman) for both stars; McQueen as the ultra-wealthy businessman who orchestrates heists for the sheer hell of it; Dunaway as the icily smart insurance investigator fixed on catching him for her own financial gain.
There were criticisms at the time that the film’s plot and characters are thin; but much like the work of producers Don Simpson and Jerry Bruckheimer in the 1980s, the thin-ness is sort of the point. The Thomas Crown Affair isn’t about wrenching plot twists or deep character studies – it’s an exercise in pure style for its own sake.
Take director Norman Jewison, for example. He uses the core premise – that of a gentleman thief who meticulously plans heists, but doesn’t get directly involved – as the basis for his own intricately-designed shots and motifs. One of the film’s recurring devices is its split-screen effects – something also seen in The Boston Strangler (released later in 1968) or TV thriller series 24. It’s hard to overstate how much additional effort this would have taken for Jewison and editor Hal Ashby (yes, that Hal Ashby) with the technology available in the late 1960s. A sequence where we simultaneously see McQueen’s Thomas Crown being driven in his Rolls Royce while his accomplices converge on the bank they’re about to rob could have been put together with more traditional cross-cuts. Instead, this movie has these sequences appear on the screen in little windows – a collage of moments that would have required the painstaking assembly and matting of separate pieces of film.
It’s an expressive, flamboyant visual style that looks like a Mondrian painting, and in some respects, it risks pulling the audience out of the movie – we’re being reminded that what we’re seeing is so much artifice. The film is actively nudging the viewer in the ribs and loudly stating how cool it is. But then, that’s entirely fitting for a movie that is all about arrogance: the cockiness of Thomas Crown, who carries himself with the air of someone who thinks he’ll never get caught. And also Dunaway’s Vicki Anderson, a woman who’s become so conspicuously wealthy thanks to her wit and intelligence that she drives around in a Ferrari.
Tricksiness aside, there’s no getting around Jewison’s propulsive direction: the opening bank heist is a masterclass of intrigue and exhilaration. The disparate guys (among them the great Yaphet Kotto) clad in crisp suits, bowler hats and shades all slowly manoeuvring into position. Then there’s the inevitable moment when the robbery itself happens, and Jewison clicks into another mode, his handheld cameras going in low for a tense exchange in a descending elevator, and an incredible low tracking shot as a smoke grenade is rolled across a marble floor towards a group of cowering civilians.
Throughout, Jewison similarly contrasts slickness and grit. Whenever we’re in Thomas Crown’s upscale world of fancy apartments and upper crust pursuits, the film has a classical Hollywood feel. When we’re with characters like Jack Weston’s working class getaway driver, on the other hand, Jewison and cinematographer Haskell Wexler go for a naturalistic look more akin to a social realist drama.
Jewison knows this is a vehicle for his star, though, and McQueen plays Thomas Crown like a guy who knows he’s being watched and admired – and thoroughly relishes the feeling of it. When he isn’t playing the hidden puppetmaster behind those daring heists, he engages in a string of conspicuously macho, thrill-seeking hobbies. In one, he flies a frankly scary-looking light aircraft (a Schweizer 1-23, IMDb tells me), bringing it in to land almost nose-first in the middle of a field. In another, he enjoys a rough-and-tumble game of polo. As he woos Vicki, he’s repeatedly seen hammering around some sand dunes in a beach buggy. In all of these sequences, Jewison is careful to ensure that McQueen’s face is visible and well-lit, so we know it isn’t a stunt double – a bit like Tom Cruise in his movies decades later. It’d all seem a bit vain and absurd if it wasn’t so self-aware; McQueen was famous for being a petrolhead and all-round thrill-seeker in real life, and the film knows that its audience knows this.
Similarly, The Thomas Crown Affair plays up to Faye Dunaway’s public persona as an assertive star and fashion icon. It’s thrilling to watch her play detective, piecing together the evidence and clues that connect Crown to the big-money heists; and then there’s the additional jolt where, later in the narrative, we learn that Vicki is perhaps even more cold and ruthless in the pursuit of her goals than McQueen’s character is.
There comes a point, however, where the film’s superficial charm works against it; we know that the two leads are going to fall for each other, and we can probably predict where the titular affair will take them both. For all the engrossing energy in Jewison’s direction, for all the charisma in the lead performances, and the catchiness of Michel Legrand’s title song, The Thomas Crown Affair is ultimately a lightweight bit of 1960s cool.
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But – yes, once again – this is sort of the point. In this respect, Thomas Crown could be seen as another marking point on the road from the James Bond movies earlier in the decade, via Jaws and Star Wars, to the high concept blockbusters in the 1980s and beyond. Such films as Top Gun, Flashdance and Beverly Hills Cop offered the same mix of style, catchy hit singles, and stories that showcased their stars’ charisma. These were movies that relied on eye-catching images and music rather than dialogue; that could play to a global audience, irrespective of their language. Even when Simpson and Bruckheimer’s magic high-concept formula began to falter in the early 90s (largely because they wildly overspent on Days Of Thunder), Tom Cruise took it and ran with it. Look at everything from the Mission: Impossible movies to Top Gun: Maverick, and you can see faint traces of Thomas Crown.
The film’s allure is such that other directors have tried (or are trying) to make the 60s heist thriller their own. John McTiernan directed a Thomas Crown Affair in 1999, this one vehicle for Pierce Brosnan and Renee Russo. Michael B Jordan’s currently directing (and starring in) a remake, due for release in 2027.
Almost 50 years on, Jewison’s film remains hugely entertaining and even strikingly modern. The only surprise, perhaps, is that Tom Cruise never attempted to make a Thomas Crown of his own.
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