Film review

  • The Thomas Crown Affair

    Old YorkerFilm review

    Norman Jewison (1968)

    ‘The Thomas Crown Affair is fundamentally a film about faith between people.  In many ways, it reminds me of a kind of updated old fable, or tale, about an ultimate test of faith … I find The Thomas Crown Affair to be a unique and haunting film, superb in its visual and technical design, and fascinating for the allegorical problem of human faith.’

    This is according to someone whose name’s unknown to me but whose words – the ellipsis above conceals plenty more of them – were immortalised by Pauline Kael’s quoting them in her essay, ‘Trash, Art and the Movies’ (included in her Going Steady collection of film writings).  The admiring summary of Norman Jewison’s heist thriller-romance appeared, says Kael, in ‘a communication from Cambridge to a Boston paper’.  She’s not explicit whether that’s Cambridge, Massachusetts or Cambridge, England, but you assume the latter because Kael responds that:

    ‘The Thomas Crown Affair is pretty good trash, but we shouldn’t convert what we enjoy it for into false terms derived from study of the other arts … it’s … priggish for a new movie generation to be so proud of what they enjoy that they use their education to try to place trash within the acceptable academic tradition.  What the Cambridge boy is doing is a more devious form of that elevating and falsifying of people who talk about [Sophia] Loren as a great actress instead of as a gorgeous funny woman.’

    Kael’s dismissal of ‘the Cambridge boy’’s pretension is fair enough though she begs the question of what ‘we enjoy’ about a film like this.  Returning after many decades to The Thomas Crown Affair, I did enjoy it, but no more as a heist movie than as an exploration of human faith.  At least, I enjoyed the crime plot only in terms of what it demands of, and draws from, the film’s stars, Steve McQueen and Faye Dunaway, and their versatile director.  Thomas Crown in retrospect is also worth watching as a late-1960s Hollywood period piece.

    The title character is a rich, enigmatic loner who masterminds a Boston bank robbery to alleviate his ennui.  His prospective adversary, Vicki Anderson, is an independent investigator hired by the bank’s insurance company to analyse the crime and work out who was behind it.  In the process of trying to prove his guilt, Vicki becomes romantically infatuated with Crown and he with her.  Crown doesn’t tend to give much away emotionally but, alone in his Beacon Hill mansion, he indulges in a couple of outbursts of full-throated laughter, congratulating himself on his criminal genius.  Steve McQueen isn’t a convincing laugher – not a convincing full-throated laugher, at any rate – but is otherwise very well cast as a charismatic man of mystery.  His effortless cool and reserve are invaluable here:  an actor who revealed more of his thoughts and feelings might more expose the film’s flimsiness.  (The screenplay is by Alan R Trustman, who also shared the writing credit on Bullitt, Steve McQueen’s other big hit in 1968.)

    Whereas McQueen is an instinctive screen actor, Faye Dunaway is self-aware and her playing full of artful touches but, like him, she’s a magnetic camera subject.  Dunaway is an odd kind of actress.  As a substantial character in a good film – in Bonnie and Clyde (1967) or Chinatown (1974) – her artificiality is liable to be too salient.  Yet she can give a semblance of depth to a shallow role like Vicki (or her avidly ambitious TV executive in Network (1976)).  The difference in the pair’s acting styles supplies an extra layer of tension to the Crown-Vicki relationship, never more effectively than in the famous chess game sequence, and in how they place their fingers on their lips – he naturally, she unnaturally – to signal they’re thinking about their next move, in more ways than one.  It must be said that, as foreplay, the chess board doesn’t compare with the pub grub consumed by Albert Finney and Joyce Redman in Tom Jones (1963) – not, at least, until things become so blatant that Dunaway’s hand starts moving up and down her king.  Once McQueen says, ‘Let’s play something else’, their clinch is a bit of an anti-climax, but the leads’ chemistry comes through in subsequent intimate bits like a red-lit sauna sequence.

    Norman Jewison, who made Thomas Crown straight after the previous year’s In the Heat of the Night (which ‘Trash, Arts and the Movies’ underestimates), does an admirable job.  For a while, the pioneering split-screen effects by graphic designer Pablo Ferro look set to overwhelm and distract the narrative but Jewison is canny.  He soon rations the split-screen images.  By doing so, he can get on with the storytelling unimpeded – and even leave the viewer wanting more of the visual trickery.  In the closing stages, Jewison uses a split screen for the different impact of unexpectedness.  Occasional sequences like a cop reading an arrestee his rights without twigging who he is, are, in Jewison’s hands, bracingly realistic amid the prevailing calculated contrivance.  The Thomas Crown Affair plays the audience throughout but so transparently that the audience is aware of – and may well enjoy – being played.

    The two stars shine more brightly thanks not only to their own glamour and talent, but also to some dull, verging on wooden, playing in the supporting cast – for example, from Paul Burke as the main detective.  Honourable exceptions are Jack Weston (as the bank robbers’ getaway driver) and Yaphet Kotto (as one of the robbers).  The fast cars in photogenic locations, Crown’s supply of cognac and cigars – these are standard-issue accoutrements of high life in a Hollywood product of the time, but Haskell Wexler’s camerawork delivers some genuinely entrancing moments, notably the sequence where Crown’s glider gracefully circles before coming in to land.  This is aptly accompanied by a reprise of the film’s Oscar-winning theme song, ‘The Windmills of Your Mind’, first heard during the opening titles and sung by Noel Harrison.  Michel Legrand wrote the absorbing, intricate melody, Marilyn and Alan Bergman the matching lyrics.  Their meaning may not add up to much, which only reinforces the film’s entertaining mystique.

    The Thomas Crown Affair was remade in 1999 (directed by John McTiernan, starring Pierce Brosnan and Rene Russo) and is due to return to the screen in a third incarnation in 2027.  For the first time, the director will also be the star.  Michael B Jordan has talked a lot publicly about his determination to make artistically ambitious, independent cinema.  His first directing effort was Creed III (2023), next up is Thomas Crown III …  But maybe Jordan sees it as an allegory about human faith.

    26 April 2026

  • Witness

    Old YorkerFilm review

    Peter Weir (1985)

    The first film that Peter Weir made in the US, Witness went down well with plenty of critics and even better with audiences, in North America and around the world.  Set in present-day Pennsylvania, the scenario is promising.  A young Amish boy, waiting at a station with his mother for a connecting train to Philadelphia, goes to the gents, where he witnesses a murder.  The murdered man is an undercover police officer.  Two of his colleagues interview the boy, who can’t identify the perpetrator from an identity parade or mug shots that he’s shown but sees a newspaper clipping in a trophy case at the police station.  The clipping includes a photo of another member of the Philadelphia police department, whom the boy recognises as the killer.  The senior detective who interviewed the boy soon realises there’s drug-related corruption in the department all the way up to the top.  The mother and son return to their home in rural Lancaster.  After an attempt on his life by the bad cops, which leaves him with a gunshot wound, the good cop takes refuge and stays in hiding within the alien world of the Amish community.

    The script (by Earl W Wallace, William Kelley and Pamela Wallace) is shallow, though, and Peter Weir’s direction heavy-handed from the start.  Witness begins at an Amish funeral, that of the father of the boy who will witness the murder.  The mourners’ unusual garb and manner of speaking suggest past times, but Weir then immediately puts ‘Pennsylvania, 1984’ on the screen:  it would have been more effective to hold back that signpost until after the shot of an Amish pony and trap going along a road busy with motor traffic.  In the story that follows, Weir’s characters must exchange more emphatically meaningful looks than there are minutes in the film (117).  The widowed Rachel Lapp (Kelly McGillis) and her eight-year-old son, Samuel (Lukas Haas), are on their way to visit Rachel’s sister in Philadelphia.  Although it’s supposedly the first time Samuel has ever been in a city environment, Rachel is surprisingly unconcerned about her son’s wandering about the station concourse and going alone to the toilets there.  He must, of course, to be the sole witness to the crime committed.  But that’s all that Samuel is in the story – a plot device rather than a character:  there’s no suggestion that he might have been traumatised (or that his mother would worry he’d been traumatised) by his shocking experience.  Once the narrative focus switches to Rachel’s nursing detective John Book (Harrison Ford) back to health and the growing mutual attraction between them, Samuel almost disappears from the action, until Book’s showdown with his nefarious boss, police chief Schaeffer (Josef Sommer), on the farm where Rachel and Samuel live with her elderly father (Jan Rubeš).  While Book and Rachel are getting to like each other, the crime thriller element also takes a back seat, except that Book’s detective partner (Brent Jennings) is murdered by Schaeffer’s men.

    The writing and direction of the central romance are no great shakes.  They’re designed merely to satisfy assumed audience expectations of a two-worlds-collide love story.  On the night of a storm (!), Book happens to see Rachel topless as she washes; when she catches sight of him, she fearlessly presents her bare breasts to his troubled gaze.  He moves uncertainly away.  Next morning, he tells her, ‘If we’d made love, then I couldn’t leave’ – which Book knows he must do, never mind that he could be useful to the community (he proves a dab hand at carpentry during a lengthy barn-raising sequence, earning the respect even of Rachel’s jealous suitor (Alexander Godunov)).  Weir still sticks in a bit where Book and Rachel subsequently express their feelings – a passionate embrace in the middle of a cornfield – in order to keep us happy.  Almost needless to say, the film ignores the question of whether the pair might have anything in common beyond sexual chemistry.  They are just playing out the familiar movie phenomenon of a love that could never be.  Once the public toilet murderer (Danny Glover) has himself been killed and Schaeffer has surrendered in the final shootout, John Book takes his leave of Rachel and Lancaster, and heads back to the city to solve more crime.

    Harrison Ford represents that world very likeably.  It’s inevitable that, in the lead, he has more meaningful looks to deliver than anyone else, but at least Ford varies them, especially Book’s incredulous little grimaces in the early stages of his Amish experience.  The BFI audience I was in chuckled at the obvious bits of fish-out-of-water humour – Book disguised in Amish clothes that don’t fit, or milking a cow – but I could only hear my own laugh when Rachel makes breakfast, and Book exclaims, ‘Honey – that’s great coffee!’, TV-commercial style, thus baffling the hostess and her family.  Harrison Ford delivers that line perfectly and manages its aftermath equally well.  Lukas Haas is good as Samuel – vivid in the opening murder scene, eccentrically introverted in the scenes that follow.  As Rachel, Kelly McGillis gives a conscientious performance but registers changing emotions very deliberately.  Josef Sommer isn’t good as the slippery-sinister police chief, and some of the playing in smaller parts is worse.  I have to admit I was relieved when John Book’s rustic idyll was over.  The Amish are decent and all that, and they pull together to help Book in the climax to the crime story, but their way of life is mildly depressing, too.  The great outdoors sequences – notably that barn-raising marathon – are enlivened by the accompaniment of Maurice Jarre’s music, which is very agreeable, even if probably insincere.

    23 April 2026

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