The Thomas Crown Affair (1968)

The Thomas Crown Affair is a 1968 American heist film directed and produced by Norman Jewison and starring Steve McQueen and Faye Dunaway. It was nominated for two Academy Awards, winning Best Original Song for Michel Legrand's "The Windmills of Your Mind". A remake was released in 1999.
==Plot==
Millionaire businessman-sportsman Thomas Crown accomplishes a perfect crime by orchestrating four men to steal $2,660,527.62 from a Boston bank ($17.2 million in 2022 dollars), along with a fifth man who drives the getaway car with the money and dumps it in a cemetery trash can. None of the men ever meet Crown face to face, nor know or meet each other before the robbery. Crown retrieves the money from the trash can after secretly following the driver of the getaway car. He deposits the money into an anonymous Swiss bank account in Geneva, making several trips, never depositing the money all at once so as not to draw undue attention to his actions.
Independent insurance investigator Vicki Anderson is contracted to investigate the heist; she will receive 10% of the stolen money if she recovers it. Speculating that the robbery's mastermind was familiar with the bank's routines because he had an account there, and that the stolen money has been deposited into a numbered Swiss bank account, Vicki and the police draw up a list of bank customers who have made several recent trips to Geneva. When Vicki sees Thomas's profile on the list, she intuitively recognizes him as the mastermind behind the robbery, and shortly thereafter guesses that he organized the robbers so none of the men knew him nor met each other.
Thomas does not need the money, and in fact masterminded the robbery as a game. Vicki makes it clear to him that she knows he is the thief and that she intends to prove it. They start a game of cat and mouse, with the attraction between them evident. Their relationship soon evolves into an affair, complicated by Vicki's vow to find the money and help detective Eddy Malone bring the guilty party to justice.
A reward offer entices the wife of the bank robbery's getaway driver, Erwin Weaver, to "fink" on him for $25,000 ($161,000 in 2022 dollars). Vicki finds out that he was hired by a man he never saw but whose voice he heard (via a microphone). She tries putting Erwin in the same room as Thomas, but there is no hint of recognition on either's part.
However, while Vicki is clearly closing in on Thomas, even using the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) as leverage against his liquid assets, he forces her to realize that she is also becoming hemmed in by her emotions. When she seemingly persuades him to negotiate an end, his point is proven when Eddy stubbornly refuses to make any deal.
Thomas organizes another robbery exactly like the first with different accomplices and tells Vicki where the "drop" will be, because he has to know for sure that she is on his side. The robbery is successful, but there are gunshots and the viewer is left with the impression that people might have been killed, raising the stakes for Vicki's decision.
Vicki and the police stake out the cemetery, where they watch one of the robbers make the drop, and they wait for Thomas to arrive so they can arrest him. However, when his Rolls-Royce arrives, she sees that Thomas has sent a messenger in his place, with a telegram asking her to bring the money and join him – or, if not, "you keep the car". She tears the telegram to bits and throws the pieces to the wind, looking up at the sky with tears in her eyes. Crown flies away in a jet.
==Cast==
*Steve McQueen as Thomas Crown
*Faye Dunaway as Vicki Anderson
*Paul Burke as Eddy Malone
*Jack Weston as Erwin
*Biff McGuire as Sandy
*Addison Powell as Abe
*Gordon Pinsent as Jamie
*Yaphet Kotto as Carl
*Sidney Armus as Arnie
*Richard Bull as Booth Guard
*Peg Shirley as Honey
*Tom Rosqui as Private Detective
*Michael Shillo as Swiss Banker
*Astrid Heeren as Gwen
==Production==
The photography is unusual for a mainstream Hollywood film, using a split-screen mode. The use of split screens to show simultaneous actions was inspired by the breakthrough Expo 67 films In the Labyrinth and A Place to Stand, the latter pioneering the use of Christopher Chapman's "multi-dynamic image technique", images shifting on moving panes. Steve McQueen was on hand for an advance screening of A Place to Stand in Hollywood, and personally told Chapman he was highly impressed; the following year, Norman Jewison had incorporated the technique into the film, inserting the scenes into the already finished product.
The film also features a chess scene, with McQueen and Dunaway playing a game of chess, silently flirting with each other. The game depicted is based on a game played in Vienna in 1898 between Gustav Zeissl and Walter von Walthoffen.
McQueen performed his own stunts, which include playing polo and driving a dune buggy at high speed along the Massachusetts coastline.
Vicki Anderson's car, referred to as "one of those red Italian things" (the Alfa Romeo Spider was the marque frequently distinguished as such), is the first of only ten Ferrari 275 GTB/4S NART Spiders built. Today, this model is one of the most valuable Ferrari road cars of all time. McQueen liked the car very much, and eventually managed to acquire one for himself. The dune buggy was a Meyers Manx, built in California on a Volkswagen Beetle floor pan with a hopped-up Chevrolet Corvair engine. McQueen owned one, and the Manx, the original dune buggy, was often copied. Crown's two-door Rolls-Royce Silver Shadow carried the Massachusetts vanity license plate "TC 100" for the film.
Sean Connery had been the original choice for the title role, but turned it down — a decision he later regretted. Johnny Carson also turned down the role.
==Filming locations==
The movie was filmed primarily on location in Boston and surrounding areas in Massachusetts and New Hampshire:
* Second Harrison Gray Otis House at 85 Mt. Vernon Street on Beacon Hill, designed by Massachusetts State House architect Charles Bulfinch in 1800 for Congressman Harrison Gray Otis, was Thomas Crown's residence
* The robbery occurred in what was then the Beverly National Bank (fictitiously renamed Boston Mercantile Bank for the film) at the North Beverly Plaza, Beverly, Massachusetts, and 55 Congress Street, Boston. The current location is noted as 44 Water Street, the offices of private investment firm, Brown Brothers. The interiors were renovated and partially restored in 1999 by the firm GHK, Malcolm Higbee-Glace, Project Manager
* A scene of the car theft was filmed in downtown Beverly across from City Hall
* The money dumpings were shot in Mount Auburn Cemetery, Coolidge Avenue, Cambridge
* The polo sequences were filmed at the Myopia Hunt Club, 435 Bay Road, South Hamilton
* The golf sequences were filmed at the Belmont Country Club, 181 Winter Street, Belmont
* The auctions took place in the St. James Ballroom at the Eben Jordan Mansion, 46 Beacon Street, Beacon Hill
* Thomas drove his dune buggy on Crane Beach in Ipswich, Massachusetts
* The Schweizer SGS 1-23H glider was flown at Salem, New Hampshire, by Roy McMaster (not Steve McQueen)
* The meat shop scene took place at Blackstone Street and North Street in Boston's North End
* Thomas and Vicki walked in the rain in Copp's Hill Cemetery in Boston's North End
* Thomas and Vicki kissed (wearing formal dress) at the top of Acorn Street on Beacon Hill, a narrow, cobblestone lane often called "the most photographed street in America"
Other locations included:
* the Allston-Brighton tollbooths (demolished in 2016) on the Massachusetts Turnpike
* Anthony's Pier 4 restaurant at 140 Northern Avenue in South Boston's Seaport District
* the Boston Common
* the old Boston Police Headquarters on Berkeley Street (since renovated as the Loews Boston Hotel)
* Cambridge Street and Linden Street, Allston
* Copp's Hill Terrace in Boston's North End
* the North End Greenmarket
* South Station, 700 Atlantic Avenue, Boston
* the Tobin Bridge
* the Prudential Tunnel portion of the Massachusetts Turnpike going under Huntington Avenue (then-future Massachusetts Route 9) —years before the Westin Hotel in Copley Square and the parking garage on Clarendon Street were built over the toll highway — in a scene in which McQueen was driving the getaway car
* the then-Dewey Square Tunnel (future Interstate 93), where McQueen emerges on the Massachusetts Turnpike; a feat technically impossible since McQueen drove into the Prudential Tunnel one scene earlier
* the Marliave Restaurant rooftop dining area, Bosworth Street, Boston, where Dunaway is shown surveillance photos by Burke of McQueen kissing another woman
* the footpath on the Boston side of the Charles River, between the Weeks Footbridge and the Anderson Bridge, with the dome of Dunster House visible in the background on the Cambridge side
* Dulles International Airport, Virginia, with signage making it look as if it were in Boston
==References==