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Blu-Ray : Recommended
Ranking:
Sale Price: $35.99 Last Price: $ Buy now! 3rd Party 12.93 In Stock
Release Date: February 13th, 2018 Movie Release Year: 1968

The Thomas Crown Affair (1968): 50th Anniversary Edition

Overview -

Fronted by Steve McQueen and Faye Dunaway at the height of their star power, Norman Jewison's The Thomas Crown Affair is a blast of 1960s style and verve. The 50th Anniversary Edition from Kino Lorber is a big step up over the last Blu-ray from MGM. Recommended.

"Every crime has a personality, something like the mind that planned it," says Vicky Anderson, the sleek insurance investigator trying to figure out the intellect behind a bank robbery so stunning it has Boston's finest completely baffled. The Thomas Crown Affair has all the dazzling personality of the intriguing crime it portrays. Sophisticated, handsome Thomas Crown has only one worry - what persona he will take on tomorrow. But when the genius rogue pulls off a crime-of-the-century bank heist and finds himself pitted against a nemesis as powerful as he is, his devil-may-care attitude hurls him into an edge-of-your-seat game of intrigue and suspense. Starring Steve McQueen, Faye Dunaway, Paul Burke, Jack Weston, and Gordon Pinsent.

OVERALL:
Recommended
Rating Breakdown
STORY
VIDEO
AUDIO
SPECIAL FEATURES
Tech Specs & Release Details
Technical Specs:
Region A
Video Resolution/Codec:
1080p/AVC MPEG-4
Length:
102
Aspect Ratio(s):
1.85:1
Audio Formats:
English DTS-HD Master Audio 2.0 Mono
Subtitles/Captions:
English Subtitles
Special Features:
Trailer
Release Date:
February 13th, 2018

Storyline: Our Reviewer's Take

Ranking:

Just two months after his topical, politically-charged race relations drama In the Heat of the Night collected five Oscars including Best Picture, director Norman Jewison already had a new movie in theaters. The follow-up, however, was a bit lightweight in comparison. Over the years, Jewison himself has had no qualms about describing his crime caper The Thomas Crown Affair as a simple lark and a case of style over substance. The film happens to be very good at those modest goals and has successfully endured as a piece of breezy entertainment for five decades and counting.

Steve McQueen stars as the Thomas Crown of the title, a wealthy and powerful Boston businessman. The nature of his business isn't clear, beyond giving him an excuse to smoke cigars and look dapper in three-piece suits, but he's apparently good at it and is treated as a very important man. Thomas Crown is also a criminal mastermind who orchestrates a bank heist carried out by a collection of accomplices unaware of their boss' identity. His motivation is not to pay off secret debts or hide any corporate failings. He actually doesn't need the money at all. He steals it mostly out of boredom, or perhaps some resentment for the very system that made him rich. The elaborate robbery is a game to him, and Crown cherishes his victories no matter how little the prize benefits him personally.

When the local Boston police prove unable to crack this case on their own, lovely and fashionable insurance investigator Vicki Anderson (Faye Dunaway, just one year following her breakout role in Bonnie and Clyde) arrives on the scene to boss them around. She quickly pegs Crown as a suspect and even tells him as much. Crown essentially dares her to catch him, greatly enjoying the game of cat-and-mouse that follows, which soon turns to flirtation and seduction. Even as they fall for each other, the two refuse to yield their positions. Love or no love, Vicki will still arrest Crown if she can catch him, and Crown plots another, very similar robbery just to prove to her that she can't.

The Thomas Crown Affair - Steve McQueen

By 1968, Steve McQueen was perhaps the defining icon of cool in Western popular culture, and the movie certainly plays up that angle. His character has little depth beyond being handsome, charming and mischievous. At the same time, the film toys with his established screen image. He reportedly took the role simply because he'd never worn a suit on camera before (he typically played more roguish types), and he thought it would be fun to play a white collar captain of industry for a change.

Fun is the order of the day in The Thomas Crown Affair. The film has just a wisp of a plot and most of the details of the robbery schemes are so vague as to willfully defy scrutiny. Even the characters' love affair seems pretty far-fetched. The story makes barely enough sense to resist giving it much thought, and not one bit more. But the stars are glamorous and have great chemistry. They wear chic clothes and look fabulous while they banter playfully. Jewison keeps the whole thing moving at a jaunty clip via numerous split-screen montages and other fancy directorial and editing tricks that were trendy at the time, seemed dated a few years later, and have now come back around to looking inventive again.

The fact that this movie is 50-years-old now is an asset. It's very much an artifact – no, a monument – of a specific era in filmmaking and pop culture. Watching it is like traveling to a time and a place that never quite existed as depicted (1968 was a particularly turbulent year in world affairs, none of which is hinted at here), where everyone is impossibly stylish, smart, witty, and rich. In many ways, that makes it even more entertaining to watch now than it may have played when originally released.

The Thomas Crown Affair first came to Blu-ray in 2011 in what sadly amounted to an underwhelming MGM catalog title. That disc featured a dated video transfer and a very thin selection of bonus features. For its 50th anniversary, Kino Lorber has licensed the film and granted it a nicer package that offers improvement in most respects.

The disc itself has a simple static menu duplicating the case art (in the style of a vintage poster). The "Windmills of Your Mind" theme song plays in a loop over the menu, which proves annoying and distracting given that it's also the very first thing heard when you play the movie.

Video Review

Ranking:

Kino Lorber's publicity states that the 50th Anniversary Edition of The Thomas Crown Affair was sourced from a "brand new 4k restoration," presumably provided by the rights owners at MGM. In comparison to MGM's own Blu-ray from 2011, improvements are obvious and significant. The old disc was watchable but very soft, sometimes even blurry. The new 1080p/AVC MPEG-4 transfer (framed at the theatrical 1.85:1 aspect ratio) is decidedly sharper and more detailed, especially in close-ups, which are frequently excellent.

The Thomas Crown Affair - Steve McQueen Comparison Kino

The Thomas Crown Affair - Steve McQueen Comparison MGM

The famous chess match seduction scene has exceptional clarity and vividness, exposing every individual eyelash, eyebrow hair, and skin pore on both actors' faces, the effect of which draws you closer to the emotions of the moment.

The Thomas Crown Affair - Faye Dunaway Comparison Kino

The Thomas Crown Affair - Faye Dunaway Comparison MGM

Not every scene is quite so vibrant, however. The movie has an abundance of split-screen optical effects that, due to the analog nature of the way they were created, are still very soft, grainy, and frequently have dirt or hairs embedded in the composites. Even outside of those, other sections of the film exhibit sporadic damage, scratches, or flashing. Some may be endemic to the original production, or some may be age-related. Nevertheless, issues like these are generally minor and forgivable (or at least excusable). This is a very nice presentation for the movie.

The two discs also have differences in color and contrast. In most cases, the new 50th Anniversary Edition looks a bit cooler but richer and more refined. At other times, flesh tones might be a little too orange, and in a few instances the colors differ so wildly between the two discs that I can't be certain which is actually more accurate to the original theatrical release.

The Thomas Crown Affair - Steve McQueen in Silhouette Comparison Kino

The Thomas Crown Affair - Steve McQueen in Silhouette Comparison MGM

Regardless, the Kino disc is decidedly better in enough ways that fans will find it a worthy upgrade from the old copy.

Audio Review

Ranking:

Keeping in mind that the movie is 50-years-old, the Blu-ray's audio quality is reasonably good. The DTS-HD Master Audio mono track is clear and intelligible, with a fair amount of throbbing musical bass in the score and theme song. The engine of Crown's dune buggy provides a nice growl.

Unfortunately, the theme song also sounds a little hollow, and the audio in general seems thin. As a mono mix, it's obviously center focused. The dynamic range is limited and the fidelity is often bright. Listening closely, you can hear some analog tape hiss and warble.

None of this is to say that the soundtrack is deficient or poorly mastered. It's good for what it is, but unquestionably suffers some limitations of its age.

The Thomas Crown Affair - Faye Dunaway & Paul Burke

Special Features

Ranking:

The prior Blu-ray from 2011 was very sparse with its bonus content, offering only a director's commentary and a trailer that were both carried over from DVD editions dating back to 1999. The Kino disc retains both of those and adds a few new items of interest.

  • Audio Commentary by Director Norman Jewison – Recorded for DVD in 1999, the filmmaker's track takes a while to warm up. Jewison starts by simply reading the cast list from the opening credits, but eventually finds more interesting topics to talk about. He freely admits that the movie is a case of "style over content" and had a short screenplay without much story in it.
  • Audio Commentary by Film Historians Lem Dobbs and Nick Redman – Dobbs (screenwriter of The Limey and Dark City) and Redman (co-founder of the Twilight Time video label) introduce themselves as old friends and clearly have a good rapport. Although fans of the movie, they both acknowledge that parts of the story don't make much sense. They spend a lot of time talking about Steve McQueen and how this film both built on and diverged from his established screen image. The conversation is very lively and interesting, but the way the track has been mixed to place each man's voice in a different speaker is distracting and annoying.
  • Interview with Director Norman Jewison (HD, 20 min.) – Still spry at 91-years-old, Jewison revisits the film for a new interview and winds up repeating a lot of the same information covered by his older commentary. Topics discussed include casting McQueen and Dunaway, filming in Boston, and how to make a chess match seem cinematically exciting. (He describes the scene as "chess with sex.")
  • Interview with Title Designer Pablo Ferro (HD, 8 min.) – Credited almost offhandedly in the film with the vague description "Multiple Screens By," Ferro created not just the opening titles but all of the intricate split-screen montages in the movie. He talks about how he uses movement and color to draw viewers' eyes to certain images, and bemoans that the art of the title sequence has largely been lost in modern movies.
  • "Three's a Company" (SD, 9 min.) – A 1967 promotional short showcases clips from the movie and behind-the-scenes footage, overlaid with confusing and generally pointless voiceover narration. Not helping matters, the audio quality is scratchy and awful. Of note, the film was initially sold under the title Thomas Crown & Co.
  • Trailer (HD, 2 min.) – The vintage trailer shows off the same kind of fancy editing used in the movie and plays up the star power of McQueen and Dunaway. It's kind of great.


The Thomas Crown Affair - Split Screen

The Thomas Crown Affair is not a film to be taken seriously, but it has held up as a light and fun romantic caper with very appealing leads and plenty of 1960s style to spare. (The 1999 remake with Pierce Brosnan and Rene Russo is pretty good too.)

Kino's 50th Anniversary Edition looks significantly better than the prior Blu-ray release and adds a few interesting new supplements, all at a pretty reasonable price. Fans will want to scoop this up.