Erwin Weaver (Jack Weston) cautiously enters a darkened hotel room, where he’s hit with bright lights and meets with a figure obscured in darkness. The mystery man offers Erwin the job of getaway driver in a bank heist. He’s given cash and instructed to buy a Ford stationwagon with wood paneling on the side, transport money from the robbery to a cemetery, and deposit it in a trash bin.

Thomas Crown (Steve McQueen) is a business tycoon of some type in Boston; handsome, rich, somewhat above the law, and bored. He has his secretary hold his calls for the rest of the day. Five men who don’t know each other – including Yaphet Kotto, in his screen debut – and who have never met Crown move into position at the National Shawmut Bank.

The crew nabs $2.6 million in cash and disperses. Crown retrieves the money from Cambridge Cemetery and flies it personally to Switzerland, where he opens a secret account and makes arrangements to pay off the crew. The detective in charge of the investigation (Paul Burke) is left without a clue. Crown returns to his penthouse and laughs up his victory over the establishment, but has no one to share the moment with.

The bank hires chic insurance investigator Vicki Anderson (Faye Dunaway) to solve the robbery. She deduces that Switzerland is the only place the mastermind could safely deposit the cash, and analyzing flight records, settles on Crown as her prime suspect. She turns up at his polo match, then an art auction, and makes no secret that she’s after him. They flirt, play chess, ride a dune buggie and try to checkmate one another, as Crown plots another heist and dares her to catch him.

Alan Trustman was a lawyer for the firm of Nutter, McClennen and Fish in Boston. He got bored one Sunday watching football and decided to write a screenplay, his first. The thirty page brief came to the attention of director Norman Jewison, who became intrigued with the potential for a stylish, romantic thriller. He worked with Trustman to form a 90 page script based on his idea.

Norman Jewison – working again with director of photography Haskell Wexler and film editor Hal Ashby – had just finished an Academy Award winning Best Picture called In The Heat of the Night and may have identified with Thomas Crown; successful, bored, and ready to thumb his nose at convention. But in this version of the story, the filmmakers bungled the score and deserve 5 to 7 in a state penitentiary.

Jewison had seen the documentary short A Place To Stand at the Montreal World Fair in 1967 and became fascinated with split screen editing. John Frankenheimer had already employed this for Grand Prix, using it during racing sequences to reveal more of the story. The Thomas Crown Affair is so brazen in its absence of story, or characters, or dialogue, or plotting, or setting, or anything having to do with a script, that technique makes little or no difference.

Steve McQueen – shrouded in darkness in the ridiculous opening scene – is not convincing as a playboy banker (Sean Connery was offered the part and would have pulled it off handsomely). McQueen and Dunaway are good together, but incredibly, don’t share a scene until over halfway through the picture. Supporting characters are underwritten and the actors cast underachieve in the parts. The theme song by Noel Harrison, “Windmills Of Your Mind,” was an Oscar winner, but is a wretched tune, painful to endure today.

Though The Thomas Crown Affair was not a hit at the box office, McQueen actually considered it his favorite of all his films, and decades later, inspired a remake starring Pierce Brosnan and Rene Russo. Directed by John McTiernan, the remake became a sleeper hit in the summer of 1999; it was exciting, sophisticated, witty, and sexy. Everything this movie is not.