The Thomas Crown Affair

13/12/2025

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Let us talk about stardom, and more than a little about consumerism. 1968 was Steve McQueen’s annus mirabilis: Bullitt and The Thomas Crown Affair were released, and McQueen became the king of cool in two roles that had little in common, yet where the persona became cemented. In Bullitt, he plays a blue-collar cop and in Norman Jewison's The Thomas Crown Affair, a white-collar criminal who has money aplenty but likes the idea of a bank robbery to alleviate the boredom of making money without effort. Yet whether on the right side of the law or the wrong side, whether making a police wage or a substantial fortune, McQueen shows an anti-authoritarianism that has rarely done actors much harm, no matter Hollywood’s conformism. Hollywood is an industry, and the movie business is an entertainment before it is an art; and actors well know that what they are creating is a product. It might sell; it might not. “All of a sudden they become rich. And it usually is overnight, not in terms of a body of work. You can be in theatre for ten years and,” producer Martin Bregman says, “all of a sudden you are very visible.” (Reel Power) McQueen’s success wasn’t instant, but his superstar status was. The actor had been making films for more than a decade and had his first lead role in The Blob. The Magnificent Seven, The Great Escape and The Cincinnati Kid made him a star, but he still had to define his persona. The two films in 1968 did that.
      Faye Dunaway’s fame was much more immediate. She was eleven years younger than McQueen and appeared in three films in 1967. Two in smaller roles and then as the co-lead in Bonnie and Clyde. She was an instant success, without a body of relative, cinematic mediocrity behind her. This might say something about the industry’s gender bias, society’s expectations or the 1960s, but McQueen had a decade to establish himself, while if Dunaway had failed to achieve great fame by the time she was thirty-five, she would probably have been reduced to supporting roles. There were exceptions, but this seemed to prove the rule. Ellen Burstyn briefly became a big star in The Exorcist and Alice Doesn’t Live Here Anymore in her forties.
    What both Dunaway and McQueen display in The Thomas Crown Affair is mutual glamour, perhaps not quite the same thing as screen chemistry and in this instance more than a little reliant on the material accoutrements that accompany their own charms. Dunaway is first seen by McQueen atop a wine-coloured 1967 Ferrari 275 GTS, and “Theodora Van Runkle designed all of Dunaway's 29 costumes for the film.” Van Runkle and Dunaway worked previously on Bonnie and Clyde, and this was “a film that sparked a trend for 1930’s style fashion in the late 60’s.” (CoutureAllure) Here, Dunaway often wears mini-skirts, pencil thin-clothing and a variety of bold hats. McQueen was no less carefully coutured: “London tailoring mastermind Douglas ‘Dougie’ Hayward was behind much of the film’s wardrobe, making McQueen’s bespoke suits with his signature ‘60s flair.” Charlies Thomas says “…he was, after all, responsible for the tailoring in other films including 1966’s Alfie, Get Carter, The Italian Job and For Your Eyes Only. Many of the foremost actors of the 1960s made a point of working with Dougie…” (Thomas Mason)
    While the suit was an important item of clothing for classic Hollywood actors, in the fifties the Method usually required less formal attire. Whether it was the red bomber jacket, jeans and T-shirt James Dean wore in Rebel Without a Cause, the leather jacket and jeans Marlon Brando was wearing in The Wild One, or the lumber jacket in On the Waterfront, these items could pass for the clothing of the common man. When Cary Grant, James Stewart, Gary Cooper and other classic actors continued to wear suits throughout the fifties, they could almost seem old-fashioned. In the sixties, it was fashionable again, though in a subtly different way. Often, the actors gave the impression of wearing it with a rebellious panache or an upstart’s ambition. Working-class actors like McQueen, Sean Connery and Michael Caine suggested the suit was part of what they were entitled to in the materialist, stylish, consumerist 1960s. In The Thomas Crown Affair, McQueen doesn’t come across as a rich man wearing clothes expected of his class, but as someone defying expectation by classily wearing suits that might not seem naturally his to wear. This isn’t only in the suits but also in his leisure clothing — “for his gallivanting ride on the beach he chooses a long-sleeve orange utility shirt, cut in a boxy fit in what appears to be a lightweight cotton-linen. He pairs it with black shorts and his signature Persols for what is an effortlessly cool beach look.” (Thomas Mason)
        We shouldn’t underestimate how much conspicuous consumption is often associated with cinematic stardom, how much what we see is gratuitous, no matter how films hide this conspicuousness with plot and ostensible character motivation. The sociologist who first properly looked at the question behind excessive materialism, Thorstein Veblen, reckoned: “throughout the entire evolution of conspicuous expenditure, whether of goods or of services or human life, runs the obvious implication that in order to effectually mend the consumer’s good fame it must be an expenditure of superfluities. In order to be reputable it must be wasteful. No merit would accrue from the consumption of the bare necessaries of life.” (’The Theory of the Leisure Class’) While, as we have noticed, there are actors better known for their limited attire, rather than their extensive wardrobe, part of the appeal of cinema is watching attractive people wearing appealing items in narratives that can almost pass for an elaborate ruse, one that allows us to keep our eyes gazing upon these people moving through film space. Audrey Hepburn might often have seemed a winsome soul, an agreeable gamine, but costume designer Edith Head was vital to her initial appeal, and so too was Givenchy. “Head..was a costume designer in an era before couture took over the movies: in fact, her films with Hepburn were a key transitional point", Andrew Pulver says. "In Sabrina Hepburn wore Givenchy (uncredited) for her Paris scenes, but it was Head who took the Oscar. For Breakfast at Tiffany's, eight years later, Givenchy received full credit, with Head as 'costume supervisor'." (Guardian) Rachel Mosley notes that “at the heart, then, of Hepburn’s Cinderella narratives and star image, is a discourse of fashion and beauty which produces a gendered attractionist aesthetic around her on screen, and opens up a significant space for a competent gendered gaze in which the details of dress are privileged.” (‘Trousers and Tiaras: Audrey Hepburn, a Woman’s Star’)
 Clothes matter, but so do other items, especially for men, whose conspicuous consumption often comes in the various vehicles they drive. Few actors have aligned their stardom (and long before Tom Cruise) with moving through space quickly in a car or on a motorbike. Some of McQueen’s most iconic moments are in or on vehicles, and while he may have appeared in several westerns, horses aren’t quite the same as horsepower. To know the name of the horses he rode in Nevada Smith and Tom Horn is one thing, but to know the motorbike in The Great Escape is a Triumph TR6 Trophy might also include the desire to purchase it. And what about the green Mustang GT390s in Bullitt, an object so desirable that McQueen himself tried to buy it, though it always remained elusive. In The Thomas Crown Affair, the car functions more sedately than we might expect, as if its status rests chiefly on it as a sign of wealth over engine power. His main vehicle is a 1967 Rolls-Royce Silver Shadow Fixed Head Sedan. He picks up the cash after the initial bank robbery from a bin at a cemetery, but he is in no hurry to get there and in no hurry to leave, as though half the purpose of the scene is to show off the car. After all, the plan has been so well executed, and Thomas’s involvement so aloof, that nobody is likely at this stage to trace him to the deed. Pace here is chiefly for thrills: his yellow byplane and his red buggy. The Thomas Crown Affair plays a bit like a Bond film, but while Bond gets the adrenaline buzz playing with expensive toys belonging to the British government, Thomas owns them himself. It makes the conspicuous consumption more explicit as we watch a man with time on his hands and money in his account, wondering what to spend them on.  
        While we note that film stardom is often based on having things in the diegetic world that most cannot afford, and see by extension that the actor can afford everything in that diegetic world and a lot more besides (with McQueen owning up to 100 vehicles), this doesn’t mean the film wants to throw these items in our face. Most of the time, the materialism is aspirational or ‘narrativisable’, the latter a terrible neologism which nevertheless captures cinema’s ability to mask the most conspicuous of consumption. At the beginning of 1969’s The Italian Job, we see a man driving a red Lamborghini Maura around various tight corners in the Alps before entering a tunnel and meeting his end when he collides with a deliberately placed bulldozer that will then push the car over a ledge. While the car is hardly unimportant, it is contained by the story the film wishes to tell: this is the Italian friend of our English central character who will complete a heist the dead man was planning.
   A good example of the aspirational is there in Pretty Woman, with Julia Roberts walking into a shop dressed as her usual self, a modestly earning but immodestly dressed sex worker who in a series of shots looks at signs for Louis Vuitton, Gucci and Chanel before entering a shop where the assistants propose that everything is outside her price range and ask her to leave. She returns the next day, clothed in white and black Chanel and with handfuls of bags from other designer stores, flaunting her purchasing power. The materialism might seem as naked as Roberts is well-attired, but the film nevertheless flimsily clothes Roberts in the narrative of aspiration — a poor girl made good. A rich woman going into the store showing her purchases from elsewhere would have no purpose beyond acting mean, but Pretty Woman presents it as a victory for the working class and a perverse form of egalitarianism.
   In The Thomas Crown Affair, the narrativisation comes in the early heist and with Vickie Anderson (Dunaway) as the independent investigator hired by the insurance company to find out who did it. The aspiration is part of a sixties amalgam of story and stardom, of ego and class. If McQueen doesn’t seem convincing as a man who has made his fortune through years of working the financial markets, neither was Sean Connery any more so as an Etonian James Bond who graduated from Cambridge and who could speak Oriental languages — especially given Connery couldn’t even lose his own accent. But that wasn’t quite the point — the purpose in the Bond films and other 60s works was to show that actors like McQueen, Connery, Michael Caine, Alain Delon and others who didn’t come from money, could convey class in a post-war milieu that showed old wealth was being replaced by new. The important thing was to convey with elan ease in a suit, in an expensive car and in swish house interiors.
    If Hepburn was so important a figure for women, and in this sense preceded the men, it was because she took what was often enough a theme of transformation in Hollywood and made it more than most about refined consumption. Stella Bruzzi compares Sabrina with Pretty Woman and notices a key difference: “whereas clothes are homogenised, making no significant distinction between couture and non-couture items [in Pretty Woman], the pieces of couture in Sabrina perform a different positional and symbolic function to those which are not.” (Undressing Cinema) But what is evident is the consistent importance in Hepburn’s films of clothes making the woman. She can dress down in Roman Holiday and become just another girl around Rome, as she hides her princess status, while in Sabrina, she is the chauffeured daughter who returns from Paris a glamorous grown-up, and the rest of the film plays on how she dresses. If numerous articles have been written about Sabrina and Hepburn's fascination with Givenchy, equally who can separate fashion and femininity in Funny Face and Breakfast at Tiffany’s? Pamela Hutchinson called the former “a film in love with fashion” (Guardian), while a dress from the latter sold at auction in 2006 for £467,200.
 If Dunaway never quite achieved the iconic style status of Hepburn, she was nevertheless in that tradition and a major figure in it. Lauren Cochrane talks about Dunaway’s clothes in Bonnie and Clyde and its influence on fashion: “from berets on the Dior catwalk to pencil skirts at Raf Simons’ Calvin Klein show, we take a look at the lasting sartorial impact of Faye Dunaway in Bonnie and Clyde.” (Guardian) Dunaway played a fashion model in The Puzzle of a Downfall Child and a fashion photographer in The Eyes of Laura Mars. Her clothes in the thirties-set Chinatown offer a perfect complement and contrast with those in Depression-era Bonnie and Clyde.  
     In The Thomas Crown Affair, what we have is stardom as consumption, and when thinking of cinema we should never forget that it is an industry as well as an art form, a consumer product in itself (with stars as commodities) that far more clearly than literature, sculpture, painting or even theatre, puts that conspicuous consumption up there on the screen.

© Tony McKibbin

Tony McKibbin

The Thomas Crown Affair

Let us talk about stardom, and more than a little about consumerism. 1968 was Steve McQueen’s annus mirabilis: Bullitt and The Thomas Crown Affair were released, and McQueen became the king of cool in two roles that had little in common, yet where the persona became cemented. In Bullitt, he plays a blue-collar cop and in Norman Jewison's The Thomas Crown Affair, a white-collar criminal who has money aplenty but likes the idea of a bank robbery to alleviate the boredom of making money without effort. Yet whether on the right side of the law or the wrong side, whether making a police wage or a substantial fortune, McQueen shows an anti-authoritarianism that has rarely done actors much harm, no matter Hollywood’s conformism. Hollywood is an industry, and the movie business is an entertainment before it is an art; and actors well know that what they are creating is a product. It might sell; it might not. “All of a sudden they become rich. And it usually is overnight, not in terms of a body of work. You can be in theatre for ten years and,” producer Martin Bregman says, “all of a sudden you are very visible.” (Reel Power) McQueen’s success wasn’t instant, but his superstar status was. The actor had been making films for more than a decade and had his first lead role in The Blob. The Magnificent Seven, The Great Escape and The Cincinnati Kid made him a star, but he still had to define his persona. The two films in 1968 did that.
      Faye Dunaway’s fame was much more immediate. She was eleven years younger than McQueen and appeared in three films in 1967. Two in smaller roles and then as the co-lead in Bonnie and Clyde. She was an instant success, without a body of relative, cinematic mediocrity behind her. This might say something about the industry’s gender bias, society’s expectations or the 1960s, but McQueen had a decade to establish himself, while if Dunaway had failed to achieve great fame by the time she was thirty-five, she would probably have been reduced to supporting roles. There were exceptions, but this seemed to prove the rule. Ellen Burstyn briefly became a big star in The Exorcist and Alice Doesn’t Live Here Anymore in her forties.
    What both Dunaway and McQueen display in The Thomas Crown Affair is mutual glamour, perhaps not quite the same thing as screen chemistry and in this instance more than a little reliant on the material accoutrements that accompany their own charms. Dunaway is first seen by McQueen atop a wine-coloured 1967 Ferrari 275 GTS, and “Theodora Van Runkle designed all of Dunaway's 29 costumes for the film.” Van Runkle and Dunaway worked previously on Bonnie and Clyde, and this was “a film that sparked a trend for 1930’s style fashion in the late 60’s.” (CoutureAllure) Here, Dunaway often wears mini-skirts, pencil thin-clothing and a variety of bold hats. McQueen was no less carefully coutured: “London tailoring mastermind Douglas ‘Dougie’ Hayward was behind much of the film’s wardrobe, making McQueen’s bespoke suits with his signature ‘60s flair.” Charlies Thomas says “…he was, after all, responsible for the tailoring in other films including 1966’s Alfie, Get Carter, The Italian Job and For Your Eyes Only. Many of the foremost actors of the 1960s made a point of working with Dougie…” (Thomas Mason)
    While the suit was an important item of clothing for classic Hollywood actors, in the fifties the Method usually required less formal attire. Whether it was the red bomber jacket, jeans and T-shirt James Dean wore in Rebel Without a Cause, the leather jacket and jeans Marlon Brando was wearing in The Wild One, or the lumber jacket in On the Waterfront, these items could pass for the clothing of the common man. When Cary Grant, James Stewart, Gary Cooper and other classic actors continued to wear suits throughout the fifties, they could almost seem old-fashioned. In the sixties, it was fashionable again, though in a subtly different way. Often, the actors gave the impression of wearing it with a rebellious panache or an upstart’s ambition. Working-class actors like McQueen, Sean Connery and Michael Caine suggested the suit was part of what they were entitled to in the materialist, stylish, consumerist 1960s. In The Thomas Crown Affair, McQueen doesn’t come across as a rich man wearing clothes expected of his class, but as someone defying expectation by classily wearing suits that might not seem naturally his to wear. This isn’t only in the suits but also in his leisure clothing — “for his gallivanting ride on the beach he chooses a long-sleeve orange utility shirt, cut in a boxy fit in what appears to be a lightweight cotton-linen. He pairs it with black shorts and his signature Persols for what is an effortlessly cool beach look.” (Thomas Mason)
        We shouldn’t underestimate how much conspicuous consumption is often associated with cinematic stardom, how much what we see is gratuitous, no matter how films hide this conspicuousness with plot and ostensible character motivation. The sociologist who first properly looked at the question behind excessive materialism, Thorstein Veblen, reckoned: “throughout the entire evolution of conspicuous expenditure, whether of goods or of services or human life, runs the obvious implication that in order to effectually mend the consumer’s good fame it must be an expenditure of superfluities. In order to be reputable it must be wasteful. No merit would accrue from the consumption of the bare necessaries of life.” (’The Theory of the Leisure Class’) While, as we have noticed, there are actors better known for their limited attire, rather than their extensive wardrobe, part of the appeal of cinema is watching attractive people wearing appealing items in narratives that can almost pass for an elaborate ruse, one that allows us to keep our eyes gazing upon these people moving through film space. Audrey Hepburn might often have seemed a winsome soul, an agreeable gamine, but costume designer Edith Head was vital to her initial appeal, and so too was Givenchy. “Head..was a costume designer in an era before couture took over the movies: in fact, her films with Hepburn were a key transitional point", Andrew Pulver says. "In Sabrina Hepburn wore Givenchy (uncredited) for her Paris scenes, but it was Head who took the Oscar. For Breakfast at Tiffany's, eight years later, Givenchy received full credit, with Head as 'costume supervisor'." (Guardian) Rachel Mosley notes that “at the heart, then, of Hepburn’s Cinderella narratives and star image, is a discourse of fashion and beauty which produces a gendered attractionist aesthetic around her on screen, and opens up a significant space for a competent gendered gaze in which the details of dress are privileged.” (‘Trousers and Tiaras: Audrey Hepburn, a Woman’s Star’)
 Clothes matter, but so do other items, especially for men, whose conspicuous consumption often comes in the various vehicles they drive. Few actors have aligned their stardom (and long before Tom Cruise) with moving through space quickly in a car or on a motorbike. Some of McQueen’s most iconic moments are in or on vehicles, and while he may have appeared in several westerns, horses aren’t quite the same as horsepower. To know the name of the horses he rode in Nevada Smith and Tom Horn is one thing, but to know the motorbike in The Great Escape is a Triumph TR6 Trophy might also include the desire to purchase it. And what about the green Mustang GT390s in Bullitt, an object so desirable that McQueen himself tried to buy it, though it always remained elusive. In The Thomas Crown Affair, the car functions more sedately than we might expect, as if its status rests chiefly on it as a sign of wealth over engine power. His main vehicle is a 1967 Rolls-Royce Silver Shadow Fixed Head Sedan. He picks up the cash after the initial bank robbery from a bin at a cemetery, but he is in no hurry to get there and in no hurry to leave, as though half the purpose of the scene is to show off the car. After all, the plan has been so well executed, and Thomas’s involvement so aloof, that nobody is likely at this stage to trace him to the deed. Pace here is chiefly for thrills: his yellow byplane and his red buggy. The Thomas Crown Affair plays a bit like a Bond film, but while Bond gets the adrenaline buzz playing with expensive toys belonging to the British government, Thomas owns them himself. It makes the conspicuous consumption more explicit as we watch a man with time on his hands and money in his account, wondering what to spend them on.  
        While we note that film stardom is often based on having things in the diegetic world that most cannot afford, and see by extension that the actor can afford everything in that diegetic world and a lot more besides (with McQueen owning up to 100 vehicles), this doesn’t mean the film wants to throw these items in our face. Most of the time, the materialism is aspirational or ‘narrativisable’, the latter a terrible neologism which nevertheless captures cinema’s ability to mask the most conspicuous of consumption. At the beginning of 1969’s The Italian Job, we see a man driving a red Lamborghini Maura around various tight corners in the Alps before entering a tunnel and meeting his end when he collides with a deliberately placed bulldozer that will then push the car over a ledge. While the car is hardly unimportant, it is contained by the story the film wishes to tell: this is the Italian friend of our English central character who will complete a heist the dead man was planning.
   A good example of the aspirational is there in Pretty Woman, with Julia Roberts walking into a shop dressed as her usual self, a modestly earning but immodestly dressed sex worker who in a series of shots looks at signs for Louis Vuitton, Gucci and Chanel before entering a shop where the assistants propose that everything is outside her price range and ask her to leave. She returns the next day, clothed in white and black Chanel and with handfuls of bags from other designer stores, flaunting her purchasing power. The materialism might seem as naked as Roberts is well-attired, but the film nevertheless flimsily clothes Roberts in the narrative of aspiration — a poor girl made good. A rich woman going into the store showing her purchases from elsewhere would have no purpose beyond acting mean, but Pretty Woman presents it as a victory for the working class and a perverse form of egalitarianism.
   In The Thomas Crown Affair, the narrativisation comes in the early heist and with Vickie Anderson (Dunaway) as the independent investigator hired by the insurance company to find out who did it. The aspiration is part of a sixties amalgam of story and stardom, of ego and class. If McQueen doesn’t seem convincing as a man who has made his fortune through years of working the financial markets, neither was Sean Connery any more so as an Etonian James Bond who graduated from Cambridge and who could speak Oriental languages — especially given Connery couldn’t even lose his own accent. But that wasn’t quite the point — the purpose in the Bond films and other 60s works was to show that actors like McQueen, Connery, Michael Caine, Alain Delon and others who didn’t come from money, could convey class in a post-war milieu that showed old wealth was being replaced by new. The important thing was to convey with elan ease in a suit, in an expensive car and in swish house interiors.
    If Hepburn was so important a figure for women, and in this sense preceded the men, it was because she took what was often enough a theme of transformation in Hollywood and made it more than most about refined consumption. Stella Bruzzi compares Sabrina with Pretty Woman and notices a key difference: “whereas clothes are homogenised, making no significant distinction between couture and non-couture items [in Pretty Woman], the pieces of couture in Sabrina perform a different positional and symbolic function to those which are not.” (Undressing Cinema) But what is evident is the consistent importance in Hepburn’s films of clothes making the woman. She can dress down in Roman Holiday and become just another girl around Rome, as she hides her princess status, while in Sabrina, she is the chauffeured daughter who returns from Paris a glamorous grown-up, and the rest of the film plays on how she dresses. If numerous articles have been written about Sabrina and Hepburn's fascination with Givenchy, equally who can separate fashion and femininity in Funny Face and Breakfast at Tiffany’s? Pamela Hutchinson called the former “a film in love with fashion” (Guardian), while a dress from the latter sold at auction in 2006 for £467,200.
 If Dunaway never quite achieved the iconic style status of Hepburn, she was nevertheless in that tradition and a major figure in it. Lauren Cochrane talks about Dunaway’s clothes in Bonnie and Clyde and its influence on fashion: “from berets on the Dior catwalk to pencil skirts at Raf Simons’ Calvin Klein show, we take a look at the lasting sartorial impact of Faye Dunaway in Bonnie and Clyde.” (Guardian) Dunaway played a fashion model in The Puzzle of a Downfall Child and a fashion photographer in The Eyes of Laura Mars. Her clothes in the thirties-set Chinatown offer a perfect complement and contrast with those in Depression-era Bonnie and Clyde.  
     In The Thomas Crown Affair, what we have is stardom as consumption, and when thinking of cinema we should never forget that it is an industry as well as an art form, a consumer product in itself (with stars as commodities) that far more clearly than literature, sculpture, painting or even theatre, puts that conspicuous consumption up there on the screen.

© Tony McKibbin