The opening scene of The Thomas Crown Affair begins with a man named Erwin (Jack Weston), enclosed within a small frame, walking down the hallway of a hotel. He nervously knocks on a door, but there is no answer. He knocks again, still no answer. Finally, he turns the doorknob and slowly enters a dark room. Having closed the door behind him, he suddenly finds bright spotlights shining in his face. Shielding his eyes from the light, he asks, “What’s going on here?”
There is a man behind a desk in the dark. His face cannot be seen, and his voice is disguised electronically. He tells Erwin that he has a job for him: “Work an hour, you do an errand, you drive a car.” Erwin is told that the job shouldn’t be dangerous, but if there is any shooting, he is on his own. Otherwise, he will get $50,000 for the job, paid out in monthly installments so there will be no quick spending. When Erwin asks how he will know that he will get paid, the answer is, “You don’t.”
Erwin agrees to the conditions. He is tossed an envelope full of cash and told to buy a Ford station wagon. When Erwin looks as though he is going to ask something, the man says, “No questions. What you don’t know can’t hurt you. You or me, Erwin, boy.”
In the next scene, we find out what we already really knew, that the man in the dark is the title character, played by Steve McQueen. We also find out that he is the head of a large, successful, financial company. He has his amusements—playing golf, flying a glider, driving a dune buggy, playing polo—but he suffers from ennui. The solution to that, apparently, it to mastermind a caper.
The caper turns out to be a bank robbery. We have seen a lot of movies featuring a bank robbery, some of them quite complicated and executed with precision, but in each case, the men all know each other and plan it together. This robbery is carried out by four men, in addition to Erwin, that don’t know each other and can recognize one another only by wearing sunglasses. Simply put, this is not believable. However, just before the robbery begins, one of the men, played by Yaphet Kotto, blesses himself, so I suppose that with God’s help, all things are possible.
Presumably, each of these four men went to that same hotel room. Erwin is a salesman, not a professional criminal. If we may be allowed to assume that the individual situations of the other four men were similar to that of Erwin, then none of these men were professional criminals either, each one just taking a few hours off from his regular job to rob a bank. This raises the question, what did Thomas Crown do, pick the names of these men out of a phonebook?
Alternatively, if they were criminals before the robbery, why did Crown select an amateur to drive the getaway car, especially someone like Erwin? He sells cosmetics, which calls his manhood into question, and he is frequently seen wiping the sweat off his face, not to mention the fact that Crown contemptuously referred to him as “Erwin, boy.”
Whatever the situations of the other four men, they were presumably offered the same deal as Erwin, that they would not get their share of the loot until later, and without any guarantee that they ever would, given that they would not know who the man in the dark was. Oh, sure!
And while that man in the dark was making these offers, the instructions could not have been as simple as telling them to buy a car. We have to imagine him handing each man a schematic of the bank, saying here is where you will be, and here is where the others will be, and then you will do this, and another man do that, and so forth and so on, all while the spotlight is shining in the eyes of the man being given these instructions.
This is the reason why it was only Erwin that we saw in that hotel room. We might believe that a character played by Jack Weston would be easily cowed by the setup and go along with it, considering that his role in the caper was simple enough, but seeing the other four men go through that would strain our credulity.
Finally, is it likely that Crown had to interview only four men besides Erwin? Would there not have been several men that declined to participate in the robbery, especially when looking at that schematic with drawings representing who does what when? Why, there might have been men parading in and out of that hotel room for weeks, not wanting any part of it, any one of whom might have called the police, letting them know what was going to happen.
On the day of the robbery, the four men drop the money they took out of the bank into Erwin’s station wagon. He drives the car to a cemetery where he deposits the money in a trashcan. After he drives away, Crown shows up in his Rolls-Royce. He gets out and puts on gloves. Then he puts a wreath of flowers on a grave while looking around to make sure he is alone. Then he gets the bags of money out of the trashcan, puts them in the trunk of his car, and drives off. I guess he put gloves on so he wouldn’t leave his fingerprints on the flowers.
Crown flies to Geneva and deposits some of the money in a Swiss bank, telling them there will be more deposits in the future. Meanwhile, the police are baffled. Enter Vicki Anderson (Faye Dunaway), insurance specialist. Her specialty is to pick out the guilty party by looking at some photographs and then have sex with him. Lucky for her, Thomas Crown does not look like Erwin. Lucky for us too.
Speaking of Erwin, he is a henpecked husband whose wife hates him. Vicki puts an ad in the newspaper offering a reward of $25,000 to be a fink and report anyone who was in Boston on a June 9th (the day of the robbery), drives a 1967 Ford station wagon, and is nervous, jumpy, or irritable. Erwin’s wife sees a chance to get her hands on a lot of money and get rid of her husband at the same time. So, she makes the call. Erwin is arrested and confesses to his part in the robbery, but he is unable to tell Vicki who hired him.
Nevertheless, Vicki is convinced that Crown is her man, and she lets him know that she will make things difficult for him financially. However, he has so much money that he says it doesn’t matter. In fact, he tells her he is going to pull off another caper, not for the money, but for reasons existential, saying it’s between him and the system. [Back in the late sixties and early seventies, “the system” was an oppressive social structure that threatened to overwhelm the individual, keeping him in his place. “There is it again, the system,” says Buford Pusser in Walking Tall (1973).]
The plan is for Vicki to meet him at the cemetery where the drop will be made again, and together they will leave for Switzerland. It will be a test of her love for him. Another bank is robbed, pretty much in the same way, although I should think that this time Crown would hire a bachelor to drive the getaway car. In any event, when Crown’s Rolls-Royce shows up at the cemetery, Vicki is waiting for him with the police. Apparently, her love for him was not true.
However, there is only a hired driver behind the wheel. He hands Vicki a telegram, saying, “Left early. Please come with the money, or you keep the car.”
The Thomas Crown Affair was the first movie in which someone robbed a bank and got away with it. However, he had to give up the woman to do so, for she was still part of the system. It would not be until The Getaway (1972) that a heterosexual couple would rob a bank, get away with it, and live happily ever after.
