The two enemies of human happiness are pain and boredom.
– Arthur Schopenhauer
56 years ago, the writer of Bullitt, Alan Trustman, and the director of In the Heat of the Night, Norman Jewison, released their sexy crime thriller The Thomas Crown Affair into theaters. Pitting Steve McQueen (Bullitt; The Magnificent Seven) against Faye Dunaway (Chinatown; Bonnie and Clyde), audiences were invited to watch these two beautiful people in a battle of wits where one realizes too late that the game’s been won before the first move’s been made. Now, home release boutique Kino Lorber is re-issuing the 2018 4K restoration with all the previous special features to ensure that more have a chance to catch up with this thrilling moment with cinema history.
Bored millionaire Thomas Crown (McQueen) decides to organize a bank robbery to see if he can pull it off and get away with it. He plans it precisely, hires a select group of individuals, and executes it without a hitch, gathering the earnings and relishing the success. What he doesn’t seem to anticipate is the insistence of the bank’s insurers to get the funds back, going so far as to bring in a gifted insurance investigator whose intelligence rivals his own, Vicki Anderson (Dunaway). As the two go head-to-head, each fully aware of the other’s intent, it shifts from a game of cat-and-mouse, but can they make it work past conviction?
As mentioned, in 2018 a 50th anniversary 4K restoration was released and this edition from Kino Lorber seems to merely be a re-issue of the same release. All of the listed special features and the restored video are identical (on paper) from this new release to the prior one. As such, if you already picked up the 2018 4K restoration anniversary release, there’s no real reason for you to go any further.
The visual aspect of the restoration is quite remarkable. It’s not so easy to notice at first, but when Jack Weston’s Ernie enters the hotel room and has the spotlight put on him, one notices a great deal of detail (and not just due to the focused light on Weston). This continues for the rest of the film with the typical aura or heavy grain removed, enabling the lushness and opulence of Crown’s world to stand out. To be clear, it’s not that the colors are particularly enhanced in some way (this isn’t a UHD restoration, just a 1080p 4K one), the film’s just been cleaned and restored so as to enable the colors, the production design, and world in which the narrative takes place to shine. For a point of comparison, don’t take the above descriptor to suggest that the film is suddenly on par with the visual language utilized in the 1999 John McTiernan remake starring Pierce Brosnan (Remington Steele; Goldeneye) and Rene Russo (Tin Cup; Lethal Weapon 3) which leaned heavily on the blacks, golds, and oranges in the version that utilized the art world as the source of theft and not the financial one. Jewison’s original is grounded in natural tones and colors, reducing the sense of a heightened reality and instilling a visual tone that leans into the grounded thriller-esque aspects of the tale. Of anything, what gets the biggest bump in appreciation are the costumes by Theadora Van Runkle (The Godfather: Part II; Bullitt) which just appear the height of style at the time.
Oddly, despite the loveliness of the visual component, the audio is less enticing. It’s not that the dialogue is poorly restored or that there’s red-lining with the score, there’s nothing that horrid in the presentation, rather, and this is going to sound strange, the way the dialogue comes through the home theater system sometimes is too low to understand. It makes sense for Thomas and Vicki to be speaking low while in bed together — intimate setting, intimate physical proximity, intimate volume — and yet it was near impossible to understand what they were saying without jacking the volume of my 5.1 surround sound system up. This is just one of several moments where the disparity between dialogue volume and the rest of the film required manual adjustment in order to catch the clever back-and-forth of Trustman’s script.
Regarding the film itself, one can tell why it’s appreciated even all these years later. McQueen plays the brilliant playboy businessman with a charm and ease that creates a great deal of comedy in what should be stressful situations. This enables the audience to be charmed more easily by the character of Thomas rather than really consider his act of crime. In a manner of speaking, his theft doesn’t hurt any actual person, only the insurance company, so it’s not like he stole from someone in need, but likely a company he’s done his homework on regarding what he can and can’t do before causing actual harm. Though, and it may just be a throwaway line by Vicki, I think it’s far more possible that Thomas was staring out of his expensive office, saw the bank from his window, and began ruminating on the possibilities and what-ifs until it became an itch he couldn’t help but scratch in an effort to feel some kind of excitement having conquered all he’s sought to accomplish. Adding to the impressiveness is how Trustman’s script doesn’t look down on Vicki as being, as she describes herself, amoral or sexually promiscuous. Rather, it paints her as equal to Thomas in virtually every way, if not moreso, which that chess game certainly highlights. Full transparency: I saw the McTiernan version when it released and it’s only now that I’m seeing the original, and I much prefer how the former handles the relationship between the two central characters, as well as how it uses the “other woman” as more than just a means of testing or manipulating Vicki, not to mention the two thefts are both style and substance (it also made me a Nina Simone fan). That said, one can see where audiences would find themselves taken by the original crime caper and all its participants.
If you didn’t snag the 50th anniversary edition in 2018 and you’re a fan of the original Affair, then there’s little reason for you to hold off on the purchase now. This re-issue offers little to no surprises compared to before, so you’ll know exactly what you’re in for regarding the bonus materials, packaging, and restoration. Even though there are a few moments in which the audio is less than ideal, that’s less a result of the restoration itself and more of the original film, something which even modern films struggle to work out a good balance for. Unlike Thomas, who is quite the flight risk, this re-issue is not, so feel free to take your time deciding.
The Thomas Crown Affair Legacy Features:
- Audio Commentary by Director Norman Jewison
- Audio Commentary by Film Historians Lem Dobbs and Nick Redman
- Interview with Director Norman Jewison
- Interview with Title Designer Pablo Ferro
- Three’s A Company: 1967 on the Set Featurette with Cast & Crew
- Theatrical Trailer
- Optional English Subtitles
Available on Blu-ray and DVD February 6th, 2024.
For more information, head to the official Kino Lorber The Thomas Crown Affair webpage.
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Categories: Home Release, Home Video, Recommendation, Reviews
Wow, a re-release of a 6 year old blu ray with that was still in print with no new special features and no hint at an upcoming 4k. Great going Kino.