The movie opens with a fine song called ‘Windmills of Your Mind’, echoing Jorge Luis Broges’s Garden of Forking Paths. The song has the following excellent line, approximately remembered as: ‘… when the leaves are turning color/ to that of her hair…’ And since the season currently is fall the muses will not be vindictive as I steal this line for a poem.

Another effective visual trick that is used at the beginning, and which recurs occasionally throughout, is a multi-framed screen, with each frame following a single character doing what he is supposed to do, in this movie planning and executing a bank robbery. One advantage that film has over the novel is this ability to, literarily, show multiple actions at the same time.

However in my opinion good thriller novels are better than good thriller movies – if only because they can come to aid on my nights of insomnia. I still vividly remember the edge of the bed excitement when I was up reading Fredrick Forsyth’s ‘The Day of The Jackal’ (will the assassin kill De Gaulle?) vs. the more mechanical movie of the same name. The reason for this gulf, I suppose, is that the novel can offer the reader the voracious pleasure of imagining himself to be, and perhaps even be, the cool assassin, the bank robber with hands of quick silver etc.

Movies, on the other hand, by setting the character in stone – for example Sean Connery as James Bond – impede, more strongly, such flights of fancy, for how many men have the natural athleticism and good looks – licenses to kill - of the various Bonds, or how many women have the drool appeal of the Bond molls?

Going back to Thomas Crown after that brief detour – the plot is simply that of a rich establishment playboy, planning and executing a flawless bank heist amounting to two million dollars. After the police fail to find any leads to the mastermind or the actual robbers, the insurance company brings in an investigator (guess the gender?) to solve the case. And what ensues, as the blurb claims, is a game of cat and mouse between the Master and the Margarita.

The most memorable scene in the movie is a game of chess, which simultaneously is also a game of seduction and distraction. It is in this scene does the investigator Vicki Anderson (played by Faye Dunaway) come close to proving to the viewer that apart from having babe appeal, she too has cerebral appeal. The master, Thomas Crown (played by Steve McQueen) is through out is an efficient and very believable blonde iceman.

After this the movie splutters and fails in convincing the viewer that as the adversaries continue their game (Tommy planning to carry out anther bank robbery and refusing to hand himself over to the cops, Vicki into charming Tommy to do her will) the end up falling in love. However since psychological finesse is not what a viewer requires of a thriller, the movie goes along and proves to be enjoyable.

Beginning reviews of movies I have watched