Prompted by Faye which had some promising grabs from this movie. I'm not a fan of Steve McQueen so it was entirely up to Dunaway to make it worthwhile. This was her second feature after Bonnie and Clyde. Directed by Norman Jewison. Won an Oscar for the original song The Windmills of Your Mind.
The scenario has Trump-esque McQueen organise the robbery of a bank in Boston, mostly for the lolz. That part reminded me of Reservoir Dogs with its mildly baroque setup and partial unwinding. The bank gets a payout from their insurers who then send Dunaway to assist the police (Paul Burke) in recovering the funds for a 10% fee which I calculate to be about $260k. She maintains her record of "always getting her man" — honeypots are her speciality, obviously — but McQueen eventually comes out on top. Tears all round.
This is nonsense of many levels. If she was anywhere as smart and immoral as she claimed she'd have married McQueen (we know he's the marrying kind as he just got divorced) and taken him to the cleaners for some significant chunk of his $4M when the lust ran out. Her tenuous inferences are all ridiculously correct. The suggestiveness is lame.
And so we're left with the fashion and the photography. Maybe it works as a time capsule of the Boston of the day. Dunaway is a committed clothes horse with a new outfit in every scene which often makes no sense as it destroys continuity. (Consider one of her afternoon/evening dates with McQueen.) But perhaps, in combination with the disjointed editing, we're supposed to notice that time has slid on by. Overall the movie makes the case for liquidating these idle rich who engage only in antisocial trivialities. In that way it speaks loudly to our present moment.
Roger Ebert: two-and-a-half stars. Renata Adler at the New York Times. Yes, McQueen's castling ruined the entire picture. Dunaway's inspector's monomania may mirror Dunaway's.
