Twelve famous features are to be shown at the Film Society of Lincoln Center “Yesterday’s Loner: Steve McQueen” tribute, which includes appearances by directors, producers, and actors who worked with the 1960s-‘70s superstar, and family members. Among the notables, widely respected and wildly inconsistent Norman Jewison will accompany the screening of 1968’s The Thomas Crown Affair, which the Canadian directed and produced from an Alan R. Trustman treatment redone in 1999.

Michel Legrand’s Oscarized “The Windmills of Your Mind” theme has nothing to do with anything, and the non-committal title and aka’s, Thomas Crown and Company and The Crown Caper, betray how little the hundred-two minutes suggests, imagines, or tries to do.

Surface gloss is what you get in this caper-romance, pale beside To Catch a Thief, whose beautiful-star power and life-of-the-super-wealthy backdrops it copies, in great part because its actors lack the elegant wit and sparkle of Hitchcock’s. An obvious if painless watch, it is on a second-tier pre-gimmicky Bond level, complete to golf bets, polo, art auctions, gliders, dream cars, brandy sniffers in hushed luxury, and a bit of breezy globetrotting.

This “best studio print available” is not all that sharp and an annoying jazz-inclined score doesn’t help, but forty years ago sexy McQueen and Faye Dunaway were near the top of their game; not as remarkable actors but as bankable presences on the screen—and off, as early celebrity-watch fodder for rocky love lifes. No matter that there is no probing, their characters shrugging that that’s how I am, and little of convincing chemistry. The closest to passion is in their celebrated but overdone chess match, whereas chaste seconds in bed, toweled in a sauna or on beach rides lifted from A Man and a Woman, the two need only look coiffured, immaculate, unsweaty and tailored (easier for leggy her than roughhouse him).

As with other capers that just can’t turn out tragic, there is no law-outlaw suspense. And any does-she-or-doesn’t-she? cannot apply to falling for him, which she does early, set up by a photograph which she fingers before the two ever cross eyebeams. The question is, will she or will she not join or turn him in, whether their openly acknowledged sparring from word one will end in a court of justice or in poetic justice.

Thirty-six, divorced without child custody, cool millionaire Crown (McQueen) lives high but tastefully on property and other investments. Clearly “it’s not about the money,” and an afterthought assertion that “it’s me and the system, the system” rings hollow after an attempt to bargain with police detective Eddy Malone (Paul Burke). A late exact repeat performance may be a test of himself or of his lady love, though he acts as much as anything from pre-early retirement boredom, to see if he can do it to the Boston Mercantile Bank visible from his upper-floor office.

Aside from Long Island nebbish getaway driver Erwin (Jack Weston), the four gunman are interchangeable, having each met Crown anonymously only once and working for a cash advance and promise of more. Haskell Wexler’s multi-split-screen imagery indicates these hirelings’ precautionary unfamiliarity with one another but grows eye-wearisome with repetition.

With a sole gratuitous harmless shooting, two million in unmarked low-domination bills is whisked away, carried by Crown himself to a Geneva bank account. Since “Boston’s finest, we’re dummies,” the insurance company calls in crack ten-percent investigator Vicki Anderson (Dunaway).

She glories in unusual, intuitive, not necessarily moral methods, and the plot glosses over her cruel and illegal child-kidnap extortion of information, one step ahead of plodding, dubious then begrudging then half-in-love Malone. Nevertheless, under her stylish broad-brimmed pastel hats there is not a great deal of activity, and among numerous implausibilities is her investigator’s ignorance of the financial term arbitrage.

Placing her Vogue self in the millionaire quarry’s path, she makes no bones about her certainty regarding the theft, but their instantaneous mutual attraction is supposedly cat-and-mouse intellectual as well as physical. She coy, he boyish, both in this beautiful couple would retain professional detachment, which of course is not in the cards. An end-ploy allows both to win and, presumably, audiences to enjoy civilized high-roller hijinks. 

(Released by United Artists and rated "R" by MPAA.)