MARQUEE SPOTTING: CROWN AFFAIR ON DRAGNET

Marquee of THE THOMAS CROWN AFFAIR on DRAGNET 1970

What we call Pop Culture Contraband is the art of spotting either movie marquees or posters or any kind of contraband from one motion picture or television show shown within another vehicle, mostly in an accidental, natural way and making for a literal sign of the times within something that represents an era: a double whammy, so to speak...

Not McQueen

Or perhaps a sort of Cinematic Archeology, and here in the last season of the latter DRAGNET episodes, where a monotone narrating Jack Webb as Sgt. Joe Friday and his sidekick Frank Gannon, played by Harry Morgan, are thrust into the Drug Culture era, if you don't blink you'll see the name of an actor (split on both sides) who had been very famous since THE GREAT ESCAPE in 1963 but truly broke ground just a year earlier, 1968, in the cop action suspense flick BULLITT: a movie Friday and Gannon might have enjoyed on a weekend: And now to the case at hand, this particular marquee showcases McQueen's THE THOMAS CROWN AFFAIR, also starring, and alongside on the marquee, Faye Dunaway and buried is fellow TV-Noir cop Paul Burke from NAKED CITY, the AFFAIR plot centering on a millionaire thief whom our DRAGNET boys would probably love to bust, had he been real: Also, McQueen's name is shown above a cool hot rod, which were and still are synonymous to him.