Some songs accompany a great movie scene. Others take us inside a character’s mind.
“The Windmills of Your Mind” somehow does both.
Written for the 1968 romantic heist film The Thomas Crown Affair, starring Steve McQueen and Faye Dunaway, the hypnotic song was composed by French composer Michel Legrand, with English lyrics by husband-and-wife songwriting team Alan and Marilyn Bergman. English actor and singer Noel Harrison supplied the understated vocal that became forever associated with the film.
Director Norman Jewison originally used the Beatles’ “Strawberry Fields Forever” as temporary music for a sequence in which McQueen’s wealthy, thrill-seeking Thomas Crown flies a glider. But the movie needed an original song, and Legrand and the Bergmans created something that did far more than fill the space. It shaped the film.
“They screened it for me with Hal Ashby the editor and the movie was about five hours,” a 77-year-old Legrand later told Today of his experience. “And Norman and Hal said to me: ‘Michel, we don’t know how to make the edits, we don’t know where to start.’ “I said to them: ‘If you don’t know how to edit the film, why don’t we let the music decide?'”
Legrand told Jewison and Ashby to take a six-week vacation while he wrote an hour and a half of music based on what he had seen in the rough cut.
“The film had given me certain impressions that I tried to convey in the music,” the composer later said in an interview for Cinescores. “Instead of small timings adapted to the action, I wrote ‘lengths’ that could become the backbone of the story.”
Jewison, Legrand and editor Hal Ashby then shaped parts of the film around the music.
Adding to the cinematic quality of the music were Alan and Marilyn Bergman’s lyrics. Jewison had specifically asked the Bergmans for a song that would convey Thomas Crown’s anxiety during the glider sequence.
“Because anxiety is circular, the flying of the glider in that sequence is circular–all circular images–which resulted in a circular kind of song,” Alan Bergman explained in a 1992 Los Angeles Times interview.
In the end it all worked brilliantly.
“The Windmills of Your Mind” moves in circles. Legrand’s melody continually seems to turn back upon itself while the Bergmans’ stream of images tumbles forward, one thought leading to another. The effect is almost dizzying, perfectly reflecting the restless mind of Thomas Crown as he soars through the sky in his glider.
Harrison’s restrained performance makes it even more effective. Rather than overpowering the images, his voice seems to float alongside them, leaving Legrand’s swirling melody and the rapid succession of the Bergmans’ words to create the tension. The song doesn’t simply tell viewers what Crown is thinking. It feels like thought itself.
“Like a carousel that’s turning, running rings around the moon
Like a clock whose hands are sweeping past the minutes of its face
And the world is like an apple whirling silently in space
Like the circles that you find in the windmills of your mind”
“The Windmills of Your Mind” became the soundtrack’s crowning achievement. The song won the 1969 Academy Award for Best Original Song, while Harrison’s recording went on to become a major hit in Britain, reaching No. 8 and remaining on the U.K. chart for 14 weeks.
And it didn’t stop there.
Dusty Springfield recorded an especially celebrated version for her landmark 1969 album Dusty in Memphis, and artists ranging from Petula Clark and Johnny Mathis to José Feliciano and Barbra Streisand have taken on the song over the decades. Sting brought it full circle in 1999 when he recorded “The Windmills of Your Mind” for the remake of The Thomas Crown Affair, starring Pierce Brosnan and Rene Russo.
Its place in movie history has endured as well. In 2004, the American Film Institute ranked “The Windmills of Your Mind” No. 57 on its list of the 100 greatest songs in American movies, placing it alongside some of the most enduring marriages of music and film ever created.
There is a reason the song has traveled so far beyond that glider soaring over New England in 1968. “The Windmills of Your Mind” isn’t really about flying, or even about a bank robbery. It captures something far more familiar: the strange, circular way the human mind races through memories, questions, fears and desires, sometimes landing us right back where we started.
More than half a century later, those windmills are still turning.
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