***SPOILERS***
The Thomas Crown Affair is a smooth, uber-Sixties movie, now remade by Pierce Brosnan's production company, Irish DreamTime. Although the remake is a slick, glossy film, it's not a patch on this supercool original.
Steve McQueen plays Thomas Crown, a bored Boston millionaire specializing in currency arbitrage. He has everything money can buy, and a hedonistic lifestyle which seems to give him very little pleasure. Feeling trapped and claustrophobic in his successful, boxed-in life, he decides to buck the "system" he cries out against and organize a daylight bank robbery. He sets up the heist, anonymously contacting a motley bunch of criminals who have never met before and thus cannot identify him or each other. It comes off, and he collects a cool $2.7 million, which goes straight into a numbered account in Geneva.
The police, headed up by detective Eddy Malone, are baffled. Enter Vicky Anderson, investigator for the insurance company forced to pay out to the bank. We soon realize that she and Crown are two of a kind: she is just as smart, devious, and amoral as he is. She seizes on Crown as the chief suspect by a combination of deduction and intuition, and, since her mind runs along similar lines to his, quickly figures out the details of how the heist was worked. Contriving to come across Crown at an art auction, she tells him straight out she knows he did it and she will be coming after him. Crown, of course, is instantly hooked. Although we see him with a girlfriend early in the film, his is a fundamentally lonely life. There is no one out there who thinks like him, who can understand him, and for a man like Crown a good mind is infinitely more sexy than a good figure. Vicky, of course, has both, and this is where a lot of the charm of her character comes in. She has a sort of masculine way of thinking, combined with a very feminine flirtiness and glamour, making for an overall charmingly contradictory whole. Indeed, Vicky is full of contradictions: an early example of modern woman, she expects to be treated as equal by a man and yet to get away with working from her "feminine intuition"; she asserts her sexual independence by sleeping with Crown to get close to him and then gets upset when Malone labels her a slut. It is the contradiction between her kinship with the amoral, restless Crown and her fidelity to her law-enforcing job that will eventually pull her apart and provide the heart of the film's fascination. Vicky is the real victim in this film, presented with a no-win situation almost from the start.
Each of them loves sparring with the other: these are two people turned on by mind games, and they make great opponents. Gradually their relationship gets more and more tangled as they fall for each other, and their growing chemistry culminates in a chess game at Crown's apartment, a scene that lasts almost seven minutes with only three lines of dialogue. In the 1960s it was probably very erotic: I have to say it made me laugh, watching Vicky lick her finger and then stroke one of the chess-pieces, a tall, rounded bishop. I've seen too many parodies of this one to take it seriously. But at the time it was probably very sexy. Temperature raised to boiling point, he ends the game by kissing her passionately, in one of the longest screen kisses in Hollywood history, over 70 seconds.
Her relationship with Crown doesn't affect her devotion to her job, and she continues to plot his downfall with Malone. Tracking down the wheelman for the robbery (and getting him to confess by the ruthless expedient of kidnapping his child, which disgusts the straight-up cop), she springs him on Crown to observe his reaction. Of course, our hero is too icy-cool to show any response, and since the wheelman never saw Crown, he cannot give him away, inadvertently or otherwise. However, Vicky is making Crown's life difficult, all his affairs coming under Revenue scrutiny, and eventually he tells her that the investigation is coming too close and he is going to disappear, doing another robbery first to prove to himself that he can, that he is not defeated and browbeaten by the system he resents. He tells her where and when the pick-up will be, and leaves it up to her whether to betray him or not.
I wo'n't give away the ending. The director, Norman Jewison (fresh from his success with In The Heat of the Night) was very much influenced in his conclusion by French New Wave cinema, and it shows - the ending is bittersweet and wholly right for the movie and the characters. Direction throughout the movie is good, and there is an interesting use of split-screen photography. In some shots it is redundant - several little boxes all showing the same picture, woo-hoo - but elsewhere it is excellent. During the original robbery, for example, it is used very successfully to show the different men in the heist playing their separate parts in the operation, cramming a lot of information onto the screen without being distracting. Towards the end, when Crown is telling Vicky his plans for the second robbery, one box stays focussed on their faces while another two split off and show the robbery beginning. Another nice shot comes when the thieves throw a smoking flare down the corridor as they go, and the camera zooms down the hallway, following the flare as it rolls and bounces away.
The film, despite its ostensible caper nature, is really about the relationship between our two dubious heroes, so the film rests on the actors. And they rise to the challenge superbly. Steve McQueen was very much cast against type as the urbane, polished Thomas Crown, and he almost pulls it off. That is to say, he is terrific in true McQueen style - cool, clever, laconic - but not really believable as the product of Dartmouth and Harvard, WASP extraordinaire. He has something of the hustler to him, and it would have suited him better if the character had been self-made instead of coming from a wealthy family. But that's a minor cavil. He is great as the unshakeable Crown, and manages to let you see how trapped the character feels by the rigidity of the society he lives in. There is a scene where he is betting on golf shots with his lawyer, £1000 a shot, and the lawyer marvels at what they are doing. McQueen looks quizzically at him and says "what else would we do on a Sunday?". He injects just the right amount of bitterness into his light tone, enough to reveal his frustrations to us the audience, who know how he feels, but not enough for the lawyer to notice a ripple in his outward calm.
Faye Dunaway is also just right for her part. She manages to combine vulnerability with strength and her amorality with charm, so we don't feel alienated from the character. And the chemistry between her and McQueen is very strong, so that by the time he tempts her to betray him we are totally involved with these characters - we realize exactly how much it would cost her to remain true to her job, and what it would mean to both of them to have their chance for a real relationship snatched away. We really want things to work out for them, and this is all down to the skill of the actors.
Paul Burke is stodgy but good as the decent cop horrified at how far Vicky is prepared to go to get her man, and the other supporting roles, such as that of the wheelman, are ably filled.
Overall, this is a terrific film: cool, smart, sophisticated, and refreshingly grown-up. Why they made a remake I ca'n't imagine - I guess Hollywood has never heard of the aphorism "if it ain't broke, don't fix it."
(c) Jennifer Mellerick 1999