Why The Thomas Crown Affair Deserves a Second Look
Norman Jewison's 1968 original and John McTiernan's 1999 remake are both worth revisiting, but it is the original that has aged into something remarkable: a style document disguised as a heist film, a portrait of 1960s Boston wealth at its most seductive and its most hollow.
Steve McQueen's Thomas Crown is a millionaire industrialist who robs a bank not for the money but for the intellectual stimulation. He is bored by everything that bored rich men are bored by, and crime is the only game that engages his full attention. McQueen plays this with the laconic cool that defined his career, making ennui look like the most attractive quality a man could possess.
Faye Dunaway's Vicki Anderson, the insurance investigator sent to catch Crown, is his intellectual equal and his sartorial match. Their chess game, famously intercut with increasingly intimate close-ups, is one of the most overtly sensual non-love scenes in cinema history. Jewison understood that attraction is most powerful when it is expressed through competition.
The wardrobe, supervised by costume designers Ron Postal and Alan Levine, established a visual vocabulary for wealthy American masculinity that endures. McQueen's three-piece suits, roll-neck sweaters beneath sport coats, and sand-buggy driving attire defined a new category: the casually luxurious man who dresses impeccably because he can afford to and because he understands that clothing is another form of strategy.
Michel Legrand's score, featuring the Oscar-winning Windmills of Your Mind performed by Noel Harrison, gives the film a dreamlike quality that elevates it above its genre. The split-screen editing technique, innovative for 1968, creates a visual rhythm that echoes the multi-layered nature of Crown's schemes and his relationship with Anderson.
The 1999 remake with Pierce Brosnan and Rene Russo updates the formula effectively. Brosnan's Crown steals art instead of money, which is more plausible for a modern billionaire's thrill-seeking. But the remake lacks the original's formal daring and its willingness to let style carry sequences that a more conventional film would fill with dialogue. Both versions are available through major streaming platforms, and https://www.criterion.com provides exceptional context for Jewison's broader filmography.
Return to the 1968 Thomas Crown Affair for its confidence. It is a film that trusts its audience to appreciate a perfectly cut suit, a well-played chess move, and the tension between two people who are simultaneously falling in love and trying to destroy each other. That trust has not aged a day.
