The Thomas Crown Affair

USA 1999

Reviewed by Kim Newman

Synopsis

Our synopses give away the plot in full, including surprise twists.

New York. Billionaire Thomas Crown orchestrates an assault on a museum, with a team of Romanian criminals botching an attempt on an entire roomful of impressionists as a feint so he can personally snatch a painting by Monet worth $100 million. Detective Michael McCann is teamed with insurance investigator Catherine Banning, who soon pegs Crown as the thief. Crown loans a Pisarro from his own collection to replace the stolen painting. Catherine lets Crown know she's on to him, but still joins him for a date. Catherine copies Crown's keys and later invades his home to steal back the Monet, only to find a forgery.

Crown and Catherine become lovers and take a trip to his tropical-island retreat, but neither is able to get over a suspicion that the other is interested only in deception: Crown to get away with his crime, Catherine to catch him for her reward money. Back in New York, Catherine and McCann concentrate on tracking the forger, having realised the copy must have been made from the original. Crown is preparing to liquidate his holdings and run, and asks Catherine to come with him. Suspecting him of secretly seeing a girl named Anna, Catherine refuses, and Crown offers to prove himself by putting the Monet back. McCann reveals Anna is not Crown's mistress but his forger, and Catherine unhappily goes along with a police scheme to trap Crown at the museum. Crown's Pisarro is actually the Monet, with a watercolour fake over it, and his return to the museum is designed to set off the sprinkler system and reveal the truth. The couple are reunited in the first-class cabin of a plane to Europe.

Review

Until the 60s, Hollywood remakes were always excused as upgrades: a given property hadn't yet been done as a talkie, in Technicolor, in 3-D or with uncensored sex and violence. However, the original of The Thomas Crown Affair was made (by Norman Jewison, with Steve McQueen and Faye Dunaway) in 1968 and would seem, like the recently remade Point Blank, more suitable for a rerelease than a remake. Since the original screenplay by Alan R. Trustman was always a trifle, Jewison's movie is remembered mainly for cinematographer Haskell Wexler's co-opting of French deuxième vague flash into mainstream cinema. It also caught something of the moment with its blankly beautiful but neurotic leads, its modish deployment of split screen, soft focus and a dozen other bits of trickery long thought old hat even in hairspray commercials, and the catchily meaningless easy listening of Noel Harrison's one big hit, 'The Windmills of Your Mind'.

John McTiernan's version replaces the style of the original, which invested every scene with bogus sophistication through cinematic techniques, with simply photographed but heavily price-tagged things. In a tiny but symptomatic snippet, a party of schoolchildren stand at the soon-to-be-stolen Monet, bored by their teacher's drone about its importance in art history. Suddenly they're excited when she tells them how much it's worth.

The whole film is a lot like that. McTiernan stands admiringly before a series of luxury items: the museum's collection of old masters, Rene Russo's amazing wardrobe (many shots start at her smart shoes and work their way up to her fetchingly distressed hairstyle), Crown's Martinique lair and his Manhattan house, jewels by BVLGARI, archetypal supermodel Esther Cañadas (so sexlessly beautiful that she gets laughs), hobby objects like a yacht ("a $100,000 yacht," we're told) and a glider, and a queue-free first-class airport check-in where the girl at the desk is sympathetic to an obviously breaking heart. All this high life gets so thick, the script has to tell us both Crown and Catherine come from poor families to prevent us from hating them.

In lieu of depth, we have Brosnan - whose best work to date has been in self-mocking mode in Mars Attacks! - pouring out his shallow heart to his psychiatrist, played by original star Dunaway. Meanwhile Russo manages a kind of haggard loveliness all too rare in a screen era when only teenagers are allowed to be glamorous. It's hard, noting that the handsome, wealthy, unmarried Crown (Brosnan, born 1951, is playing a 42-year-old) loves shopping for clothes and lives with a Chinese boy assistant, not to suspect that the real reason Catherine shouldn't get together with him is that he's a barely-closeted gay (he even offers to cook).

The plot performs an elaborate shuffle around its crime, with Crown pulling off the heist only to put his booty back immediately, allowing McCann indulgently to let him get away with it since no real people have been hurt. (Denis Leary has a funny speech about the real criminals he has put away that week.) This conveniently overlooks the fact that Crown's scheme depends on sacrificing a bunch of Romanian pawns (mostly ugly baldie foreigners, so who cares?) who are left rotting in jail - ratted out by their own boss, who picks them out of a line-up - while Crown and Catherine jet off to a luxurious exile. In 1968, it was an exhilarating surprise that a film like The Thomas Crown Affair could end with a good-looking, non-violent criminal getting away with the loot; in 1999, such finishes are so accepted that it would be refreshing to see one of those ironic last-minute contrivances that undid the perfect plans in The Killing (1956) or The Lavender Hill Mob (1951), and close with the well-groomed cracksman going up the river for a long stretch.

Credits

Producers
Pierce Brosnan
Beau St. Clair
Screenplay
Leslie Dixon
Kurt Wimmer
Story
Alan R. Trustman
Director of Photography
Tom Priestley
Editor
John Wright
Production Designer
Bruno Rubeo
Music
Bill Conti
©Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer Pictures Inc.
Production Companies
Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer Pictures presents an Irish DreamTime production
Executive Producer
Michael Tadross
Co-producer
Roger Paradiso
Associate Producer
Bruce G. Moriarty
Production Associate
Cynthia Palormo
Production Supervisor
2nd Unit:
Eddy Collyns
Production Co-ordinator
Terry Ellen Ladin
Production Services in Martinique
Les Films du Dorlis
Unit Production Managers
Roger Paradiso
Michael Tadross
Location Manager
Charles Zalben
Location Co-ordinator
2nd Unit:
Jeffrey Stolow
2nd Unit Director
John Sullivan
Aerial Unit Director
Mischa Hausserman
Assistant Directors
Bruce G. Moriarty
Stephen Davis
Michael Pitt
Peter Soldo
2nd Unit:
Jonathan Watson
Jamie Miller
Script Supervisor
Cornelia 'Nini' Rogan
Casting
Pat McCorkle
ADR Voice:
Barbara Harris
2nd Unit Director of Photography
John Sullivan
Camera Operators
Phil Oetiker
2nd Unit:
John Sosenko
Spacecam Operator
2nd Unit:
Ronald C. Goodman
Visual Effects
John Sullivan
Pixel Magic
Digital Effects Supervisor:
Ray McIntyre Jr
Executive Producer:
Ray Scalice
Digital Compositing:
Jim Gorman
Tyler Foell
CG Modelling:
Juan Vargas
Scanning/Recording:
Victor Dimichina
Production Supervisor:
Reid Paul
Additional Visual Effects
POP Film
Special Effects
Co-ordinator:
Conrad F. Brink
Foreman:
Jeff Brink
Art Directors
Dennis Bradford
2nd Unit:
Teresa Carriker-Thayer
Set Decorator
Leslie Rollins
Set Dressers
Joseph 'Joby' DeLuca
Wayne Brackett
Damian J. Costa
Dennis Freeborn
Eric Lewin
Richard Nelson
Illustrator
Jay Durrwachter
Costume Designer
Kate Harrington
Wardrobe Supervisors
Michael Adkins
Hartsell Taylor
Key Make-up
Steven Lawrence
Key Hair Stylist
Romaine Greene
Main Title Design
yU+co.
Garson Yu
Main Title Digital Compositing
Digiscope
Opticals
Pacific Title/Mirage
Main/End Title Opticals
Howard Anderson Co
Orchestrations
Jack Eskew
Orchestra Manager
Nathan Kaproff
Electronic Music Production
Ashley Irwin
Supervising Music Editor
Chris McGeary
Music Scoring Mixer
Dan Wallin
Music Consultant
Randall Poster
Soundtrack
"Sinnerman" adapted/performed by Nina Simone; "The Complicated Man", "UFO Get-Go", "Back Porch" by/performed by Jamshied Sharifi; "Tango Ballad" from "The Threepenny Opera ? Original Broadway Cast" by Kurt Weill, Bertolt Brecht, music conducted by Samuel Matlowsky; "The Windmills of Your Mind" by Michel Legrand, Marilyn Bergman, Alan Bergman, arranged by Rob Middleton, performed by Chico O'Farrill and His Orchestra; "Cumenco" by Raf S. Astor, Eddie Bobe, performed by the Cumenco All-Stars; "Everything Is Never Quite Enough" by Wasis Diop, Xavier Derouin, Beth Hirsch, performed by Wasis Diop; "Caban la ka Kratchie" by/performed by Georges Fordant; "T'oublies tout" by Jean-Marc Monnerville, Remy Bellenchombre, performed by Kali; "The Windmills of Your Mind" by Michel Legrand, Marilyn Bergman, Alan Bergman, performed by Sting
Choreography
John Carrafa
Production Sound Recorder
Tom Nelson
Re-recording Mixers
Michael Minkler
Frank A. Montaño
Recordists
Matthew R. Colleran
Sean G. England
Supervising Sound Editor
George Watters II
Sound Editors
F. Hudson Miller
R.J. Palmer
Suhail Kafity
Gary Wright
Supervising Dialogue Editor
Teri E. Dorman
Dialogue Editors
David Arnold
Karen Spangenberg
ADR
Recordist:
Rick Canelli
Mixer:
Thomas J. O'Connell
Supervising Editor:
Juno J. Ellis
Editors:
Denise Horta
Stephen Janisz
Foley
Artists:
Dan O'Connell
John Cucci
Recordist:
Linda Lew
Mixer:
James Ashwill
Supervising Editor:
Victoria Martin
Editors:
Matthew Harrison
James Likowski
Technical Consultant
Eva Norvind
Stunt Co-ordinator
Frank Ferrara
Marine Co-ordinator
2nd Unit:
Lance Julian
Catamaran Co-ordinator
2nd Unit:
Roy Seaman
Picture Boats
2nd Unit:
Ralph Lucci
Pilots
Al Cerullo
Cliff Fleming
Thomas Knauff
Heinz G. Weissenbuehler
Cast
Pierce Brosnan
Thomas Crown
Rene Russo
Catherine Banning
Denis Leary
Detective Michael McCann
Ben Gazzara
Andrew Wallace
Frankie Faison
Detective Paretti
Fritz Weaver
John Reynolds
Charles Keating
Golchan
Mark Margolis
Knutzhorn
Faye Dunaway
psychiatrist
Michael Lombard
Proctor Bobby McKinley
Bill Ambrozy
Michael S. Bahr
Robert Novak
Joe Lamb
proctors
James Saito
Paul Cheng
Esther Cañadas
Anna Knutzhorn
Mischa Hausserman
Crown's driver
Daniel Oreskes
Petru
Dominic Chianese Jr
Dimetri
Ritchie Coster
Janos
Gregg Bello
Iggy
John P. McCann
senior detective
Gino Lucci
freight truck driver
George Christy
senior museum guard
Mike Danner
forklift operator
James J. Archer
J.J., the security guard
John Elsen
New York City cop
Robert Spillane
Crown security officer
Daniel Jamal Gibson
Sam
Cynthia Darlow
Crown's secretary
Sherry Koftan
Jane Denoble
Gene Bozzi
Ryan Hecht
Paul Simon
Crown employees
Tom Tammi
businessman
Mark Zeisler
Mark Zimmerman
bulldogs
Dan Southern
James Yaegashi
Crown executives
Ira Wheeler
old man
David Adkins
son
John A. MacKay
company lawyer
Melissa Maxwell
teacher
Colleen Hamm
schoolgirl
Timothy Wheeler
museum security tech
John Thrall Bush
Dominic Marcus
Robert Stephenson
David Toney
Phillip Douglas
museum security guards
Jeffrey Dreisbach
junior proctor
R.J. Remo
Caleb Archer
smoking kids
Dennis Creaghan
Lenox
Randy Phillips
Gloria Barnes
Mimi Weddell
Pat Friedlander
Gary L. Catus
National Arts Club guests
Jeremy Nagel
Crown's caddie
John C. Havens
museum operating tech
Annie Rose Murray
woman spectator
Bill Tatum
gentleman yachtsman
Teddy Coluca
Michael Charles
detectives in restaurant
Orlando Carafa
Cipriani waiter
Ben Epps
male associate
Kim D. Cannon
Douglas Kahelemauna Nam
cleaning men
Richard Russell Ramos
art inspector
John Seidman
lab technician
Robert Ian MacKenzie
jeweller
Yusef Bulos
2nd jeweller
Ray Virta
detective - museum
Thomas Michael Sullivan
museum special police
J. Paul Boehmer
museum detective
Tony Cucci
watching cop
Paul Geoffrey
another cop
R.F. Rodgers
uniform cop
Thomas Richard Bloom
Crown impostor
Kim Craven
ticket agent
Marion McCorry
stewardess
Sean Haberle
ramp manager
Mikel Sarah Lambert
wealthy woman
Angelo Fraboni
Melanie Lapatin
Jodi Melnick
Tony Meredith
Michael Terrace
featured dancers
Chico O'Farrill's Afro-Cuban Orchestra
band
Certificate
tbc
Distributor
United International Pictures (UK) Ltd
tbc feet
tbc minutes
Digital DTS sound/Dolby/SDDS
In Colour
Prints by
DeLuxe
Last Updated: 20 Dec 2011