The Thomas Crown Affair movie storyline. A private-eye looking man arrives to a deserted hotel corridor. He softly knocks on the door of a room, but waits with the jitterbug in his stomach when one of the cleaning ladies appears, and he won’t do anything else until she has gone away to her duties. When he finally enters the room, a strong light hits his face, so he can’t look who he’s talking to. The man tells him to give a piece of information some time down the line in exchange of 50,000 dollars due in small installments. The man throws him a pocket full of money in order to buy a new car, which he can’t use until he’s told so. It’s a specific kind of car, with wood and red-coloured.
Thomas Crown (Steve McQueen) is a banker who deals with bonus portfolios. He’s successful. However, under the name of Charlie, he phones to the public phone booths at a train station, checking that all his men (Richard Bull and Yaphet Kotto) are on their places. Suddenly, he decides it’s time to move on. A black man kidnaps a lift full of people, including the bellboy (Charles Lampkin and Paul Verdier).
An executive family including the talkative executive woman (Patty Regan) is waiting for the lift. A man who says that his name is Michael Holland points his gun to the booth guard (James Rawley). More people appear are they are told to step into the lift and stay there. One of the criminals shoots one of the people, a man who has started to get nervous because of the situation. Another accomplicce is told to dress as a policeman and create a traffic jam outside the bank. The objective consists on several money bags which are being transported from the hotel via the lift to somewhere else at a fixed time.
The detective-looking man takes the car to a cemetery, where he has to leave a message – in a particular rubbish bin. He’s sweating like a pig, and taking the sweat off with a huge white handkerchief. Right after the detective-looking man leaves, Thomas Crown appears in another car, a black Rolls Royce. He puts on some gloves, takes a funeral garland from the car and puts it at some random tomb. He gets next to the rubbish bin and takes the sacks – supposedly full of money – from it. He gets frantic when the bells start to ring, but then leaves off.
The Thomas Crown Affair is a 1968 American neo noir heist film directed and produced by Norman Jewison and starring Steve McQueen and Faye Dunaway. It was nominated for two Academy Awards, winning Best Original Song for Michel Legrand’s “The Windmills of Your Mind”. A remake was released in 1999, and a second remake was in development stages as of 2016.
About the Production
The photography is unusual for a mainstream Hollywood film, using a split-screen mode. The use of split screens to show simultaneous actions was inspired by the breakthrough Expo 67 films In the Labyrinth and A Place to Stand, the latter of which pioneered the use of Christopher Chapman’s “multi-dynamic image technique”, images shifting on moving panes. Steve McQueen was on hand for an advance screening of A Place to Stand in Hollywood and personally told Chapman he was highly impressed; the following year, Norman Jewison had incorporated the technique into the film, inserting the scenes into the already finished product.
The film also features a chess scene, with McQueen and Dunaway playing a game of chess, silently flirting with each other. The game depicted is based on a game played in Vienna in 1898 between Gustav Zeissl and Walter von Walthoffen.
McQueen undertook his own stunts, which include playing polo and driving a dune buggy at high speed along the Massachusetts coastline. This was similar to his starring role in the movie Bullitt, released a few months afterwards, in which he drove a Ford Mustang through San Francisco at more than 100 miles per hour (160 km/h). In an interview, McQueen would later say this was his favorite film.
The car driven by Dunaway, referred to as “one of those red Italian things,” is the first of only ten Ferrari 275 GTB/4S NART Spiders built. Today, this model is one of the most valuable Ferrari road cars of all time. McQueen liked the car very much, and eventually managed to acquire one for himself. The dune buggy was a Meyers Manx, built in California on a VW beetle floor pan with a hopped-up Chevrolet Corvair engine. McQueen owned one, and the Manx, the original dune buggy, was often copied. Crown’s two-door Rolls-Royce Silver Shadow carried Massachusetts vanity license tag “TC 100” for the film.
Sean Connery had been the original choice for the title role, but turned it down—a decision he later regretted. In the 1999 remake, the title role was portrayed by another actor who had portrayed James Bond, Pierce Brosnan. A second remake is underway with Michael B. Jordan in the title role.
The Thomas Crown Affair (1968)
Directed by: Norman Jewison
Starring: Steve McQueen, Faye Dunaway, Paul Burke, Jack Weston, Biff McGuire, Addison Powell, Astrid Heeren, Gordon Pinsent, Yaphet Kotto, Sidney Armus, Richard Bull, Carol Corbett
Screenplay by: Alan Trustman
Production Design by:
Cinematography by: Haskell Wexler
Film Editing by: Hal Ashby, Byron ‘Buzz’ Brandt, Ralph E. Winters
Set Decoration by: Edward G. Boyle
Art Direction by: Robert F. Boyle
Music by: Michel Legrand
MPAA Rating: None.
Distributed by: United Artists
Release Date: June 19, 1968
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