The Thomas Crown Affair
With Pierce Brosnan, Rene Russo, Denis Leary, Frankie R. Faison, and Faye Dunaway.
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Both are about a classy investigator for an insurance company (Faye Dunaway in 1968, Rene Russo in 1999) going after a debonair zillionaire (Steve McQueen then, Pierce Brosnan now) who pulls off elaborately planned, outrageous robberies with hired helpers just for the fun of it. In the original, set in Boston, he robs a bank; in the remake he steals a Monet from New York’s Metropolitan Museum and then, just to show how cool he is, replaces it without getting caught. What starts off as a sassy battle of wills between the two characters quickly turns into an upscale romance, and the lure of amorality for the leads is probably just as important as the omnipresent trappings of wealth.
In the same essay Kael expressed her dismay at reading a letter in a Boston paper from a Cambridge student who took The Thomas Crown Affair as a serious allegory. But that was before the teen and preteen markets took over most of the film business and college professors started speaking seriously about Star Wars in relation to the Aeneid. Even though George Lucas is now treated with more respect than Virgil, I doubt that anyone’s going to assign cultural credentials to adult tripe like the Thomas Crown remake. It’s a piece of disposable fluff–though that’s exactly what’s so appealing about it. Is seeing it “like lying in the sun flicking through fashion magazines”? Pretty much, though maybe it’s more like flicking through Playboy features about lifestyles of the wealthy. And I’m not sure younger viewers will want to buy into those fantasies.
But a movie of this kind may need a big screen to carry any weight as myth–and without that mythic weight it dissolves into thin air. So part of my preference for the second Thomas Crown and the Fantasyland he moves through is how big they were at 900 N. Michigan. Forced to watch the original on a small screen, I can’t properly judge its strength, even as a piece of fantasy fluff–though millions of people who watch movies on video seem to think they can.
