Monday, September 06, 2010
A frequent experience I’m having of late is revisiting a movie that I haven’t seen in a long time and finding it to be much different than I remembered.
Often this takes the form of my screening films I like for Adriane in the hopes that she’ll like them too. We’ve had the occasional success — our recent Barbara Stanwyck double feature, for example — but just as often the movies I show her will land with a resounding thud, not only for her but for me as well. On some level I find myself watching the film through her eyes, which in turn opens my eyes to flaws I may have forgiven or overlooked on previous viewings.
Nonetheless, as Adriane is a fan of John McTiernan’s 1999 remake of The Thomas Crown Affair, starring Pierce Brosnan and Rene Russo, it was only natural that I show her Norman Jewison’s 1968 original, which I have always liked for a couple of strong, if obvious, reasons:
1. Steve McQueen. Even though he looks entirely out of place in the three-piece blue windowpane-plaid suit we first see him in — Hilts the Cooler King in a three-piece? — there is a point early on when the McQueen we know comes to the fore:
After the success of the first heist and the subsequent money drop, the impeccably tailored Crown drives home, parks his Rolls on the cobbled drive in front of his manse, gives his butler the night off, and retires to his study, where he pours himself a brandy—
—pours himself a brandy, lights a cigar, and lapses into a fit of hysterical laughter at his own audacity and the caper he’s just pulled off. From which point forward he more clearly resembles the McQueen we expect, which is good timing, because now he has to go to work onYou: Wait a minute. This is still McQueen we’re talking about, right?
Me: Correct.
2. Faye Dunaway. I’ve been told firsthand of Dunaway’s repellent, prima donna behavior by a perfectly lovely woman I met in L.A. who’d had some industry-related legal dealings with her, and none of her story was hard to believe. That said, from 1967’s Bonnie and Clyde, through Chinatown and Three Days of the Condor, right up to 1976’s Network, Dunaway was just about the sexiest thing on two stems. The wheels probably started to come off around the time of Eyes of Laura Mars, though, and once Mommie Dearest hit the fan, that was pretty much the end of Faye as anything other than a camp icon. But here, for the time being, Dunaway continued to pose a pretty compelling case for her own nascent stardom.
Which brings us to this most recent viewing of Thomas Crown and a few things that stand out to me now as being to the film’s detriment:
1. Right from the very top, that damned “The Windmills of Your Mind” playing over the opening credits isn’t doing anybody any favors. Never mind that it won the Oscar for best song and became so iconic that the producers of the remake couldn’t resist enlisting Sting to record a cover of it (for the end credits this time, thank you very much). The bottom line is this: If your movie is predicated on the incalculable cool of Steve McQueen, a maudlin, instantly dated weeper from the syrup reserves of Alan and Marilyn Bergman is not how it’s done.
(Later, during perhaps my favorite sequence, in which Crown cleverly disposes of a detective parked outside his house on surveillance detail, composer Michel Legrand gallantly rallies for the save with a selection titled “The Boston Wrangler” — download it on iTunes; you’ll thank me later — but alas, most of the musical damage has already been inflicted and seared upon one’s cerebral cortex.)
2. Jewison employs the then-groundbreaking technique of split-screen storytelling, which here does not merely split the screen but rather fragments it into multiple shards of action and movement as well as the occasional disco ball of squint-defying editing-bay trickery. Adriane was instantly annoyed by it, and I have to admit that it could have been curtailed and refined for more effective narrative use than the “look at me!” factor that takes over at a certain point. And no matter how much I admire Jewison, I shouldn’t let him get away with techniques that would have me foaming at the mouth when Tony Scott employs them.
3. On this occasion, I was also more alert to the incredible quickness and ease with which Dunaway’s insurance investigator, Vicki Anderson, solves the fairly elaborate how of the heist, after which the remaining pieces of the puzzle — including the identity of Crown himself — fall into place with alarming speed.
I am well aware that this is done because the filmmakers want to bring Dunaway and McQueen together onscreen as soon as possible. Sparks cannot fly until they do. But it is hard to take Vicki seriously as a seasoned investigator with a sharp, analytical mind when she jets into Logan International Airport looking like a fashion model, with supplicant skycaps and airline personnel (whom she addresses by name) trailing behind her, as though she’s come to town to solve a major crime before posing for Avedon, then getting a little shopping done.
Vicki infuriates the Boston P.D.’s lead investigator (Paul Burke) but soon enough proves her mettle by explaining the entire heist in such perfect expository detail that it’s as though she sat right there beside us, sharing our popcorn as we watched the whole thing unfold in the first place.1
4. Another bugbear is the aforementioned casting of Steve McQueen against type. As I noted earlier, after establishing him as an affluent, take-no-prisoners business titan, it more or less works out the way we want it to, with that old McQueen magic eventually taking over the show. But if it hadn’t, then what? In either outcome, we’re forced to grapple with this question: Did Jewison and company hope they could credibly transform Steve McQueen into Thomas Crown, or in the name of box office, did they settle for letting Crown expediently morph into Steve McQueen?2
Ultimately, it is this last point that perhaps makes the case for McTiernan’s remake being considerably more credible than Jewison’s original: Knowing who the character Thomas Crown is supposed to be, which casting makes more sense: rugged, rambunctious, streetwise Steve McQueen or dapper, intelligent, sophisticated Pierce Brosnan?
In the end, my enjoyment of the McQueen-Dunaway version dims somewhat but doesn’t diminish entirely — only enough to make me count this as one of those rare instances when the remake is actually superior to the original.
Don’t feel bad for McQueen, though, because four months after Crown’s release, Bullitt arrived in theaters, cementing his legend once and for all.
1 A lesson for screenwriters: Always look for other ways to bring characters up to speed on information the audience already knows. As good as it often was, the television series 24, particularly in later seasons, was awful about padding time by having a character in the know explain something in painstaking detail to a character in the dark long after the audience had already watched it unfold with their own eyes.
On the flip side, there’s a neatly executed scene in Alfred Hitchcock’s North By Northwest that achieves this purpose about as well as I’ve seen it done anywhere: When the head of the intelligence agency, known as the Professor (Leo G. Carroll), finally catches up to the fugitive Roger Thornhill (Cary Grant) in Chicago, he has him brought to the airport, where they must catch a plane about to depart for Rapid City, South Dakota. In order to talk the reluctant Thornhill onto the plane, there is a vital piece of information that the Professor must deliver to him within a certain context. The audience already knows the context — we’ve watched two full acts of it up to this point — so instead of listening to the Professor recount the entire plot to us, we watch him recount it to Thornhill as they cross the tarmac, drowned out by the drone of airplane engines until the moment when he springs on all of us — you, me and Cary Grant — what we need to know to get him on that plane.
Same thing with Vicki and her revelation about the bank heist. I don’t need to hear again what I already know. I only need to know that she knows it. And I’d like to see her and the cops break a sweat before arriving at their conclusion so that the next step in their case doesn’t seem so rushed and transparent.
2 The invaluable Internet Movie Database provides some additional perspective: “Sean Connery had been the original choice for the title role but declined, a decision he later regretted.” Imagine that: They wanted James Bond to play Thomas Crown.
