Chess With Sex: The Making of The Thomas Crown Affair (1968)
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The script described it simply as 'chess with sex.' Two or three days of filming. No dialogue. Almost entirely improvised. Director Norman Jewison would crouch behind the camera during tight close-ups, whispering instructions to his actors because the shots were so close he wasn't in frame. The result was one of the most charged scenes in 1960s cinema, and it made Steve McQueen and Faye Dunaway into one of Hollywood's most electric screen pairings. Neither of them was supposed to be in the film.
Nobody Wanted McQueen
The Thomas Crown Affair began life as a screenplay by Alan Trustman, a Boston lawyer turned first-time scriptwriter. The character of Thomas Crown, a fabulously wealthy Boston businessman who orchestrates a bank robbery purely for the thrill of it, was conceived as polished, patrician, and immaculate in a suit. Steve McQueen, best known for playing tough, denim-clad working types in films like The Magnificent Seven and The Great Escape, was so far from the producers' minds that he was barely considered.
Richard Burton was the first choice. Sean Connery was second, and came close: producer Walter Mirisch had lunch with him at the Regency Hotel and spent most of a Saturday afternoon in conversation, but couldn't seal the deal. Jack Lemmon was floated. Jean-Paul Belmondo was briefly considered for a French angle on the character. Brigitte Bardot was at one point considered a near-certainty for the female lead.
McQueen heard about the script through a friend, not through his agency. When he called director Norman Jewison directly, Jewison was blunt: 'If it's Thomas Crown, forget it. You're not right. I love you and respect you as an actor. But I'll never tell you lies. You can't have the part.' He then listed McQueen's specific shortcomings for the role, including a habit of looking at the ground or squinting into the sun rather than holding eye contact. Only after three hours on Jewison's back lawn did the director relent. 'The more he talked,' Jewison later said, 'the more I saw him as Thomas Crown.'
McQueen knew it was a risk. 'I don't have any illusions on that score,' he told interviewers. 'If people laugh at me, my ass is gone.' But he'd been actively looking to change his screen image. 'I felt it was time to get past those tough upright types,' he said. 'When Norman showed me the Crown part I grabbed it.'
Finding Faye Dunaway
Faye Dunaway was 27 and had just finished filming Bonnie and Clyde when she was cast as Vicki Anderson, the sharp insurance investigator hired to catch Crown. It was her second major film role. Jewison later said he'd been watching her work and saw something in her that he wanted for the part: a quality of intelligence that read as sensuality on screen, and a self-possession that would make her a genuine match for McQueen rather than simply a love interest.
The chemistry between the two leads was, by all accounts, genuine and immediate, though they'd never worked together before. Jewison said later that it was terrific from their first scenes together, and that a significant part of his job became simply not getting in the way of it.
Filming in Boston
The decision to shoot in Boston rather than in Los Angeles was, in Jewison's words, a significant advantage. 'We were far away from Hollywood and there was no one to bother us.' The production had the run of the city, filming at real locations including the Myopia Hunt Club in Hamilton for the polo sequences and the former Salem glider airport in New Hampshire for the gliding scenes. McQueen, an experienced racing driver and pilot, was enthusiastic about the glider work but was only filmed in the cockpit on the ground. A local pilot actually flew the plane.
The dune buggy sequence on the beach was another showcase for McQueen's physical confidence on screen and helped establish the playboy restlessness of Thomas Crown in a way that dialogue couldn't. It also served as something of a warm-up for Bullitt, which McQueen made the following year and which would take his affinity for machines to a considerably higher gear.
The Split Screen Obsession
Cinematographer Haskell Wexler was central to the film's visual identity, which leaned heavily on an experimental technique called multi-dynamic imaging, better known as split screen. Jewison had discovered it at Expo 67 in Montreal, in a short film called A Place to Stand by Christopher Chapman that condensed an hour of footage into 17 minutes using simultaneous images. He took Wexler and editor Hal Ashby to Montreal to see it, and proposed using the technique for the film's opening heist sequence, in which five strangers who've never met carry out a coordinated bank robbery.
The split screen allowed Jewison to show all five men's parallel actions at the same time, conveying a huge amount of information in a short space. He noted that the eye can process multiple simultaneous images as long as there's no competing dialogue, and the wordless heist sequence put that theory to work. Critical reception of the technique was divided: some reviewers found it dazzlingly innovative, others found it exhausting. Roger Ebert called the film 'possibly the most under-plotted, underwritten, over-photographed film of the year,' though he acknowledged it was great to look at. Pauline Kael was more forgiving, calling it 'pretty good trash' with genuine entertainment value. The technique influenced a generation of filmmakers regardless.
The Chess Scene
The scene that everyone remembers takes place midway through the film, when Crown invites Vicki to his mansion and she notices his oversized, stylised chess set. 'Do you play?' he asks. 'Try me,' she says. What follows is less a game of chess than an extended, wordless negotiation of desire, with every move on the board reflected in glances, small gestures, and deliberate physical proximity.
The script's instruction for the scene, as written by Trustman, was exactly two words: 'chess with sex.'
There was no dialogue written for it and no choreography either. Jewison spent two to three days filming it, working almost entirely through improvisation. He'd whisper directions to the actors from behind the camera during close-ups, invisible because the shots were too tight to include him. He instructed Dunaway to let her right hand travel slowly up her left arm, across her shoulder and to her throat, and told McQueen to watch it. The camera watched McQueen watching her. The scene works, as Jewison acknowledged, because of three things working together: Wexler's playful, intimate cinematography, Michel Legrand's sensual score, and Hal Ashby's editing, which builds tension through rhythm rather than action.
The chess moves in the scene were real, for anyone keeping track. By the 12th move, the board reflected a position from an 1898 Vienna tournament game between Zeissl and Walthoffen, a Ruy Lopez Schliemann variation. Whether that was deliberate or coincidental has never been confirmed.
The Kiss and What Came After
The chess scene builds to a long, slow kiss, shot in tight close-up. Dunaway cradles the curved side of a bishop between her fingers. McQueen smokes a cigar. The scene ends with the two of them in bed, which by 1968 standards was about as far as mainstream Hollywood went. Jewison described the film as the only one he'd made that he'd consider amoral, essentially because it asks the audience to root for a man who steals and lies and gets away with it. The film does nothing to complicate that: Thomas Crown wins, more or less, and the film thinks that's wonderful.
The original glider sequence was cut to Strawberry Fields Forever, though the Beatles withdrew permission for the song before the film was released. Michel Legrand's score replaced it, and Legrand's The Windmills of Your Mind won the Academy Award for Best Original Song at the 1969 ceremony. The film was nominated for a second Oscar for Legrand's score.
Reception and Legacy
The Thomas Crown Affair opened on 19 June 1968, premiering in Boston, and went on to gross $14 million against a $4.3 million budget. Critical reception was mixed but the film found a substantial audience. It was stylish in a way that felt new: a heist movie that wasn't really about the heist, a romance without sentiment, a thriller with almost no violence. McQueen wearing a three-piece suit and flying a glider was a genuine revelation to audiences who'd only seen him in motorcycle leathers.
The film has aged interestingly. The split screen sequences feel dated in a way that's almost nostalgic. McQueen and Dunaway, on the other hand, haven't dated at all. The chess scene in particular holds up as a masterclass in how to film attraction without spelling it out, built entirely from close-ups, music, and two actors who understood precisely what they were doing without needing it written down for them.
A remake followed in 1999 with Pierce Brosnan and Rene Russo, which is a perfectly enjoyable film and has the advantage of a real art heist plot. A second remake, with Michael B. Jordan, is in development. We shall see whether the second remake manages to replicate the specific quality that made the original work: the sense that both leads were genuinely surprised by what was happening between them, and that nobody was entirely in control of where it was going.
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