From the archive

Polo was the ideal sport for the suave crook at the centre of The Thomas Crown Affair. But neither the game nor the role were such a straightforward fit for the veteran horseman who took the role…

WORDS ROB RYAN This photograph shows the moment when the swankiest of sports collided with the daddy of cool. It captures a slightly anxious-looking Steve McQueen between takes for 1968’s The Thomas Crown Affair, which was directed by Norman Jewison and written by Alan Trustman. (The film was remade in 1999 with Piers Brosnan and a superbly sultry Rene Russo.)

The movie tells the story of a rich playboy who is drawn to crime and consequently tracked down by a sexy insurance agent, played by Faye Dunaway in 1968. It is one of McQueen’s breakthrough films, showing he could extend his range beyond laconic cowboys (‘Make it Vin’) in The Magnificent Seven and the ‘cooler king’ of The Great Escape. But it could have been so different.

‘I wrote it for Sean Connery and Julie Christie,’ insists Alan Trustman, still one of the most respected screenwriters in the business. ‘Jewison and producer Walter Mirisch were staying at the Sherry Netherland and called on Connery at the Plaza Hotel every day for a week, and Connery couldn’t make up his mind. So they flew back to LA and gave it to McQueen, who had read the script and was chasing it. Twenty-five years later, Connery told Mirisch he should have accepted.’

So, after losing Sean, what did Trustman think of the replacement McQueen and Dunaway pairing? ‘I was furious. I hated both selections. But I spent a week in New York screening every piece of TV and feature film on McQueen and listing everything he could do and say comfortably, and then did a complete rewrite for him. He loved it. Amongst other things, I included no sentences of more than five words – he couldn’t remember more than five words.’

McQueen, of course, was a veteran of westerns (before The Magnificent Seven he starred in the TV series Wanted: Dead or Alive), so he certainly knew how to ride a horse. But did he enjoy the polo? ‘Not particularly,’ says Trustman. ‘It was work.’

For his part, Trustman was no fan of the influential split-screen editing (by Pablo Ferro) that took a six-minute polo sequence down to a mere forty seconds. ‘I didn’t like it in the polo but it also destroyed my intricate second bank robbery scene that I constructed to work in a bank that changed its procedures after the first robbery.’

However, he still maintains that, at 40 seconds or six minutes, polo was a perfect signifier of Crown’s wealth and status, designed to show he was an upper-crust Bostonian. But that wasn’t the real reason for its inclusion. ‘The scenes were filmed at the Myopia Hunt Club (so called because all the founders wore glasses) in South Hamilton, Massachusetts, and I put them in the script for my childhood friend, Nate Rosenthal, who was the only Jewish polo player at Myopia. Nate appeared in the polo scenes, so he had a ball.’ Even if McQueen didn’t. The original 1968 The Thomas Crown Affair is available on DVD