The Thomas Crown Affair is back, with Pierce Brosnan as the millionaire art thief and Rene Russo as the detective playing their own version of the film’s highly charged mating game. Hal Hayes reports.

For LOVE or MONET

It was the movie that gave a whole new meaning to the chess term ‘Mate’: Norman Jewison’s The Thomas Crown Affair, released in 1968, in which Steve McQueen played the millionaire art thief of the film’s title and Faye Dunaway - fresh from her career-launching triumph with Bonnie & Clyde - played the investigator who is determined to outwit him but ends up falling in love with him.

Brosnan and the Thomas Crown Affair crew on the Museum set built in the studio in Yonkers.

Using split-screen and all kinds of other sixties visual trickery, the film climaxed (for once, exactly the right word) with the most famous chess game in Hollywood history, in which McQueen and Dunaway faced up across a chessboard in a game whose subtext - and, for most of the time, whose only text - could be summed up in three letters: S-E-X.

Thirty years on, Dunaway is back in a remake of The Thomas Crown Affair. But this time she plays a psychiatrist - that is exactly how she is billed: not with a name but simply as ‘The Psychiatrist’ - who is treating 1999’s Thomas Crown, played by James Bond star Pierce Brosnan. Moreover, it was Brosnan who developed the project, then took it to United Artists, the studio behind the Bond movies, under his own Irish DreamTime banner.