Robert Redford and American Cinema: Modern Film Stardom and the Politics of Celebrity 9781350141971, 9781350142008, 9781350141988

Citation preview

Robert Redford and American Cinema

ii

Robert Redford and American Cinema Modern Film Stardom and the Politics of Celebrity Michael Allen

BLOOMSBURY ACADEMIC Bloomsbury Publishing Plc 50 Bedford Square, London, WC1B 3DP, UK 1385 Broadway, New York, NY 10018, USA 29 Earlsfort Terrace, Dublin 2, Ireland BLOOMSBURY, BLOOMSBURY ACADEMIC and the Diana logo are trademarks of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc First published in Great Britain 2021 Copyright © Michael Allen, 2021 Michael Allen has asserted her right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as Author of this work. For legal purposes the Acknowledgments on p. ix constitute an extension of this copyright page. Cover design: Charlotte Daniels Cover image: A River Runs Through It (1992) directed by Robert Redford (© Columbia Pictures / RNB / Collection Christophel / Arenapal) All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage or retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publishers. Bloomsbury Publishing Plc does not have any control over, or responsibility for, any third-party websites referred to or in this book. All internet addresses given in this book were correct at the time of going to press. The author and publisher regret any inconvenience caused if addresses have changed or sites have ceased to exist, but can accept no responsibility for any such changes. A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Allen, Michael, 1957- author. Title: Robert Redford and American cinema : modern film stardom and the politics of celebrity / Michael Allen. Description: 1st. | London ; New York : Bloomsbury Academic, 2021. | Includes bibliographical references and index. | Identifiers: LCCN 2020039979 (print) | LCCN 2020039980 (ebook) | ISBN 9781350141971 (hardback) | ISBN 9781350141988 (pdf) | ISBN 9781350141995 (epub) Subjects: LCSH: Redford, Robert–Criticism and interpretation. Classification: LCC PN2287.R283 A45 2021 (print) | LCC PN2287.R283 (ebook) | DDC 791.4302/8092 [B]–dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020039979 LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020039980 ISBN: HB: 978-1-3501-4197-1 ePDF: 978-1-3501-4198-8 eBook: 978-1-3501-4199-5 Typeset by Integra Software Services Pvt. Ltd. To find out more about our authors and books visit www.bloomsbury.com and sign up for our newsletters.

To Janet and Olivia, with love.

vi

Contents List of Illustrations Acknowledgments Introduction 1 Starting small: Robert Redford in theatre and on television 2 Maverick superstar for a New Hollywood 3 Political animal 4 An independent soul 5 Behind the camera 6 Proud member of the ‘Over the Hill’ gang Filmography Bibliography Index

viii ix 1 7 33 71 119 145 177 214 221 230

Illustrations 1.1 Acting with a legend: Redford with Laughton in ‘In the Presence of Mine Enemies’ 2.1 Brave debut: Redford as pansexual Wade Lewis in Inside Daisy Clover 2.2 Finally footloose: Redford as Paul Blatter in Barefoot in the Park 2.3 The eyes have it: Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid 2.4 Pyrrhic victory I: Downhill Racer 2.5 The passing of the baton: The Sting 3.1 Pyrrhic victory II: The Candidate 3.2 Giving Redford something to do: The argument in the restaurant in The Way We Were 3.3 Bookworm turned action hero: Three Days of the Condor 3.4 Intrepid reporters: Hoffman as Bernstein and Redford as Woodward in All the President’s Men 3.5 Redford as Rather in Truth 5.1 Feel the tension: Breakfast with the Jarretts in Ordinary People 5.2 The majesty of nature I: A River Runs through It 5.3 The majesty of nature II: The Horse Whisperer 5.4 Acting masterclass: Lions for Lambs 6.1 Has-been card sharp: Havana 6.2 Old and grizzled: An Unfinished Life 6.3 Ageing stunt man: All Is Lost 6.4 Going out in style: The Old Man and the Gun

13 47 49 51 59 63 90 93 101 107 116 156 158 159 172 188 190 206 208

Acknowledgments A great many thanks go to Philippa Brewster, who agreed to accept the book for publication, too many years ago now for me to mention without embarrassment. Following on, thanks also go to Rebecca Barden and Veidehi Hans at Bloomsbury, who took on the project, for their patience and professionalism in getting my manuscript into its final completed state. Finally, I would like to send my love and thanks to my wife Janet, whose love and support kept me going through several significant crises of confidence. I would not have been able to stay the course through the length of the project without her words of encouragement.

x

Introduction

Shortly after he completed filming All the President’s Men in April 1976, Robert Redford was offered $2 million by producer Joseph E. Levine to appear in his new film, A Bridge Too Far. Redford’s role was to be a small one that would take just two weeks of his time to film. This, perhaps better than anything else, illustrates the position of pre-eminence held by Robert Redford in the motion picture industry today. The male sex symbol of the seventies, he consistently wins popularity polls and heads box office lists … … Redford has made seven movies in the last four years and his latest, All the President’s Men, occupied two solid years of his time, as he took part in every business and creative aspect of the filmmaking. … He took roles others were avoiding just for the challenge … But in spite of Redford’s independence and unorthodoxy – or perhaps because of it – he became one of the biggest stars in Hollywood history. … There are several more books left in Redford. This is only a start. (Spada, 1977:7) This foreword to James Spada’s study, written at the height of Robert Redford’s mid-1970s global movie stardom, and with his role in A Bridge Too Far recently announced, summarizes Redford’s then extraordinary power within Hollywood: Number One in innumerable ‘sexy movie male’ polls (trivial, but not irrelevant as a marker of public profile), and the not unrelated issue of box office success (very important for an industry only just returning from the turmoil of near-collapse at the end of the previous decade). Perhaps, more intriguingly, Spada’s assessment seems to anticipate more, and better, achievements to come, more dimensions to Redford’s capabilities, without

2

Robert Redford and American Cinema

quite knowing what these might be. At the time, almost certainly, neither did Redford, fully, though he was aware of a number of strong and growing interests (the environment, directing, independent and alternative cinema) that he planned to pursue in the coming years. This current book is about evaluating both Redford’s career up to the date of Spada’s study, and his subsequent achievements within the context of contemporary American cinema – as an offering to the ‘several books left’ on Redford that Spada predicted. How prophetic Spada has proven to be. Robert Redford has been a major presence in the American film industry for almost sixty years, a phenomenal achievement by any standards. Rising at a young age through the theatre and television of the 1960s, he achieved meteoric stardom at the very end of that decade and maintained that status through the 1970s and beyond, being the top box office star for several years in the mid-1970s. In the following decade, he was instrumental in cohering and expanding the American independent film scene through his Sundance Institute and its festival. He has also become an accomplished director of some nine films. In later life, through the first two decades of the 2000s, he adapted his screen presence to play a number of lateage characters in both mainstream and independent films – the last of which, The Old Man and the Gun, was made in 2018, after which he announced his retirement. That’s quite some CV. And yet Redford, for all his stardom, accomplishments and influence on his country’s film industry across so many years, is a critically undervalued figure in film and media studies. Acting honours are heaped upon his contemporaries – Hoffman, de Niro, Pacino, et al. – while Redford is often perceived as a bland and vacuous actor, more interesting for his undeniable handsomeness and matinee-idol screen presence than for his acting skills. The films he has directed have often suffered bad reviews and criticism, while even his groundbreaking work for independent cinema has been questioned. This volume has, as its intention, a challenging of that neglect and of those overly pejorative evaluations. It covers the whole of Redford’s career, from his earliest theatre school productions through his long apprenticeship in television, where he mixed routine serial fodder with truly extraordinary dramatic epics alongside major stars, to his long career as movie superstar and forward to independent cinema mentor and ageing actor. Although he has appeared on a thousand-and-one magazine covers, Redford has always

Introduction

3

been a very private man and not often forthcoming in interview. So, although a number of works have appeared about his life and work to supplement and deepen this volume of journalistic coverage, he remains something of an enigma. Picking up on the note about the more serious publications on his life and work, for such a major Hollywood star with such a long and illustrious career, there are surprisingly few, and even fewer good, book-length studies of him. The most substantial is Michael Feeney Callan’s 2010 biography of Redford, which, as one might expect, spends as much, if not more, time on Redford’s private life and concerns as it does on his films. Certainly, it doesn’t offer academic analysis of these – as it shouldn’t be expected to, given that it is principally a biography. Nonetheless, I will be drawing upon its exhaustive research extensively throughout my own study. The same goes for the less credible biographies, such as Minty Clinch’s 1989 work, simply called Robert Redford, and Lawrence J. Quirk and William Schoell’s somewhat iconoclastic take on their subject, titled The Sundance Kid, as well as a curious little paperback written in 1975 by David Hanna, Robert Redford: The Superstar Nobody Knows, just as Redford was becoming a major superstar, which both charts his rise and attempts to prophesy his future. Then there are the coffee table books, heavy on photographs, short on text, which are listed in the bibliography here, but aren’t really referenced in the text. A superior version of this kind of publication is a useful study of All the President’s Men by Jack Hirshberg, which furnishes good insights into the making of the film. Other than that, there are a few essays in collected volumes on movie stars, and myriad small articles in film journals and magazines. However, he is a conspicuous absence or a minor entry in most of the respected works on contemporary American cinema, warranting only a passing, single page number, reference in many of them. So, a surprisingly small collection for such a major figure in contemporary American cinema. This current work is certainly not intended as another biography, although biographical details of Redford’s life and career are inevitably, and necessarily, included, if only to contextualize his body of work both in front of and behind the camera. Rather, it is hoped that the phases of Redford’s career, and the work produced in each, will be set in their social, political and film industry contexts. The intention is to move Redford from the often artificially constructed position of bland irrelevance, to someone who has astutely gauged

4

Robert Redford and American Cinema

the shifts and changes in American cinema across several decades, and has negotiated either his screen image, or his industry position, or both, to maintain his position as a significant presence within that industry. To repeatedly do so across such a length of time, when the casualty rate in Hollywood and American film generally is staggeringly high, is extraordinary. The hope is that this work acts as a testament to that achievement. It is broadly chronological, moving from Redford’s earliest acting work in theatre and television through to his last films of recent years. Because of the thematic nature of some of the chapters (politics, independence, director), there is some looping back and forth across timeframes, and readdressing of key films, as Redford’s various dimensions are individually examined while also being connected together. Chapter 1, as indicated above, covers Redford’s theatre and television work across the 1960s, a period when he was a jobbing actor who was, at least in the early years, grateful for any ‘gig’ he could get. Much of this was standard TV fare – Western and crime series especially. What is surprising, I hope, are the qualities and dimensions Redford brought to each role – qualities of honing his skills as an actor which would be developed much further in his film work. Even more surprising, perhaps, are the characters he played and how these play with, and against, the ‘standard’ image he acquired when his star image cemented itself in popular consciousness and critical reception from the beginning of the 1970s onwards. Chapter 2 details that rise to stardom, within the context of changes in both the definition of stardom and that notion of stardom within the volatile and uncertain years of New Hollywood. That Redford was a superstar even before the mid-1970s is almost a given: in the middle years of the decade, he starred in a number of big-budget movies which confirmed his god-like, impossibly handsome, matinee-idol screen persona. So much, so bland: all assumed surface and little depth. What is less well acknowledged are the films he made in this period that were the exact opposite of this developing image – films in which he played extremely unpleasant characters which were anything but big-budget, glossy Hollywood. Chapter 3, a long chapter for important reasons, covers Redford’s political films, made during various turbulent periods in American society. Redford was a politically committed person in his private life, with focused interests

Introduction

5

in the environment, the history and current condition of Native Americans, and the moral and political integrity of America itself. The films covered in this chapter are concerned with his reaction to specific political issues, most notably the corruption of the American government, culminating in the disgrace of Nixon’s fall due to the Watergate cover-up scandal, as well as the recent War on Terror following the 9/11 terrorist attacks. These films show Redford, both through the characters he plays and, more significantly, in his choice of directorial projects, active in challenging the authority of central government. He was not alone in driving this agenda, but he was certainly a major voice and a powerful advocate. Chapter 4 focuses on Redford’s promotion of the independent film world, initially prompted by his own desire to make similarly small films controlled by himself rather than studio producers. Redford’s public profile for many years has been shaped by this project, and in many ways it is fully justified. But it is also something of a distortion, with many other figures making important contributions and interventions in the development of American independent cinema. The chapter also details the failures; this is not an unadulterated, celebratory, success story, as Redford himself might well readily admit. Chapter 5 covers his work as a director rather than as an actor. Redford has directed nine movies, some successful, some less so. Again, the accusation of blandness stalks him, with reviews of his films criticizing the safeness and superficiality of his directorial style. While not attempting to completely disagree with this assessment, the chapter argues that there is usually more – in terms of formal style, narrative, character – in his films than he is generally given credit for. It also, again, attempts to situate his move into directing within the context of the equivalent efforts of some of his peers. Chapter 6 details Redford’s subtle and almost imperceptibly negotiation of his screen image towards the accepted realities of later age. Hollywood has always been notoriously unforgiving about actors growing old, admittedly less so for male actors than their female counterparts. But the public perception of Redford has always been grounded so firmly in his looks, what would happen, how would he survive, when those looks began to fade? What kind of characters would he play, in what kind of stories? Redford’s response was often bold and courageous, consciously playing with his star persona to give the characters he played deeper poignancy. Although not as famous as his many

6

Robert Redford and American Cinema

earlier successes, some of these later films are amongst the most touching and human of Redford’s career. Together, I hope the chapters will pay tribute to Redford’s skills as an actor, producer, director and mentor of independent cinema, while not shying away from some of the less successful aspects and works which have also contributed to defining his long career. Robert Redford has been popularly idolized throughout that long career while simultaneously being critically, and academically, maligned and neglected. This current study is offered as a partial rectification of that imbalance.

1

Starting small: Robert Redford in theatre and on television

The first decade Robert Redford spent as an actor saw his progress from acting school productions, through to Broadway success and into television. The last of these was in the middle of a buoyant period, in which critically respected drama productions vied with mass-produced serials for audience attention. Redford was by no means alone in following this route towards acting work. Young actors like him – Paul Newman, Steve McQueen, Dustin Hoffman, Gene Hackman, etc. – had intermixed theatre and television throughout the 1950s and 1960s. In this, they would join older, seasoned pros, many of whom had seen the best of their celebrity days served in theatre and on film, and were now content to carry on earning a living in the relatively new, but in some ways still critically derided, medium of television. In the first year of his acting career, through 1959, Redford appeared in two pre-graduation student, and three professional, theatre productions. The student productions were Chekhov’s The Seagull and Sophocles’s Antigone, played in full classical style (which he hated). Professionally, he had a background role in Tall Story, at The Belasco in New York, a much-resisted classical role in summer stock that he hated and did for the money (Anouilh’s Tiger at the Gates, at Bucks County Playhouse), and the lead in another Broadway production, The Highest Tree, at the Longacre Theatre, where he felt the famous director (Dore Schary) was stifling him with over-fussy direction. In between being a student and a professional stage actor, he was baptized in the brief but exhilarating experience of live television, in a play, ‘Thunder over Berlin’, broadcast on CBS’s Armstrong Circle Theater in May 1959 to millions of people. And in between these, he also acquired representation by America’s largest talent agency, MCA. Quite a rollercoaster ride for a fledgling actor to make in his first year.

8

Robert Redford and American Cinema

It is best to begin with the last element noted above. Redford’s signing on with MCA, at the very beginning of his acting career, is important in order to understand how the agency facilitated Redford’s negotiation of the various dramatic media open to him in the early 1960s, and how this negotiation, marshalled and focused by a ‘management team’, positioned him as a rising presence poised to reach stardom status within a fragile and volatile film industry by the end of the decade. MCA had started in 1924 as a management company, but had progressively expanded, through the following decades, to encompass live shows, variety, radio, television and the movie industry. In the process, it had moved from simple representation of artists to active production, most notably in the form of the ‘package deal’, by which it presented to radio stations/networks, movie studios and, latterly, television stations/networks complete assemblies of talent for a given production. All the network or studio had to do was finance the package, which, given the top-flight talent at MCA’s command, was usually a foregone conclusion. MCA’s seminal role in changing the status of the Hollywood film star from salaried contract player to self-determining, independent talent capable of fronting a package deal that became the means of controlling the terms of a film’s production and profit distribution will form the context for a later chapter, specifically in the context of Redford’s meteoric rise to film superstardom in the 1970s. As seismically significant were the agency’s activities in the television field, in many ways foundational for Redford’s developing career, as will be examined shortly. But it is essential to immediately stress the symbiotic interactions between MCA’s various ‘creative arms’ (it was often compared to an octopus by envious rivals, in its ability to infiltrate and control all aspects of the developing media landscape). The ways in which MCA’s simultaneous activity in all fields and media of the entertainment world allowed it to switch and swap its clients from one medium to another: enabling them to take up a feature film role here, an appearance, or even a title role, in a television series there, all the while being able (though few actually did do so, as their film and television screen careers developed) to return to live theatre. MCA’s ability to offer its clients constant interchangeability between media allowed them to maintain careers which might otherwise have begun to wane, and certainly for new

Robert Redford in Theatre and on Television

9

talents to capitalize on opportunities as they arose in any medium, in an effort to establish their names and presence in an increasingly competitive business. The man who ‘discovered’ Redford during his student productions was Stark Heseltine, one of MCA’s theatrical agents. Hesseltine immediately alerted senior MCA executive Maynard Morris to Redford’s potential, and the two of them met with the actor and, according to his biographer Michael Feeney Callan, pressured him into signing up with the agency (2010:68). Whatever Redford’s initial reluctance to do so, the agency soon went to work for him, assigning its New York TV agent, Eleanor Kilgallen, to find him work even while he was still in Tall Story on the New York Broadway stage. The initial result of her efforts was the CBS television live drama ‘Thunder over Berlin’ (already mentioned above, considered more fully below). A matter of a few months later, while Redford was performing in The Highest Tree (to appalling reviews), MCA’s West Coast agent, Monique James, was also assigned to him, and began finding him parts in filmed series over on the opposite side of America, in Hollywood. Thus were Redford’s immediate professional parameters set: theatre, live TV drama, filmed TV drama; East and West Coast of America. For a few years, he would, guided by MCA, attempt to juggle all of these in an uneasy mix, before eventually opting, as much from necessity as choice, on just one: West Coast Hollywood. Redford’s first MCA ‘gig’, arranged by Kilgallen, was Armstrong Circle Theater, a notable anthology series which had been running on television since 1950. In 1957, its move from NBC to CBS had resulted in the series adopting, amongst other themes, an emphasis on Cold War stories. Redford’s episode was one of these, entitled ‘Thunder over Berlin’ (‘Berlin: City with a Short Fuse’, according to his biographer Callan (2010:69–70)). Broadcast in May 1959, Redford was cast as the episode’s light relief, but took the brief too far, with his then natural tendency towards playing for jokes resulting in him over-milking the comedy potential of his part to the detriment of the drama, to the producer’s annoyance. When the show finally went out live, Redford’s lines had been cut from the original forty down to a modest four. However, notwithstanding this draconian, and somewhat humbling, reduction in his role, the adrenalin-rush of live dramatic television was powerful for Redford, who was keen to experience more of the same. For him, it mixed the intensity of live performance with a scale of audience that theatre could never provide.

10

Robert Redford and American Cinema

His second live TV drama production was in far more hallowed company: alongside screen legends Greer Garson and Christopher Plummer in a 1960 adaptation of George Bernard Shaw’s ‘Captain Brassbound’s Conversion’ for another respected anthology series, NBC’s Hallmark Hall of Fame. Again, Redford only had four lines to speak, in a small role as a soldier who shows Garson’s character into a tent. This time, the four lines were the intended sum of the part, rather than a punitive reduction from an originally larger role. Whether or not this was enough to allow him to impress the watching audience is not recorded. He did, however, apparently impress his star fellow cast member, who treated him kindly. More significantly, as Callan notes, Redford’s agent Monique James commented, ‘It’s not always about the size of a part, but the connections involved that are important. Neither of us wanted to bed down in Maverick, and this was the turning point’ (2010:74). Significantly, Garson was, at the time, also an MCA client and had appeared in a number of MCA-TV productions in late 1950s, filmed at Revue Studios. Therefore, her recognition of Redford’s potential, even in a small part, would have repercussions, assuming that she passed on her favourable response on his performance to the producers. What is centrally at issue here is whether an actor could ‘cut it’ in a live performance: that is, whether he or she was capable of sustaining a performance, more akin to the theatrical experience, or was more comfortable with the fragmented processes of film production, which allowed the actor to build the role on screen through small, intense acting ‘takes’. The live drama format made great demands upon its creative personnel, ushering in an extraordinarily fruitful period for television drama. The live anthology drama brought something new to viewers across the country, as writers and directors struggled to impart a unique aesthetic to the unexplored medium. Written especially for television, performed live, addressing a variety of subjects and bringing new talent before the public, these shows have been eulogised by historians, and many mourn the passing of the golden age.

(Hilmes, 1990:148) The ‘liveness’ element of television dramatic performance in this period was a crucial factor: ‘Thus, it behooved the networks to promote the superior

Robert Redford in Theatre and on Television

11

value of live over recorded programming, because the ability to transmit live belonged to the networks and the networks alone’ (Hilmes, 1990:143). The essential question became: could actors ‘pull off ’ a continuous performance in a live context on television (whether block-recording on video or actually live at the broadcast time), or would they be more comfortable with the separated-take format of filmmaking? Redford, comfortable both with the theatre-live environment and imbued (as a result) with a need to keep performance preparations fresh and under-prepared, continued to respond to the demands of live television, developing the acting skills that would sustain spontaneity in performance when he progressed to film roles in the decades to come. But it is Redford’s third live TV drama appearance, again in May 1960, as a sympathetic Nazi in ‘In the Presence of Mine Enemies’, that finally got him noticed. The production had even more impressive credentials, perhaps, than the Shaw play: written by Rod Serling and directed by Fielder Cook, a veteran of live TV, it starred acting legend Charles Laughton as well as Hollywood actors Arthur Kennedy and Oscar Homolka. Redford could only assume to absorb and learn in such vaulted company. Moreover, it demanded of Redford a substantially increased complexity of characterization, in terms of screen time and dialogue, as well as the challenge of matching his performance to those of recognized figures such as Laughton, Homolka and Kennedy. Indeed, Redford has commented upon the enormity of the experience of acting alongside someone of Laughton’s reputation. In Callan’s biography, he is quoted as saying: ‘It was among my most nerve-racking experiences because of Laughton. Part of it was his sheer physicality, which was as commanding as his legend. He was also intense and introspective. I had to make the emotional adjustment to play a co-lead with this legend’ (2010:75). Simon Callow, in his biography of Laughton, skews the full assessment of the work. In his attempt to foreground Laughton’s performance, in spite of it being, as he admits, woefully under-prepared and ill-suited to television, he grudgingly assesses Arthur Kennedy as ‘highly competent’; Redford is afforded less grace. Here is his full assessment: [Laughton’s] performance is muted to the point of catatonia, but when as occasionally happens, he feels confident enough to let go, the scope and grandeur of his talent suddenly reveals itself, and the other, highly

12

Robert Redford and American Cinema

competent, actors (like Arthur Kennedy, for example), look pretty small. The young Nazi officer in love with the rabbi’s daughter is played by Robert Redford (his biggest part to date), and the comparison in the two actor’s styles is instructive. Redford is impeccably ‘truthful’: he follows all the Method prescriptions, his action is clear, his inner life ticking nicely over. Laughton, meanwhile, appears to be asleep for most of their scenes together. Then he talks of the dignity of his people, and the superiority of love to hate, and a huge ocean of feeling is released, and the whole absurd farrago suddenly matters, because he becomes the voice of his tribe, and love’s advocate. Redford (who is by no means unskilful in the role) seems, at these moments, to be made of cardboard.

(2012:272) There is an immediate challenge to his interpretation that can be launched: at this stage in his acting development (and, arguable, forever after), Redford might be accused of many things, but ‘Method’ was certainly not one of them. Redford loathed the over-thought, endlessly discussed ‘motivations’ of the Method approach. It would be a frustration that he would have to negotiate in future years, as he moved towards Hollywood mainstream megastardom, for example, while working with one of ‘The Method’s primary film exponents, Paul Newman, during the making of Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, a few years later. Redford’s spontaneously instinctive approach to acting, already stated during his formative years in stage school and theatre productions, would continue to be his own personal acting ‘method’ throughout the rest of his career, repeatedly clashing with alternative, more theoretically formulated acting methods of those he came to work with. If anything, Laughton, with his more traditional stage preparations, overlaid upon his various late-life neuroses (detailed by Callow), was far more likely to be over-prepared and ‘locked down’ than Redford, at these two end-stage/ embryonic moments in their two careers (Figure 1.1). As an honourable truce, the simple reality is that the drama required the Rabbi to explode emotionally at a certain point, and for the quiet Nazi to remain relatively controlled, in spite of, or indeed because of, his moral ambiguity. Both actors were honouring their roles. Not so much Method, just honest respect for their profession and the integrity of aligning performance to role. Perhaps the best representation of this was that Redford, even after having been warned by Laughton not

Robert Redford in Theatre and on Television

13

Figure 1.1  Acting with a legend: Redford with Laughton in ‘In the Presence of Mine Enemies’.

to slap him at the drama’s climatic moment, did so anyway. Later, Laughton acknowledged that it was right for the dramatic moment. ‘When the show was over, I [Redford] went to him [Laughton] and apologised. You did what you had to do, he said. And he was right. Dramatically it worked. It was honest’ (Callan, 2010:75). That moment of slapping Laughton revisits a formative event in stage school when, preparing a production of All My Sons, Redford, having been warned by a fellow actor not to manhandle him and ruin his clothes, did just that in the heat of the dramatic moment (Callan, 2010:64). But there is an interesting, and I think vital, issue involved here of acting for the live TV camera, which is different from acting for either the movie camera or on stage for a theatre audience. The scale and expressiveness of the physical movement and facial gestures, as well as intonations of the voice, have to be different. The intended intimacy of the reception – by small groups of people in domestic sitting rooms – means a greater use of close-up, which results, in turn, in a reduction in gesture and in vocal volume: grand gestures, suitable for the projection out to the theatre space or, perhaps, for the size of

14

Robert Redford and American Cinema

the biggest cinemascope movie screens which, in competition with television, register as excessive on the small screen. In this sense, the performances of Laughton, and even Kennedy, both appear, at times, a little ‘over-the-top’, in ways that Redford’s doesn’t. I think that it is interesting, and significant, that the two seasoned theatre and film actors are prone to seeming to be overacting for the intimate TV camera, whereas the relatively inexperienced newcomer – Redford – is better able to modulate his performance to the scale required by the medium. It is even more potentially interesting that these intimate acting techniques that Redford develops across his years in television pay dividends. It is a development of his acting style that, I will argue through the rest of this work, becomes a defining quality of Redford’s screen presence as well as his sensibility as a director. The moment; the acting moment: that is what mattered to Redford at this early stage in his career. And, as I hope to demonstrate throughout the rest of this work, that central impulse never left Redford, either as an actor, a director or a mentor for others to find that central drive. But perhaps we also need to consider the difference, gestured towards above, in the characterizations within the drama itself – of the rabbi as someone used to assuming authority, of command and of outbursts of both religious fervour and righteous indignation relating to the fate of his people; of Kennedy’s as his son as an impulsive, hot-headed rebel similarly impassioned about the treatment of the Jews; and of Redford as a meek and mild, rather naïve and repressed Bavarian ‘country-hick’ who must go against everything he has been raised to accept as natural – automatic acquiescence to authority, unthinking nationalistic hatred of the Jews – in order to find a truth within himself as being opposed to these very values. In these terms, Redford’s performance is adeptly pitched, and right for the production as a whole, offering an important counterbalance to the more emotional, explosive forces of rabbi and son, although the gestures and strength of expression of both Laughton and Kennedy, while right for their characters, still exceed the bounds and requirements of the small screen. Between them, these various elements work to suggest that Redford had managed to take on board the requirements of acting small for the small screen in ways Laughton and Kennedy hadn’t. Although Laughton, certainly, had acted in a number of live TV dramas across the 1950s, his natural performance style was still overemphatic: designed to be writ large.

Robert Redford in Theatre and on Television

15

‘In the Presence of Mine Enemies’ was performed live from CBS’s Television City in Los Angeles, with a ‘hot kine’ made to preserve a record of it. A hot kine is a process whereby the television signal was sent long distance by co-axial cable as it was broadcast live to the immediate geographical area and recorded onto film via a camera placed in front of a high-quality TV monitor. This was then used for later broadcast to other parts of the United States. It is this that has been preserved and is available on DVD. Redford’s next ‘live’ television drama – ‘The Iceman Cometh’ – was not quite that. It was to be ‘an exact recreation of the 1956 Circle in the Square production, directed by Jose Quintero, which was regarded as the definitive version, and consecrated Jason Robards [Jr.] as O’Neill’s signature actor … [But] The play was to be taped over several days in October [1960], for transmission in November’ (Callan, 2010:78). The television version was to be directed by Sidney Lumet, by then an experienced television director who had also already recently directed a seminal movie, Twelve Angry Men (1957), and in future would direct such notable films as Serpico (1973), Dog Day Afternoon (1975) and The Verdict (1982). Videotape had only recently become an option for television producers, offering an electronic means of recording a production for time-shifted broadcast. The ability to record a television signal electronically rather than photographically was demonstrated in 1951 in the US, when the Electronic Division of Bing Crosby Enterprises developed a black and white video recorder. Recording electronically had huge advantages over recording on film. The optical and photographic developing losses of film recording were eliminated; as videotape recorded electronic signals rather than visible images, there were no optical distortions at all. It could be replayed instantly; and it could also be recorded over and used again … Videotape was a cheaper alternative to telerecording programmes, a way of taking television out of the control of the schedule, allowing programmes to be made and stockpiled, before transmission. The ‘videotape age’ reformulates the aesthetics of drama and the organisation of production in various ways, but even so, segments of drama lasting up to thirty minutes continued to be recorded on videotape in continuous time ‘as if live’ until the introduction of time-coded signals on the tape in the mid-1970s.

(Jacobs, 2000:24)

16

Robert Redford and American Cinema

As Jacobs’s description suggests, videotape was initially (and practically, for some years to come), extremely difficult to edit in terms of physically cutting and rejoining segments together. Therefore, in its earliest form, it was more a medium of basic recording than creative manipulation and lent itself to the recording of continuous performance rather than the building up of performance through the assemblage of fragments, as had become the case in traditional film editing. Its essential aesthetic was to preserve the sense of continuous performance by joining together blocks of such continuous live performance into a full completed work. The process, while allowing the space for mistakes and re-takes, nevertheless resulted in a curious hybrid – a performance enacted to be recorded through the lens of a camera while retaining the explicit markers of performed continuity. By and large, the pre-recording was a production expediency: O’Neill’s play, after all, is several hours long (three hours twenty minutes in the DVD version, minus all advert breaks). To have actually done a drama of this length live, when the ‘standard’ live television dramas were, at most, well under half that length (most were even shorter, at around one hour long), would have been extraordinarily demanding, for both the actors and the technicians, even tempting fate of some appalling disaster happening at some point in the proceedings. Furthermore, the broadcast was planned to be in two parts, shown over two separate Sunday evenings, which, if the whole thing were actually to have been performed live, would have necessitated the entire cast and crew to reassemble after a week’s gap (actually, not unknown in early TV drama). This is not even to consider the emotional demands of the play itself, one of the giant emotional rollercoaster dramas of modern American theatre. To expect a television audience to commit itself to over three hours of intense emotional soul-bearing on a single evening might have been too much to ask, even for the dedicated early TV viewers of the period. Therefore, more digestible over two separate evenings’ viewings even if, by arranging it in such a way, the production couldn’t be fully live, and therefore required a pre-recording process that attempted to preserve as much of the sense of live performance as possible. It is now very interesting to watch the production on a television screen, with the awareness of its semi-live recording process. Mistakes – fluffed lines, shaky camera tracks and wobbly reframings – occasionally pepper the

Robert Redford in Theatre and on Television

17

drama, none apparently serious enough to warrant, at the time, a halting of the recording of the current segment and the cost in time and money of going back to its beginning and doing it again. Moreover, in a strange way, these small errors actually add to the sense of the drama as it unfolds in real time. For Jan Bussell, this consciousness that it is all happening now this minute, that one is witnessing actual creation – that might even go wrong – adds tremendously to the feeling that one is a part of it, that it is something personal between oneself and the artist, and makes television what can only be described as a ‘cosy’ medium. It is the producer’s art to exploit these assets to the full, and obviously the performer has to adjust his technique accordingly.

(1952:20) There is here a concrete feeling of the camera trying to at least cover, if not catch up with, the actors as they act in the moment: to be there to capture the details of a performance in its immediacy. Long tracks around and into the action and into faces attempt to catch the spontaneous looks and gestures of the theatre-trained actor striving to build character through a response to the dramatic moment. The camera becomes observational and, in a vibrant sense, eavesdropping, almost colluding with the action/actors to frame the moment ‘perfectly’ in capturing the dramatic highpoint of the scene. But this sense of apparent spontaneity, of the recording process apparently ‘just happening’ upon the improvised performances of the actors, is undermined by the realization that most parts of most scenes of the production are, in fact, perfectly composed: often in depth to frame lines of characters responding to one another backward into depth and forward towards camera, and, equally, of lines of characters facing towards the lead character of the dramatic moment in close-up to frame a moment of grand revelation. These are by no means happenstances: extensive rehearsals have virtually guaranteed that these dramatic moments are captured on camera to their maximum effect. Within the demands of the play, Redford’s character, Parfitt, is manoeuvred to become the alter ego of the main character Hickey: a younger version of himself, a parallel guilt-narrative that lies at the core of the drama. This is a demanding role for a relative ‘newbie’ such as Redford to take on, certainly opposite O’Neill’s ‘signature actor’ Jason Robards Jr. And in truth, he doesn’t

18

Robert Redford and American Cinema

quite make it, although this is as much the fault of the play as it is Redford’s failure in the role. Parfitt, having been positioned as persistent ‘emotional agitator’ throughout the play – to the rising annoyance of both Hickey and Larry, Parfitt’s symbolic father – is allowed to rather peter out at the play’s climax, as Hickey takes centre-stage to allow Robards a bravura thirty-minute monologue to confess his sins and guilt over the murder of his wife. Admittedly, Parfitt’s suicidal leap from the, offstage, fire escape is a direct reference to an earlier suggestion of what Larry should do to end his meaningless life, and Parfitt has by this point largely fulfilled, and exhausted, his role as Hickey’s younger mirror image. But his relatively underplayed exit – a dash up the staircase in the background of the set, semi obscured by foreground characters – does rather squander Redford’s work in detailing Parfitt’s emotional turmoil. But as with ‘In the Presence of Mine Enemies’, Redford’s performance could be argued to be perfectly pitched for the demands of adapting a stage production to the intimacy of the television screen. At times, the other lead actors, even Robards, could be accused of grandstanding (again, admittedly, generated by the extremities of his character), projecting to the gods in the back row of an imaginary theatre, executing grand physical gestures and overly self-conscious dramatic pauses. Only Myron McCormick as Larry Slade, who had played the same role in the original 1956 stage production, manages to modulate his performance, on the whole, to suit the small screen. But his character – the quiet, introspective ‘life philosopher’ – more naturally fits the required underplaying than some of the other characters who, more emotionally raw, are given to violent and ‘shouty’ outbursts. Redford, as he had done with Sergeant Lott in ‘In the Presence of Mine Enemies’, takes an awkward, naïve character and uses his qualities to fit the television medium – playing him contained and repressed, using those qualities to allow him to quietly fill the intimate screen. With the other actors, especially, perhaps, Robards as Hickey, we feel we are in the presence of what is ostensibly still a stage production, albeit captured by cameras for television. With Redford, more so, we feel we are watching a performance for television, a performance whose physical actions and mannerisms, and scale of voice and facial gesture, are fundamentally pitched for the diminishment of viewing them on a small television screen. This intentional smallness of acted gesture to represent bigger emotions, signalled by the barest of grimaces or smiles,

Robert Redford in Theatre and on Television

19

or an arching of the eyebrow, always to be fully captured by the camera in close-up, needs to be signalled here, if only in embryonic form, as Redford’s signature style – one he would carry into his film work and career and would, both negatively and positively, define him as a screen actor. Redford’s last three TV anthology drama appearances were in productions which, together, continue to mark the technological shifts that were taking place in American television at that time, from live and then video-recorded, through to filmed on celluloid. ‘Black Monday’, in which Redford played the murderous, racist son of a Southern senator was, like ‘The Iceman Cometh’, also a Play of the Week, again made by Talent Associates for distribution by the National Educational Network, and directed by another experienced and talented early TV drama director, Ralph Nelson. As with ‘Iceman’, it was pre-recorded on videotape, with resultant structures of blocked recording and possibilities for retakes. In contrast, ‘The Voice of Charlie Pont’ (ABC 25 October 1962, 22.00), which was an Alcoa Premiere presentation, hosted by Fred Astaire, was shot on film at Revue Studios in Los Angeles. Astaire was an MCA client, and Revue Studios had been created by MCA in 1952 to facilitate the production of its TV shows on film. Redford was Emmy nominated for his performance. Redford’s final anthology drama, ‘The Last of the Big Spenders’, was for the Dick Powell Theatre series, again shot on film, but this time for Powell’s Four Star Productions. Four Star had also been created in 1952, by Powell in partnership with fellow Hollywood stars David Niven, Charles Boyer and Joel McCrea (although McCrea soon left and was replaced by Ida Lupino). ‘Four Star possessed a unique asset in its relationship with the William Morris talent agency …. Instead of creating its own production company [like MCA and Revue], William Morris forged an informal alliance with Four Star, directing its clients to the production company and marketing the company’s series to sponsors and networks’ (Rose, 1995:216). In all of these negotiations and realignments, we can see a shift in television production of dramatic material from the live to the recorded, whether that recording was made onto film or videotape. And this shift has everything to do with the growing realities of television in the 1960s: the increasing need for predictability in scheduling and of control over the production of the material that was to appear in the prescribed scheduling slots of daily programming. As

20

Robert Redford and American Cinema

pre-recorded (film and/or video) became the norm in television programming strategies, it was perhaps also inevitable that the Hollywood movie studios would become integrated into the processes.

Early film industry interest in TV Mention has been made above that two of Redford’s productions were shot on film rather than recorded on videotape. This needs some expansion in order to understand how Redford trained himself in acting for film rather than live television across the 1960s, and how this might have impacted upon his future aesthetic, both as an actor and as a director. In the latter half of the 1940s, a number of Hollywood studios began active involvement in the emerging television industry. Paramount had actually been active before that decade when in 1938 it began a relationship with DuMont Television which would last until the late 1950s. Ownership of stock gave Paramount control over DuMont’s network and stations. Together with its own two TV stations, ‘the studio owned or had an interest in five television stations in some of the biggest markets in the United States’ (White, 1990:148). By 1945, RKO had established RKO Television to investigate the possibilities of the nascent medium. In 1948, 20th Century Fox had established two subsidiaries to build and operate television stations. In the same year, Loews/MGM applied for several TV licences, although these were later withdrawn. However, in the mid-1950s, it again announced plans to acquire interests in several TV stations. This is all to establish that, counter to any kind of received wisdom that the American film industry was antagonistic to television, Hollywood, from television’s earliest days, saw it as at least expedient to keep abreast of developments in the rival medium, and to keep its options open as far as cooperation was concerned. All of the major Hollywood studios attempted to enter the television industry in the early years of the new medium; they sought both to exploit broadcast television through the ownership and operation of television stations and networks and to offer alternatives to broadcast television. These alternatives – theatre television and subscription television – offered ways in which the studios could differentiate their products from those of broadcast

Robert Redford in Theatre and on Television

21

television. They also fit in with the ways in which the motion picture companies had been doing business for decades and allowed them to retain control over distribution of their products and over the profits that resulted from that control.

(White, 1990:161–2) The year 1953 has been seen as a critical turning point. There are many factors involved in this: the lifting of the FCC freeze on the creation of new stations, a shift of advertising money into TV from other media, a drop in movie theatre revenues allied to the effects of post-Paramount divestiture really being felt, the subsequent merger of Paramount United Theatres with ABC, as well as the development and appearance of ‘Disneyland’ and ‘Warner Brothers Presents’ as major events on American television. The announcement of major movie industry involvement in the creation of TV product, rather than just the ownership of, and profit-syphoning from, TV stations, was a significant move forward: ‘Warner Brothers Presents’, along with ‘Disneyland’, represents a formal attempt by the film industry to assume production control over the previously pervasive but scattered use of Hollywood film stars and general glamour on television. …By the end of 1956, the proportion of network programming, mostly filmed, originating in Hollywood stood at 71 percent; ‘the long-postponed marriage between television and Hollywood was nearly complete’ [Castleman and Podrazik, The TV Schedule Book, 1984].

(Hilmes, 1990:154–6) One consequence of Hollywood’s interest, and gradual move into, television, was that it brought with it the tried and trusted professionalism that decades of filmmaking had gradually perfected into the efficiency of the Studio System. Hollywood expertise in production soon began to dominate the television series market. … motion picture exhibitors experienced a traumatic period of turmoil and falling profits as the number of feature films produced yearly declined drastically and television cut into theatre attendance. But producers, although also entering a period of confusion and reorganisation, expanded their markets in production for television.

(Hilmes, 1990:165)

22

Robert Redford and American Cinema

Conversely, in a response to the threat posed by television, movie studios also adopted several strategies for survival in terms of feature production. One was to reduce the volume of output and to make those productions that were released bigger and more spectacular – a strategy that resulted eventually, in a series of ill-considered super-productions (Hello Dolly!, Camelot, etc.) that would bring the Hollywood studio system to the brink of collapse and usher in, albeit short-term (in its initial incarnation, at least) New Hollywood. Redford would become involved in this renaissance, and its aftermath, in a variety of ways, as will be explored in coming chapters. What is more immediately relevant is that TV offered smaller independent production companies a market for their product, bolstering the independent sector of film production companies who saw in this shifting landscape of low-budget, rapid-schedule output a means of establishing a presence in the burgeoning industry. Once the television industry began to take shape in the late 1940s, Hollywood’s most opportunistic independent producers actively negotiated with sponsors and networks to determine the initial programming forms and the economics of filmed TV production. By the early 1950s, many of these marginal producers were replaced by a second wave of independent producers who began to formalise the relations between Hollywood and the television industry, in the process making telefilm production a recognisable component of the movie industry.

(Anderson, 1994:48) These were companies used to running on minimal budgets, with great ingenuity and resourcefulness. They had grown accustomed to squeezing themselves into the cracks and crevices of the studio system – operating on tiny budgets, surviving on minimal profits, designing product that earned money in the neglected areas of a market defined by larger companies. Independent producers and small studios typically filled the exhibitors’ need for such products as B features, short subjects, serials, and travelogues, the less-prestigious and not-as-profitable entertainment that completed a theatre’s daily programme, but that the major companies produced with less frequency after the early 1940s.

(Anderson, 1994:53)

Robert Redford in Theatre and on Television

23

Finally, in terms of both film and television, MCA had crucially also become a prominent producer of both feature films and filmed television shows, creating a tailor-made entity – Revue Productions – for that very purpose. Incorporated in 1943, it only began producing TV in 1950. Its first production, Stars over Hollywood, had been an NBC Saturday morning radio show since 1941. Moving it to TV, MCA insisted it be shot on film at Eagle-Lion Film. ‘It would be expensive, but they were able to budget for the extra cost by paying MCA clients minimum scale: $500 per performance’ (McDougal, 2001:158). MCA, throughout this period especially, were in direct competition with the William Morris agency, who ran a similarly comprehensive operation and roster of major and minor talent. Redford would more than once find himself batted around between these two behemoths of the industry, as will be described later. The ascendance of major movie studios and a select group of independent producers – Desilu, Revue and Four Star – signalled the third stage in the development of the telefilm industry, the period of economic concentration in which massive production factories replaced the small, specialised producers who had defined the industry during its earlier stages. In the tightened market that resulted from the networks’ alliance with Hollywood studios, the networks began to consolidate power over advertisers, affiliates and producers alike.

(Anderson, 1994:217) ABC was instrumental in shifting TV to filmed product, needing to differentiate itself from other networks in a fiercely competitive marketplace, to free itself from the control over product by advertiser, as well as to cultivate ties with the film industry, namely, Disney and Warner Bros. ABC’s related strategies of counterprogramming, demographic targeting, and reliance on small-ticket sponsors made it imperative that the Hollywood producers with whom ABC collaborated deliver a particular type of product – a weekly series of films that would display movie industry production values while invoking traditional Hollywood genres and story-telling skills. Ideally, Hollywood production values would differentiate the series from live television.

(Anderson, 1994:140–1)

24

Robert Redford and American Cinema

The ABC deals showed that TV production could benefit movie studios, especially after the Paramount divorce settlement which, across the following decade, meant that studios were lying increasingly idle. Television productions occupying the spaces were a material bailout.

Redford’s appearances in filmed series Redford’s first filmed television appearances, either side of his live performance in ‘Captain Brassbound’s Conversion’, were in two, by then well established, Western series, typical of the fast-turnaround material that was beginning to become the staple of American network television. Both, to be fair, were fairly prestigious productions of their kind. The first, Maverick, was nearing the end of its third season (each of 26–7 episodes each), and had made a star of its title character, James Garner (although Redford’s episode was actually fronted by Garner’s fictional brother Bart, in a second strand of the show created due to the insatiable production demands created by its popularity). The second, The Deputy, nominally starred Hollywood legend Henry Fonda (although in reality, his was a brief guest appearance that framed each week’s main story, in which troublesome situations were handled by his eponymous deputy). In Maverick, Redford played the slightly naïve and hapless younger brother of the female trail boss with whom Bart Maverick primarily negotiates and flirts. Redford’s role is essentially as the fall guy, whose naivety causes him to be gulled by the villains, necessitating Maverick’s intervention to resolve the situation. In The Deputy, Redford plays Burt Johnson, an altogether less sympathetic character: a young buck intent on making his name by killing an experienced gunslinger who is trying to escape his past reputation and start a new life. In addition to trying to engineer the showdown with the gunfighter, Johnson also, clumsily and drunkenly, attempts to sexually accost the gunfighter’s fiancée. The scene appears too suddenly, making it uncertain whether the attack is simply designed to make his character even less attractive, or to give the plot dynamic more tension by offering it as a reason for the final showdown. The conceit of the episode is that Johnson is in competition with a second young aspiring gunslinger, who is altogether more out-of-control and ‘evil’ than he is. The climax of the episode sees both of them facing one another

Robert Redford in Theatre and on Television

25

on Main Street, flanking the old gunfighter, who is trying to stop the killing. In the event, both of them shoot simultaneously, killing the gunfighter, but leaving it ambiguous which of them fired the single shot which killed him (although Fonda’s sheriff gets his deputy to admit that he has hidden the fact that both bullets found their target). Both men are convicted of the murder. I have dwelt on this episode because it establishes, early in Redford’s television career, a certain stereotyping of him as a villain. In series after series over the first years of the 1960s, Redford would play cold, heartless, psychotic characters in a range of productions, both Western and contemporary. In his first non-Western appearance, although not really a ‘bad’ character, he played a mentally disturbed young man trapped in the wreckage of his family home; in an episode of Moment of Fear, a manipulative stranger twisting a family’s relationships; in Naked City, memorably, the coldly rational, but deranged, neo-Nazi leader of a gang who murders tramps living on the streets; in The New Breed, a hitchhiking serial killer. The list goes on; the ‘bad guy’ roles kept on coming in series after series, to the point where Redford admits that he was surprised when, in 1962, he was offered a positive role in his first movie, a small independent production, War Hunt (to be covered in more detailed in a later chapter). When Redford read the script, the role of Endore jumped out at him. ‘I thought, Oh, I get it. They’ve seen me do the psychos on TV, and now I’m going to be the neurotic wild guy … But I was wrong. I could not believe it when [I was] told to learn Loomis’s lines… I could not believe that these guys saw me as a friendly face. I thought, Finally! I told Monique [James, his agent]: What a relief! I was beginning to be typecast as a loony. Now these Sanders guys are opening it up. They see the actor.’

(Callan, 2010:85) Redford’s increasingly restricting stereotyping across his TV serial acting work is indicative of several factors involved in the production of such material. It bespeaks of the relentless production pressure of such series – week after week, six-day schedules, constantly wringing variations out of the basic set of narrative elements at the creators’ disposal. In such pressurized circumstances, actors had to be hired who could instantly fill a recognizable role, working a shorthand in creating a familiar type. That actor also had only a modest screen

26

Robert Redford and American Cinema

time in which to establish this character: most series were well under thirty minutes in length when advert breaks were accounted for. TV supporting characters had to hit the ground running, so to speak. Redford developed a range of mannerisms and character tics to help him quickly establish his characters’ screen presence, such as the clenching of his jaw when becoming resolute (just before physical action), or the double look ‘off-to-the-side’ in order to notice a potentially significant movement being made by another character (and so appearing to be always ‘primed’ to act and respond, even when the focus of the moment is on the other actor making the gesture). This double-look became one of Redford’s most characteristic acting mannerisms, designed both to attract the camera’s (audiences’) attention and to make his performance appear completely natural: who wouldn’t glance at a movement at the periphery of one’s vision, especially if, as in the Old West, that could be a precursor to dangerous action? More intriguingly, Redford’s early ‘reputation’ as a psychotic bad guy plays against his somewhat over-determined later image as a screen ‘good-guy’: stunningly handsome, dazzlingly smiling, bland male beauty, heroic rescuer of all victims and the oppressed. As analysis of his feature film persona in the next chapter will reveal, this early development of a bad-guy image would by no means be discarded and abandoned once his movie career took off. In spite of his rather exasperated comments regarding stereotyping quoted above, it would be wrong to think that Redford was always striving to become the automatically loved hero in his parts, and that he had to escape television into movies in order to achieve this. Redford also appeared in the short-lived Western series, Tate, in 1960. In fact, he appeared twice, in two separate episodes, as two different characters; quite a feat, considering, as I’ve noted, the series was so short-lived: only one season of thirteen episodes. His twin appearances in this particular series indicate several things about the realities of television series production in the early 1960s. Firstly, the conceit of the show is that the lead – Tate – is an exgunfighter who lost an arm in the Civil War. The interest in each episode is therefore often how he manages to thwart the villains with such a disability. Secondly, Redford’s two appearances, separated by a matter of weeks, speak volumes about the ephemerality of this kind of mass-produced, ‘filler’ product, where its audience would not remember, or not care, that the same actor was

Robert Redford in Theatre and on Television

27

reappearing as a completely different character. Finally, it shows the ‘cookiecutter’ approach to filmed television series which were largely the result of talent agency packaging – actors and creative personnel were simply jigsaw puzzle pieces to be used as and when necessity dictated. Redford’s first role, as a vengeful young son of a man Tate is supposed to have murdered, is over almost before it’s begun (perhaps why he was instantly forgotten and could therefore reappear weeks later as someone else). He is simply the mechanism by which the actual narrative is initiated: he has hired a bounty hunter so that if he fails to kill Tate, the bounty hunter will; the episode is actually about the interaction between Tate and the bounty hunter. Once Redford has announced this at the start, he then rashly tries to kill Tate himself and is gunned down in response. No wonder then, as I’ve said, that audiences tuning in several weeks later would fail to recognize Redford in his second role, as a decent, almost pacifist, character who refuses to fight his brother to the death when the brother confronts him about having stolen away his woman while he was away avenging another brother’s death. This second episode is resolved when Tate steps into Redford’s place, and wounds the brother in a gunfight. But the rushed realities of TV series scripting then have the central characters immediately taken by surprise by Indians, during which the brother’s wife is abducted, only to be immediately rescued off-screen by Redford, who then plants the Indians’ scalps (which he has presumably ‘collected’) on his brother’s grave. Such cavalier narrative twists and turns were not easy for an actor, to put it mildly, if one’s primary focus was establishing a coherent character. Virtually his last filmed TV appearance, in The Virginian, seems to offer a neat transitional role. His character, Matthew Cordell, has been literally institutionalized all his life, having been left on the doorstep of an orphanage as a newborn baby, grown up there, and then sent straight from there to prison following crimes he commits as a young man. The Virginian persuades the Judge (Lee J. Cobb) to give him a chance as a worker on the ranch. The convict with a massive anti-social chip on his shoulder allows Redford to revisit many of the features of his ‘angry young man’ persona of previous roles: sudden outbursts of rage, a ready resorting to his fists, cold, almost psychotic attitude, and finally the accidental killing of an escaped prison buddy who is attempting to persuade him to help burgle the Judge’s house. However, the

28

Robert Redford and American Cinema

denouement of the episode sees the patient philanthropy of the Virginian and Judge pay off, when Cordell returns to accept his fate, having seemingly run away after the killing. Given a second chance, he exhibits the characteristics of a changed man, including parting quip. Having served his apprenticeship as stereotyped ‘wrong-un’, Redford was now, perhaps, ready for change. The reality, in terms of his early movie roles, is somewhat different, as we will see in the next chapter. What his time in television also offered Redford was the chance to work with a range of significant and influential people, both actors and those on the other side of the camera. Laughton, Kennedy, Robards, Lumet, Fonda have all already been mentioned. Other famous, now ageing, actors he learned from included Audie Murphy in an episode of Murphy’s series Whispering Smith in 1961. The presence of so many famous names in early American television is yet another indication of the changing Hollywood of the 1960s, in which venerated movie stars of previous decades were ‘reduced’ to featuring in variable quality TV product. Some of these legendary names were generous in their advice to the young actor; others more reluctant. For example, Callan quotes Redford recounting his experience of working with Lee J. Cobb, one of the stars of The Virginian, in 1963: ‘You couldn’t go wrong studying him’, says Redford. ‘Here was an actor who did it all, starting in the Group Theatre, doing stage, the classics, movies, and now here he was in television. He’d had a heart attack and had obviously slowed down, but I was keen to learn from him.’ After a particularly intense scene, in which Redford found himself stretching to impress the great man, Cobb took him aside: ‘I know what you’re looking for, son, but you won’t get it from me. I’ve paid my dues, done my work, and now I just want to be comfortable.’

(2010:102) But he also went on to be directed by Robert Altman, in an episode of Bus Stop entitled ‘The Covering Darkness’, and Alfred Hitchcock in one episode of his Presents (‘The Right Kind of Medicine’) and two of his Hour (‘A Piece of the Action’ and ‘A Tangled Web’) series. In between, he had parts in other series that have become part of television’s early canon: as Death, come to claim an old lady played by Gladys Cooper, in an episode of The Twilight Zone titled

Robert Redford in Theatre and on Television

29

‘Nothing in the Dark’ in 1962, as well as parts in Dr Kildare (also 1962) and The Untouchables in 1963. There is much revealed about the extraordinary and intense potential of television during these years in this short account. The increasing, and voracious, quantity of material demanded of television as it grew and expanded, offered those willing and prepared to capitalize on it a near constant source of work. There is also a real sense of television as a productive meeting point between ‘seasoned pros’, as they reached the twilight of their careers and had, for whatever necessity, to swap the movies for television, and new and rising talent fresh to the business, eager to learn acting technique and, more crudely, strategies for continuing to exist in a constantly changing industry, whether that was to do with adapting acting style and performance or moving into other roles (scripting, producer, director) within the industry. It is also evidence of the rising potential of television as a creative and artistic medium in its own right that would draw masters of the cinema of the calibre of Alfred Hitchcock to experiment with the forms of production that it could offer. New kids on the block, like Redford, found themselves suddenly in revered company, the like of which they could only have dreamed of as fledgling actors who were finding it all but impossible to break into the restricted world of Hollywood filmmaking. Although budgets were draconially smaller for television as against the movies, the creative process of producing the end material was not dissimilar. Television thereby became a vital educational environment for those actors, like Redford, keen to learn more than just their lines for a particular, dispensable production: ‘the anthology series also offered another important benefit; like B-movie production in the studio system, it served as a training ground, allowing young writers, directors, and producers to experiment in a variety of genres, including comedy, romance and action-adventure’ (Anderson, 1994:64). One interesting further aspect of the low-budget financing of TV material by the majors is that it showed them an economic model that might prove beneficial in years to come: namely, that a modest investment in modest production, made by new and creative talent and marketed in the right way, could reap major rewards – at least equal to all but the biggest blockbuster feature releases. In this way, this period of film/TV crossover, and the

30

Robert Redford and American Cinema

production of small-budget TV features, might be seen as the blueprint for the ‘revolution’ that was to hit Hollywood at the end of the decade: The New Hollywood began to take shape as soon as the major studios – those with the greatest investment in the Old Hollywood of the studio system – forged a relationship between movies and television during the 1950s. Diversifying into television seemed adventuresome to the major studios in 1955, but less than a decade later those same studios had come to depend for their very existence on the income provided by television. At the same time, the networks and local stations leaned heavily on Hollywood in order to satisfy their endless need for programming.

(Anderson, 1994:288) Hollywood maintained some semblance of the ‘big movie’ ethos (family films, epics, event movies) even across this troubled period. Not all Hollywood films were suddenly youth-oriented and ‘alternative’, although certainly fewer, big-budget films were produced, with an increased need for those that were to perform well at the box office. This became an increasingly risky economic strategy if not underpinned by the ‘B’ feature production of studio days, which would offer a full evening’s entertainment for audiences. Therefore, the major studios continued to depend on a mix of low-budget youth features and bigger budget mass-audience features, together with a turn towards television to produce the replacement product for the old ‘B’ movie market. Profits made in TV could therefore be made to underpin blockbuster films. [At the end of 1958], Warner Bros. announced that it now planned to produce only twelve to fourteen movies per year. But with an average budget of $2.5 million, these would be marketed as A pictures, giving them the potential for lucrative returns at the box-office. Since such a small number of movies couldn’t be expected to pay for studio overhead, Warner Bros. relied on television to support studio expenses by adding nearly 40 percent in overhead charges to the average TV budget. In addition to paying overhead, television production continued to serve as a valuable training ground for inexperienced writers, directors, producers, and actors.

(Anderson, 1994:246) Therefore, as Robert Redford was nearing completion of his decade-long television apprenticeship, and began to move uneasily into the world of

Robert Redford in Theatre and on Television

31

American feature production, he was entering a volatile environment of uncertainty. This was a landscape formed of a mixture of old and new arrogance, the wish to maintain old forms and the equally passionate need to dismantle them in response to the youth zeitgeist of the end of the 1960s. Before too long, however, the ‘revolution’ would become deflated as an alternative vision of American filmmaking. It would take either an astute player of the constantly changing world, or someone who, actually, was always semi-disinterested in it, to survive these tumultuous changes. Perhaps, more accurately, it took someone who could combine the two, a canny figure who was capable of negotiating a complex, continually evolving, and above all lasting, path through this new continually changing beast known as (New, Blockbuster, Indie, Post-, etc.) Hollywood. How Robert Redford has been able to perform this perpetual reinvention of self will occupy the remaining chapters of this work.

32

2

Maverick superstar for a New Hollywood

Introduction and context Robert Redford has been constructed, in popular cultural memory and discourse, as the epitome of the classic male Hollywood movie star: impossibly good looking, manly, virile, but within a kind of inoffensive, cross-gender appeal – perfect for securing the widest possible fan base. According to this clichéd framing, in his earliest years of movie stardom, women openly wanted him, while men wanted to be him. Across the 1970s, he became an established favourite with the industry because he appeared in a range of movies, some small-scale, but others bigger budget; the latter, especially, returning huge sums at the box office. The reality of Redford’s position within the industry in the latter half of the 1960s, fresh from a string of television appearances in which he largely played mentally unhinged villains, and a modest entry into a series of feature films which both maintained that socially dysfunctional, or even psychotic, image and offered a non-descript alternative, was anything but a confirmation of his instant star quality. It was even debatable whether Redford was seeking that star status. Through these years, he was clear in his disdain for the artificial trappings of Hollywood glamour. Although inescapably aware (or relentlessly made aware) of his conventional good looks, he was angry enough, and forceful enough, to insist upon working against this prescriptive and superficial pigeon-holing in an attempt to project something more complex and ambiguous in terms of the characters he chose to play on screen. Indeed, he only became involved in acting as a by-product of other interests: namely, his beginnings as a fine artist, pragmatically, perhaps reluctantly,

34

Robert Redford and American Cinema

adapted to an idea of designing stage sets at theatre school. He then found, having been forced, as part of the programme, to be involved in acting classes as one of the conditions for enrolling in theatre school that against his expectations he liked the physical and emotional immediacy of acting itself. His early efforts in this area, however, were all to do with trying to challenge orthodox methods – of studied ‘actorly’ technique, of the careful pre-planning of a performance in terms of the text, of control and predictability in every aspect of developing ‘the performance’. This is one of the most intriguing of elements in Redford’s early formation of his actor-star identity: how much it was premeditated, how much a careful construction of a planned future star image and how much just the simple joy of spontaneous invention that accidentally resulted in stardom. The trajectory of this chapter takes us from the free and impulsive to the more controlled and preconceived: in the process moving Redford from maverick spirit, more in tune with the counter-culture New Hollywood, to his positioning relative to the reassertion of studio control, within which stars would have immense power and influence, thereby establishing the format for production structures that are still in play within the Hollywood film industry to this day. This chapter will primarily explore Redford’s conscious, and perhaps unconscious, negotiations and manipulations of the incredibly fluid and ever-changing landscape of American filmmaking across the 1960s and into the 1970s: the period during which Redford moved from being a TV star and movie bit player to being the biggest movie star in the world. This latter achievement is all the more impressive because it was achieved in a period when the idea of the conventional movie star was anathema to the aims of the New Hollywood. Old Hollywood had collapsed, and the ‘lunatics had taken over the asylum’, or were just about to. In the last couple of years of the 1960s, radical alternatives were the name of the game. What place did a sun-kissed, blandly smiling West Coast jock, seemingly easy in his sexual allure, have in this prickly New Jerusalem? Redford’s negotiation of these shifting sands, and his emergence as a major player (both as on-screen star and, increasingly, as behind-the-scenes producer), is a testament to two primary factors: firstly, the inability of the hardcore alternative American cinema to maintain its countercultural agenda, petering out by the middle of the 1970s; secondly, the consequent, perhaps reactionary, need for American

Maverick Superstar for a New Hollywood

35

culture to reinstall new, more comfortable, cultural icons into the centre of its reference system, as a means of re-stabilizing one of its major cultural industries – cinema.

Paramount Decrees and the future power of stardom It starts, as so many accounts of post-war American cinema do, with the Paramount Decrees of 1948: a law-suit against monopoly practices deemed to be practised by the vertically integrated Hollywood studios due to their control over production, distribution and exhibition of feature films. The judgement handed down as a result of the case forced the studios to divest themselves of their exhibition chains. The well-oiled ‘conveyor-belt’ production system, which had come to typify Hollywood’s feature film production method, had enabled the selling of groups of lesser films on the back of fewer, but coveted, big-budget, star-laden specials. Hollywood’s economic rationale was dependent on the security of box office revenues from studio-owned exhibition outlets, which ensured that money expended on productions was returned, with profit, to finance further productions in an endless, but reassuring, cycle. The consequences of this were various and radical. Studio strategy had been to protect lower-budget films, which might often under-perform or fail at the box office, by spreading the profits from more sure-fire big-budget and starladen features. Indeed, the low-budget output was seen as essential in a period where double bills – an A-list feature supported by a B-feature – made up a full evening’s entertainment, supplemented by shorter newsreels and cartoons. Post-Paramount, that format ceased to make economic sense, with the result that more emphasis was increasingly placed on the main feature to make its profits within its own terms, purely as a marker of its own market-place worth and significance. This model of the standalone ‘blockbuster’ success, although an occasional feature of American movies since the earliest days of feature production, and certainly destined to become perhaps the identifying aspect of Hollywood in its post-‘New’ period from the mid-1970s onwards was established in the early 1950s as the slightly desperate means by which Hollywood would survive the amputation of its exhibition arm and loss of assured, production-line sustaining, revenues.

36

Robert Redford and American Cinema

There were a number of consequences of this emphasis on a smaller number of bigger-budget productions. Proposed productions had to come with desirable, sellable, elements: a well-known source novel or play, a named star and/or director. Instead of a spread of different and variable elements, productions were increasingly expected to offer a package of identifiable qualities that would, as much as possible, ensure success at the box office. Foremost amongst these was the film star, and the 1950s saw the increase in star-led package deals with the studios, in which one or more star names – actor(s), director, writer – would form a production grouping linked to a ‘property’ – pre-existing novel or play, or synopsis to be written up by the known screenwriter – and present this to the studio for financing and distribution. In this way, studios became increasingly to be seen primarily as the ‘money men’, funding productions and reaping a (hopefully large) proportion of box office rewards, but not centrally the originating forces that they had once been, preParamount. This, in turn, threw emphasis upon the ‘talent’ – more often than not the actor-star as, quite literally, the visible face of the project: the person responsible for the success or failure of the venture. Such a weight of responsibility might often be unreasonable – the artistic success of a feature usually being as much down to the talents of a writer or director, and its financial success as much a consequence of astute and effective studio-financed and organized marketing campaigns, for example. But nevertheless, the elevated position of the film star within the newly organized constellation of elements working to make a success of a given production gave the star actor considerable power, both artistic and financial. Artistically, he or she had more say in the production – from casting to editing of script and even co-producer power. Financially, s/ he could demand higher and higher salaries, and more of a ‘cut’ of box office revenues. James Stewart’s lucrative percentage-of-box office deal for appearing in Winchester ‘73 (1955), a popular success, was seen as the groundbreaker in terms of shifting the terms of Hollywood filmmaking deals. From this point onwards, star actors realized that, as one of the most, if not the most, important elements in the selling of films to the public, they were able to demand a range of benefits, from greater input into the creative process to more lucrative deals dependent on the movie’s success. After over a decade

Maverick Superstar for a New Hollywood

37

of such negotiations, the possibilities had become firmly established for new players striving to make their mark in the business. The increasing emphasis upon the centrality of the star was an almost inevitable consequence of the economic model of reduced number, higherbudget, higher-risk productions that became Hollywood’s chosen strategy in the post-Paramount period. But this strategy came with a noted risk: The number of stars in the system decreased significantly from the classical era, just as the number of films produced annually declined consistently throughout the sixties and seventies. But the overall ratio of film budgets dedicated to performers’ pay increased, as did the salaries themselves. Especially at the dawn of the New Hollywood, major film financiers questioned whether stars were effective box-office draws. Yet record sums accrued to rising and established stars throughout the decade.

(Morrison, 2010:1–2) Redford would prove to be one of the more astute players in this new game.

European art cinema At the time, in the late 1960s when Redford was attempting to break into Hollywood, the new generation of young filmmakers being wooed by the old studios was heavily influenced by the latest movements in European art cinema. Coppola, Altman, Penn, Bogdanovich, all avowed a great love of what they saw as the adventurous filmmaking of the European cinemas, and the new generation of non-conventionally handsome, almost ugly, actors such as Jean-Paul Belmondo and Charles Aznavour. Redford, perhaps surprisingly, professed the same. He had been interested in European art cinema for some time. Indeed, he had helped fund and organize a project – Education, Youth and Recreation (EYR) – to promote ‘alternative film’, both foreign and American, through university campuses. ‘I loved the nouvelle vague. I loved what was happening in Europe …. with directors like Fellini, Truffaut, and of course Bergman, who was giving us another view of the human experience. I wanted to encourage a comparable independent artistry in American film and started it there with EYR’ (Callan,

38

Robert Redford and American Cinema

2010:150–1). Furthermore, he had also planned, but failed, to have discussions with Truffaut and the British director Tony Richardson, ‘both of whom had expressed interest in working with him’, in Paris just before Inside Daisy Clover (1965) (Callan, 2010:107). But, as he admitted, ‘when I got down to it, I knew my fate was with [his agent Meta] Rosenberg and the Warners soundstage. I was the one who asked for that. I was the one who set those wheels in motion’ (Callan, 2010:107). As perhaps a compromise for this lack of courage in fully embracing the European art cinemas in their own environ, Redford agreed to work, on American turf, with another of European art cinema’s enfants terribles, Roman Polanski, who was set to direct the production of Downhill Racer (1969), in which Redford was to play a coldly ambitious Olympic skier. Polanski’s name, however, was taken off the production when he ran over-schedule on Rosemary’s Baby (1968). Redford and his newly chosen director, Michael Ritchie, seeing an opportunity, stepped into the vacuum, Redford aggressively negotiating a deal which allowed him to produce the film, with Ritchie directing. On the back of this, Redford set up a production company, Wildwood, which he has maintained to the current day as his main producing arm – an early example of actors establishing their personal production companies as a means of ensuring maximum control over the production process of their own films.

New Hollywood The big-budget spectacular cinema strategy of Hollywood during the late 1950s and through the 1960s, motivated by industry shifts and challenges such as television and other factors, is widely acknowledged to have ultimately failed. Late period successes, such as The Sound of Music (1965), with a box office of almost $300 million worldwide, temporarily blinded industry leaders to the dangers of the strategy, which finally came home to roost towards the end of the decade with a string of box office flops – Doctor Doolittle (1967; $6 million rentals against $17 million budget), Star! (1968; $10 million worldwide against a $17 million budget) and Hello Dolly! (1969; $15 million in rentals against a $25 million budget) – which drove their various studios to near bankruptcy. As the 1960s ended, UA lost $85 million, MGM $72 million

Maverick Superstar for a New Hollywood

39

and 20th Century Fox $65 million; Columbia almost went into receivership. The ‘build them big, sell them loud’ strategy clearly wasn’t working. Hence, as the standard account has it, the old guard of Hollywood has-been studio heads issued panic-stricken pleas to the emerging, new generation of filmmakers to save the industry, a rescue plan achieved through low-budget, youth-oriented movies such as Easy Rider (1969; $60 million worldwide against a $400,000 budget, including marketing). However, Easy Rider is ultimately atypical and unrepresentative of the actual significance of New Hollywood. Many of the other drug-culture films failed to do anything like as well at the box office. We would be wiser to look towards Bonnie and Clyde (1967; $70 million against a $2.5 million budget) or The Graduate (1967; $115 million against a $3 million budget), with their new generation of alternative movie actor, as the significant feature releases of the late sixties. This is because, while they also addressed the developing youth culture of the age (young, cool leads, anti-establishment attitudes), they framed this within still clearly coherent and accessible narratives which were at least capable of being enjoyed by a wider demographic than the 16–24 age group of the drug-culture films. The box office of the two films speaks volumes in this respect. This more ‘respectable’ New Hollywood, certainly relative to the short-lived druggy, drop-out film strand, is the one that the more erudite film historians choose to focus on. It produced a string of significant films – Five Easy Pieces (1970), The King of Marvin Gardens (1972), Shampoo (1975), etc. – which more intelligently examined the shifting values of late 1960s and early 1970s American society and culture and seriously examined the concerns of increasingly disillusioned young people in an America which was losing its post-war sense of infallibility and invincibility. One aspect of this was the tendency of the films to feature relative unknowns. Warren Beatty had made a few films before Bonnie and Clyde (1967), but his initial promise was seen to already be waning before the film made him a significant industry player. Jack Nicholson had been active in the Roger Corman world of exploitation movies, but had failed to make the transition to mainstream stardom. Dustin Hoffman was perhaps the epitome of this new breed of anti-stars: small, not conventionally handsome, rather ‘dorky’, he was the antithesis of the traditional, chisel-jawed Hollywood male lead.

40

Robert Redford and American Cinema

Certainly, Hoffman’s ‘meteoric success’ (although he’d been struggling in the business for years, largely through theatre work and an intermittent TV career) in The Graduate (1967) rang alarm bells for many in the industry, who couldn’t understand how such a physically unexceptional actor could play the romantic lead in a major box office success. Among those alarmed to see this happening was Steve McQueen, whose rugged manliness was the polar opposite of Hoffman’s meek geek: [T]he notion of stardom became suspect. As a holdover of the old myths, it seemed to rely by definition on the construction of idealised images, but what most characterises stardom of the seventies is a provisional rejection of such idealisation. Nearly every major star to emerge in the decade defies the familiar norms of beauty, glamour, and traditional masculinity or femininity that stardom itself had done so much to establish. Yet few critics argued that these shifting standards reflected a growing preference for authenticity over the constructed image, despite a wash of rhetoric to that effect, nowhere more abundant than in star discourses of the time.

(Morrison, 2010:2) Robert Redford, who had tested for the role of Benjamin, was in the running for some time before being rejected. Redford was considered because everyone involved in the production during the casting stage, including Hoffman and Redford, saw Benjamin as a WASP figure, albeit one who was still awkward with women. Redford finally lost out on the role because, with his dazzling good looks, it was impossible to imagine him ever having difficulty with women. And therein lies the seed of his eventual mainstream stardom.

A new generation of actors However, the radical oppositional grouping of actors during these years is at least partly artificial, a quick and lazy classification system that helps to organize the history of a period full of such nominal binary oppositions: Old Hollywood vs New Hollywood, the rise of the auteur director to mark the final demise of the metteur-en-scène, etc. Molly Haskell, writing near the time of the New Hollywood, commented that the new stars of the period were interchangeable: ‘If we can’t get X, we’ll get Y’ (Weis, 1981:47). But Haskell was

Maverick Superstar for a New Hollywood

41

largely thinking in terms of one of the new breed anti-stars replacing another: Nicholson replacing Hoffman, for example (or, conceivably, a still extant mainstream star replacing another one in the older, traditional, productions: Christopher Plummer for Rex Harrison, in Doctor Doolittle, for example; indeed, this almost happened, when Harrison was briefly fired from the production [Harris, 2008:134]). But to expand upon Haskell’s comment above, it is significant, if not a little amusing, to note that the glamour boys and the anti-heroes often went up for the same parts in the new milestone films of the period. Dustin Hoffman only won the part of Benjamin in The Graduate, for example, after Redford had been tested, and rejected, for it. Redford only won the part of the Sundance Kid after Steve McQueen and Marlon Brando were unsuccessfully courted by the studio. Haskell does go on to qualify her first position, commenting that even Redford, who, with his regular features and glamorous WASP good looks, comes closest to our traditional idea of the star, is constantly recoiling from stardom … His guardedness, his apparent distaste for the public life in a film like The Candidate, seems as much of a projection of Redford himself as of the role. We know by the cool way they handle themselves, by the ironic distance they generally keep from emotional commitment, that these guys are smart, smarter than the bosses, smarter than the system (which they may or may not beat).

(Haskell, 1981:48) Haskell’s subtle incorporation of Redford into the pantheon of anti-stars of the New Hollywood questions his image as an un-problematically mainstream matinee idol. But if we still allow this version of Redford, at least in terms of the attempts by his agents and studios to make him such a conventional movie star, in another sense, this is evidence that the industry was all at sea, flailing in trying to read the times. That anyone, establishment or anti-establishment, might be seen as suitable for any project, low-budget or high, is not a coherent game plan strategy; it is a sign of panic. And it certainly muddies the water, if what you want as a historian is a neat division into black and white, dramatic oppositional camps of old and new, revolution in the nostrils. The paradox of New Hollywood is that traditional glamour co-existed and co-competed with its gritty, less perfect, alternative.

42

Robert Redford and American Cinema

Redford’s early films Within this incipiently changing industrial landscape, I want, briefly, to consider the context within which Redford finally entered the movie business in the latter half of the 1960s. This section is designed to show how Redford both ‘paid his dues’ as a jobbing actor rather than an ‘instant’ star, and negotiated himself between the old, disappearing, traditional, studio system and the emerging elements of the more independent New Hollywood. By the end of this new apprenticeship period, Redford would be primed for stardom, though a stardom that he would insist still mixed the mainstream with the alternative. He made his first ‘proper movie’ (as opposed to TV ‘movie’), War Hunt (1962), after the fraternal producer/director team of Denis and Terry Sanders had approached him backstage during the theatre run of Little Moon of Albany. The Sanders brothers were Turkish, UCLA graduates, and, according to Redford (who liked them all the more for it), ‘quirky and cutting-edge’ (Callan, 2010:84). The film was shot on a $250,000 budget from Universal after the brothers had won an Oscar for their cinema verité short about the Civil War, A Time out of War. The result was an interesting failure, but gave Redford both invaluable experience as a film, rather than TV or theatre, actor and valuable insights into the moviemaking business. Interestingly, almost as a footnote here, during production, Redford and co-star John Saxon had an illuminating discussion about the future of the American film business. Saxon was adamant that all that remained in L.A. was television …. That the movie market was dead. He [Redford] wouldn’t have any of it. He was still a relative unknown, had no real power, but he was emphatic. ‘There’s plenty left to do’, he told me. I said, ‘But the movies are dead out here’, and he just looked at me and shook his head. He was a stubborn critter.

(quoted in Callan, 2010:87) This interchange neatly summarizes Redford’s approach to developing his career as a film actor: to play mainstream against independent. It would become the major strategy of his future working life in the industry.

Maverick Superstar for a New Hollywood

43

Three years later, Redford appeared in Situation Hopeless … but Not Serious (1965), a European-located studio picture, financed by Paramount, with an ‘international’ cast – main star Alec Guinness and German director Gottfried Reinhardt, who had directed a dozen forgettable ‘B’ movies in the previous decade. The result was a misguided failure, a clash of values, tones, styles and pacing common to international co-productions of the time, that left the film on the shelf until the success of Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid (1969) four years later, when it was finally released on the back of Redford’s sudden fame, on a double bill with Oh Dad, Poor Dad, Mama’s Hung You in the Closet and I’m Feeling So Sad (1967). That the latter film was co-directed by Richard Quine (Sex and the Single Girl; How to Murder Your Wife) and Alexander Mackendrick (uncredited, but of Ealing comedies fame), and starred fading luminaries such as Rosalind Russell (His Girl Friday; Aunty Mame) is a testament to the sorry state of the industry during this period, where such former talents should be squandered on such unworthy projects. Redford’s next three films are far more telling in terms of the negotiation taking place between Old and New Hollywood. Inside Daisy Clover (1965) was a star vehicle designed around Natalie Wood, who had been a movie star for many years, and was to make this her thirty-eighth film. It was also calculatedly founded on the sudden, massive, fame of Christopher Plummer, fresh off the mega-success of The Sound of Music (1965), as well as director Robert Mulligan, whose To Kill a Mockingbird (1962) was similarly celebrated and respected. The film was shot on the Warners lot and on location on Santa Monica pier: by all markers, a studio movie. It lost money on a budget of $4.5 million, making back only $1.5 million. The Chase (1966), again, had an all-star cast, headed by Marlon Brando, top-flight creatives which included writer Lillian Hellman, and producer Sam Spiegel, who had by then become known for his big-budget, epic productions, his previous film being Lawrence of Arabia (1962). Redford here was in heavyweight mainstream Hollywood company. But it also had Arthur Penn as director, one of the forthcoming New Hollywood pioneer figureheads who was to make Bonnie and Clyde only two years later. Again, we can see Redford, more by luck than design perhaps, in the midst of a combination of traditional studio and rising independent forces.

44

Robert Redford and American Cinema

Redford’s third film in this ‘trilogy’, This Property Is Condemned (1966) seemed to repeat the formulaic dichotomy. Again starring Natalie Wood, it was Redford’s friend Sydney Pollack’s first major film assignment, based on a short play by Tennessee Williams but substantially re-written by UCLA Film School graduate, and future New Hollywood mentor, Francis Ford Coppola. Again, we see the mixture of the Old and the New, and the straddling of mainstream and future New Hollywood. But it is also worth noting that the production, compared to the previous two films, was rather thinner in its overall star quality across creatives. The relative lack of success of these early films had, at least in terms of Redford, compromised his potential promise: he was on the verge of being a has-been even before he was a once-was. However, as a significant final note on this film, Callan quotes Redford commenting that ‘Long before Sydney directed me … the director-actor dynamic was in play. It was a dialogue that could switch either way, real productive interactivity based on our curiosity about the world and a desire to put new spins on conventional platforms. Out of that bond came This Property’ (2010:13). It is just worth flagging here that in one of his first films, Redford was already active in collaborating with his director in shaping the creation of the finished work. Chapter 5, on Redford as director, will explore this far more fully. Barefoot in the Park (1967) returned Redford to the mainstream, being a fairly straight, traditional, translation to film of a very successful Broadway play, in which Redford had starred for a full year (October 1963–4). Financed by Paramount, it was as safe and conventional a property as could be imagined, almost a sure bet. And so it proved to be, earning $9 million, five times its budget, in its first six weeks and, eventually, $20 million worldwide. Redford didn’t want to make the film. He was burned out from the year of playing his character, Paul Bratter, on stage, and so was initially reluctant to resurrect him in movie form. But eventually he agreed, and the film helped enormously in re-establishing him as a potential star of the future within Hollywood. Much against his instincts which were, at this time, more alternative and nonHollywood, Redford had manoeuvred himself into a certain, for him perhaps undesirable, position as a light-comedy actor in traditional comedy fare in a declining and seemingly increasingly irrelevant mainstream American film industry.

Maverick Superstar for a New Hollywood

45

Redford as actor: Three early films revisited As has been suggested earlier in this chapter, Robert Redford straddled, albeit uneasily and with ambiguous forethought, the mainstream and alternative poles of the industry at the end of the 1960s. One pole would take him towards being the conventional movie star, appearing in the safe, traditional, familyoriented, mainstream cinema of the now seemingly defunct Hollywood studio system. As Molly Haskell notes: Robert Redford is perhaps the only one of the new breed to generate the kind of electrical charge that we associate with the stars of a bygone era. He is the pure and total star (and, some would say condescendingly, only a star) rather than the Nicholson/Gould-type actor-star, or a character-actorturned-star such as Dustin Hoffman or Gene Hackman. For them, stardom remains conditional and related to role. For Redford, the voltage is set and steady and no longer has much to do with performance.

(1981:51–2) The other pole would be that of the rising, rebellious, anti-establishment New Hollywood: the new, grungy, usually bearded, rebel, angry at anything and everything and hedonistically interested in all things escapist. It is easy to place Redford in the former camp – as Haskell intimates, photogenically handsome, seemingly vacuous, playing it safe and conventional (the real-life embodiment, perhaps, of his character Paul Blatter in Barefoot in the Park). But this image is countered by two factors. The first is Redford’s noted disconnection from all things safe and comfortable in 1960s America: as indicated earlier, as a young adult, he was a troubled and angry soul, who attempted to ‘find himself ’ as a painter in Europe, and had actively resisted conventional teaching techniques at acting school and in his early theatre and television roles, refusing to play it safe in the latter by accepting the lead role, when offered, in a conventional continuing drama series, Breaking Point. This was his early identity: as rebellious, disaffected and disillusioned by America and its values as any of the New Hollywood counterculture icons also professed to be. In this context of Redford’s acting style and nascent star-image, a brief revisiting of his first, pre-Butch, film roles might be useful: Wade Lewis, a

46

Robert Redford and American Cinema

narcissistic, multi-sexual (reduced to ‘mere’ homosexual in the final cut) predator in Inside Daisy Clover; ‘Bubber’ Reeves, a convict (albeit innocent of the murder committed by a fellow escapee at the start of the film) on the run in The Chase; Owen Legate, a seemingly heartless railroad agent in This Property Is Condemned, who appears in a small town under instructions to brutally lay off most of the workers; and finally, on the eve of his big break, the reprising of his character from his biggest Broadway play, Paul Bratter in Barefoot in the Park. None of them are totally unlikeable, although Bratter spends most of the film being the stuffed shirt to his more liberated wife, until his values of stability and inherent decency curtail her 1960s feminist excesses. But still, all slightly unlikeable characters too; some, certainly, far more than others. This rogue’s gallery of anti-heroic characters (on a scale from near-psychotic to merely boring) can be seen to be continuing Redford’s track record of interest in playing ‘oddballs’, whether psychopaths and outcasts, from his television days or charmless upholders of convention in theatre. And, as with those roles, he imbues these potentially unacceptable characters with a great deal of depth and humanity, despite their unappealing qualities. Redford’s good looks, charm and dazzling smile make them all seem potentially desirable. Redford’s role as Bubber in The Chase, even though chosen by him instead of other possibilities, peripheralized him into being a cypher and ultimate victim, spending most of his screen time running from location to location rather than actually acting. Only the final scene, when he reunites with his wife to find she has deserted him for another man, allows him space to perform as a real character, before he is gunned down while being taken in by Brando’s sheriff. He imbues the role with more sympathy than most of the criminals he played during his television days, but the effect is short-lived. As Owen Leagate, the development of his role is compromised by the confusing shifts in the narrative: at the start of the film, he appears in an industrial town as a seemingly heartless job-cutter and ends as a melodramatic lover. In truth, he copes well with both ‘identities’, using his understated acting style to suggest Leagate’s controlled and calculated personality, and his more spontaneous acting style to convince us of his release from this former constraining persona through finding true love. The really interesting character was Lewis in Inside Daisy Clover. His part was written as a homosexual, which was risky enough for an actor to play at

Maverick Superstar for a New Hollywood

47

that time (indeed, he was advised not to take the part as being detrimental to his career development). Redford, however, wanted to be even more adventurous and play the character as an extreme: ‘I am interested in playing, if anything, someone who bats ten different ways: children, women, dogs, cats, men, anything that salves his ego. Total narcissism’ (quoted in Spada, 1977:82) (Figure 2.1). This, remember, was in 1966, and Redford was explicitly stating that he was only interested in playing the originally written gay character as a completely amoral sexual predator with no boundaries: not only a demanding acting challenge in itself, but extraordinarily courageous for an actor possibly assumed, at this stage in his career, to want to protect his fledgling screen image. It is evidence of Redford’s early ambitions: not for stardom, necessarily, but for pushing himself as an actor and for simple commitment to the given role, without consideration of what that might do to his image or for the development of his career. It is perhaps one of the tragedies of his career that this extreme desire was progressively curtailed as stardom, and then superstardom, engulfed him from the early 1970s onwards. It might also provide a partial explanation for his commitment to independent American cinema, where such boundaries are not only pushed, but also expected to be pushed. In mid-1967, after the success of Barefoot in the Park, Redford was finally being regarded as a rising young actor with box office potential. A few months later, he was being sued for a quarter of a million dollars by Paramount for walking out on a Western, Blue (1968), it was planning to make, because he

Figure 2.1  Brave debut: Redford as pansexual Wade Lewis in Inside Daisy Clover.

48

Robert Redford and American Cinema

disagreed with the inauthenticity of the approach, and was being seen within the industry as a stubborn troublemaker who was on the verge of blowing his big chance at stardom. A little over a year later, he achieved that stardom by appearing in a Western with the previous decade’s biggest male star, which became one of the biggest hits of 1969 and has remained one of the most beloved of Westerns to this date. Such was the volatility of the times: conflicting regimes rubbing up against one another, uncomfortable partners in a redefining of a long-established filmmaking industry. How Redford made this awkward and troublesome transition in many ways encapsulates the shifts occurring within the American film industry as a whole as the 1960s drew to a close. In what follows, I am in no way trying to suggest that Redford paved the way or provided the template for how Hollywood, and actors within Hollywood, would negotiate the move from one industrial model to another. In the previous two decades, at least, several significant male stars had already done some of what Redford did to build his career and cement his position within the industry. I will be using him, rather, as a focal point around which to examine those manoeuvres and negotiations. Barefoot in the Park was in many ways a very traditional, general entertainment film. It was bright and breezy, moving through numerous, very funny, scenes before reaching the inevitable happy ending which reconciled the temporarily conflicted newlyweds (Redford and Jane Fonda) at its centre. Redford had played the part of Paul Bratter for a full year on Broadway, and could do it, by his own admission, in his sleep. Moreover, he hated the stuffed shirt character he had to play, who is only ‘liberated’ at the very end of the film when, high on cold medicine, he finally walks barefoot in Central Park, joining his new wife as a 1960s free spirit (Figure 2.2). The film, therefore, both had its cake and ate it: positing Fonda’s character’s anarchic spirit as a disruptive problem kept in check by her husband’s sensible responsibility, while finally allowing them to be young in love and freedom seekers just as the final credits roll. Although obviously connecting, very loosely, to the youth zeitgeist of sixties Hippy America (though Simon had written the play several years earlier), it is a very long way from the bleaker satire of The Graduate, which opened only a few months later. Robert Redford auditioned for the part of Benjamin Braddock in that latter film, but was rejected, not because his acting wasn’t up to scratch, but because

Maverick Superstar for a New Hollywood

49

Figure 2.2  Finally footloose: Redford as Paul Blatter in Barefoot in the Park.

no-one would believe that someone looking like him would have trouble attracting and seducing women. That problem was left to Dustin Hoffman and his quirky, alternative physical look and mumbly, deadpan delivery. With the advent of this new generation of non-handsome male actors that The Graduate ushered in, Redford’s conventional matinee idol handsomeness and male virility were potentially in some danger, threatening to stall his career before it had properly started.

Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid (1969) But, finally, we get to the film that ‘made him’, Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid. The story of how he, finally, got the part has been well told in countless accounts (Goldman, Callan, et al.), so only the briefest of precis will be offered here, and only to try to bring forward various dynamics of stardom and industry that have been covered earlier in this work. Redford was NOT wanted for the role. The studio, 20th Century Fox, adamantly refused to consider him, because, having struck gold on The Sound of Music (1965), it wanted an all-star Western capable of similar big box office. Paul Newman was a given, but who to play alongside him? Newman and Steve McQueen? Newman and Marlon

50

Robert Redford and American Cinema

Brando? Newman and Warren Beatty? Any of these actors were considered, perhaps, as a backlash against the rise of New Hollywood (although Beatty was, ironically, also part of emerging New Hollywood, through his producing and starring roles in Bonnie and Clyde in 1967). In an explicit expression of the package system in action, the film’s director, George Roy Hill incessantly, and thereafter the film’s main star Newman and writer William Goldman, all argued for Redford until the studio capitulated and he finally won the role. In it, he plays a charming but ruthless gunman, complete with killer smile and the quickest draw in the West. The binary opposition of late 1960s Hollywood actor identity is contained right there in the character: drop-dead handsome as a Hollywood leading man ought to be (and remember – he is seen as the film’s gorgeous male, even when alongside former automatic choice Paul Newman!) but potentially capable of a ruthless violence that no previous generation Hollywood leading man would have contemplated tarnishing his image by committing. As David Hanna, somewhat poetically but nonetheless accurately, described him, Redford as Sundance ‘appeared in the movie out of a sinister dusk …. his mystique resid[ing] partly in a darker side of his nature’ (1975:68). Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid links explicitly to Tell Them Willie Boy Is Here (considered below), both Westerns, and both characters, Cooper and Sundance, while notably on opposite sides of the law, are not dissimilar: the emotionally shut-down loner, fixed and committed to a personal Western ethos of taciturnity and certainty of personal skillsets (gunplay, tracking, oneness with the landscape, awareness of falseness and hypocrisy), but who is also sufficiently aware of his personal charisma to be sure of himself in seducing the ‘proper lady’, whether Reservation Commissioner (Willie Boy) or schoolteacher (Butch). There are numerous scenes in which the ruthless qualities of his character are clearly spelled out. In the poker game scene, which almost starts the film, his character is nervous and vigilant, constantly looking for signs of danger. Redford establishes his character through brooding physical menace (even while, impressively, sitting statically at the gaming table). Most effectively apparent and as I’ve noted earlier in this work, an acting trope Redford had already developed in his earlier work, and would carry through the rest of his acting career, are his nervous, flickering eyes, restlessly attempting to assess

Maverick Superstar for a New Hollywood

51

the intentions of those around him, judging any potential threat and danger (Figure 2.3). There is something cold and ruthless, and yet vulnerable, in this staring. A key light even seems to emphasize this, making his eyes glow in the sombre darkness of the barroom. His opponent accuses him of cheating, but pales when he finds out he’s called out the Sundance Kid. Then, foolishly, when he asks Sundance how good he is with a gun, Sundance explosively draws and shoots his opponent’s gunbelt from his waist, and then the gun itself across the room in a series of further shots. [Significantly, in the scene, Newman, as Butch, has noted that he is over the hill, insinuating that Redford as Sundance is the new heir apparent. Newman handing on the mantle of male star to Redford at the very start of the film would signal Redford’s ascension to that particular throne.] When he and Butch return to the gang’s camp, Butch is challenged for his leadership and to a knife fight. He asks Sundance to kill his opponent if he loses. ‘Be glad too’, says Sundance, before flashing the Redford smile at the challenger. The mix of ruthless killer and charming smiler is unsettling, at the same time as it is comic. Later, towards the end of the film, Sundance and Butch are facing Mexican bandits who’ve stolen the money they are in charge of protecting. Sundance tells Butch to kill certain bandits and he’ll cover the rest, only to be told that Butch has never shot or killed anyone. ‘One hell of a

Figure 2.3  The eyes have it: Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid.

52

Robert Redford and American Cinema

time to tell me’, says Sundance, the professional killer who thinks nothing of shooting and killing anyone opposing him. He conducts his personal life equally ruthlessly: in an early ‘comic’ scene, he seems to ‘force’ a woman to strip at gunpoint in front of him, before it is revealed that he is, in fact, her lover. But later, having slept with her – Ella – again after returning from a dangerous mission, he dismissively offers her to Butch, after the noted ‘Raindrops are Falling on my Head’ montage has established a more-than-close relationship between Ella and Butch. Echoing Hanna, director George Roy Hill has astutely commented that Redford brought a lot of his own personality to the role – outwardly hard and distant, inwardly warm. ‘If you have a cold man playing a potential killer, it’s repulsive. Redford was able to play against the underlying warmth and make the character full-bodied’ (quoted in Spada, 1977:113). In doing this he was continuing the strategy that had served him so well across the earlier years of the decade: namely, to play the most heinous of characters with the utmost charm, to make the awful and dangerous irresistibly attractive, dare I say seductive? If so, it was a strategy that would be tested to its limits in the films that were to immediately follow the success of Butch. What makes his playing of these characters so redeemable are the small details of his performances, details developed from his early work in theatre and especially, given its intimacy of reception, in television: the side glances, the smallest facial gestures, the even smaller, almost imperceptible, shifts of focus in his eyes as he responds to situations or makes decisions that will affect both his character and the narrative. These are actorly gestures, but of the subtlest register; you really have to be watching intently to catch them. They are also elements in Redford building a spontaneously natural performance. He is fully believable in character because the moments of that character are so minutely expressed: human in all their flaws. That is perhaps why, even in this, his first major box office success, he captured audiences’ attention. He connects intimately and believably to them through the smallest of his expressions. Alongside him, the method acting tics of even so accomplished an actor as Paul Newman often seem over-done and somewhat too obvious. Ironically, the minuteness of Redford’s acting style would often come to be the basis for accusations of blandness, of nothing much going on in the actor stakes and thereby in the character itself. To be a credible actor in modern Hollywood, it seems, you need

Maverick Superstar for a New Hollywood

53

to be prepared to gain and shed large amounts of body weight (de Niro, Raging Bull [1980]; Bale, The Machinist [2004]), or eat up the screen with pyrotechnic acting (Pacino, The Scent of a Woman [1992]: ‘Howaahh’!). Redford spurned such extrovert techniques. For him, the integrity of a character always lay in its utter believability on the screen, even when playing a cold-blooded killer in the Old West of nineteenth-century America. Admittedly, all of this is done in a tongue-in-cheek style, setting up serious situations only to defuse them with humorous flipping of expectations. But the essential characteristics of the cold killer are re-emphasized enough, especially in opposition to the loveable and harmless Butch, that they become essentials of the character. The film is essentially a comedy, but there is more than enough darkness in Redford’s portrayal of the Sundance Kid to make us wary of the character as a human being. It is a fine line for an actor to walk, and Redford accomplishes it perfectly, infusing the character with massive doses of the humour, sex appeal and virility that virtually guaranteed him superstar status following its release. As numerous biographers and writers have noted, the release of the film shot him to stellar fame and celebrity, and changed his life forever. He had made it to fame and fortune: on the cover of every media and celebrity magazine, his opinions asked on every subject, his choice of roles to cement that appealing superstardom his for the accepting.

Post-Butch films So, Robert Redford is said to have shot to superstardom overnight on the back of Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid. To an extent, that is true. By Redford’s own admission, the film’s success, and the degree of public and media exposure heaped upon him as a result, changed his life immediately. It is assumed, I think, that Redford then went on to become a willingly glamorous leading man – handsome and romantic in glossy big-budget movies across the 1970s. Eventually, he did - some of the time. But what is interesting is what happened to him in the years immediately following his supposed ascension to instant glamorous superstardom. Between 1970 and 1973, Redford had six features released. Two had been finished before the release of Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, but had languished in studio uncertainty regarding how

54

Robert Redford and American Cinema

to handle them, until Redford’s dramatic rise to popularity made promoting them as Redford vehicles an obvious attraction. The other four were a very odd and eclectic selection for an actor supposedly intent on becoming a box office heart-throb. In three of them, he plays characters with various degrees of unlikeability. In Tell Them Willie Boy Is Here (1969), Redford plays Cooper, an ineffectual sheriff in pursuit of a Native American. In Downhill Racer (1969), as David Chappellet, he is a cold-hearted, nakedly ambitious Olympic skier who thinks nothing of using people to his own ends. In Little Fauss and Big Halsy (1970), he is a narcissistic motorcycle racing loser who, again, heartlessly uses and discards those close to him to achieve what he thinks he wants in life. The Hot Rock (1972), admittedly, is a throwaway light-comedy caper film, made to be exactly what it is: a perfectly enjoyable, but forgettable, entertainment. Only with The Candidate and Jeremiah Johnson (both also 1972), two films that shouldn’t have succeeded but did, did Redford’s box office clout finally offer a confirmation of the star status initiated by his Sundance Kid of 1969. Three years is a long time in show business, and a fledgling star might not be automatically assured a future in the face of as many flops as Redford suffered between 1969 and 1972. Some of these films were actually initiated, and filmed, prior to Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, in settlement of the breach of contract caused by his withdrawal from the Blue production. That statement, in itself, needs further unpacking, because it attests to the non-linear reality of film planning, production and distribution at any time in Hollywood, but particularly, perhaps, in the chaotic and tumultuous period of the end of Old and the rise of New Hollywood. Films were discussed and put into pre-production where they stayed as nervous executives took the pulse of the current moment. Big and small productions could be held up in this way. Redford’s films around this time were often similarly suspended. He had an agreement to proceed with his first, autonomous, production Downhill Racer, before the tortured signing of him to Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid eventually occurred. But further delays, not least because of him having to actually make Butch, meant that Downhill Racer was eventually completed post the film that catapulted him to stardom. Before I go on to consider how this string of movies connects to the emerging New Hollywood, it seems important that recognize that Redford, at this moment in time, was very much ploughing his own furrow, and had

Maverick Superstar for a New Hollywood

55

been for some years. His television work, within its obviously strict formulaic boundaries, offered him the space to create his own complex, morally ambiguous, characters – a dynamic that was extended, when possible, into his early movie work. The Sundance Kid was merely the latest in that long line of explorations. But, it could certainly be argued that this string of roles saw Redford chiming in with the prevalent nihilistic, anti-establishment mood of the times: a position which one could read as positioning Redford as one of the New Hollywood generation, rather than, as might be assumed, their nemesis in his traditional matinee idol screen image. His characters are unsympathetic, self-obsessed, unwilling to play the establishment game. Redford was certainly aware of the boundary-pushing, even iconoclastic, work being undertaken by his peers, Nicholson, Pacino, de Niro, et al. in portraying unconventional and ‘difficult’ characters. But while this may be true, Redford has always seemed to be focused on his own interests and his own development. And so while he cannot have been unaware that some of his characters (Halsy, Chappalet etc.) inevitably entered into a dialogue with Nicholson’s Duprea (Five Easy Pieces), or even Pacino’s ruthless and selfabsorbed Godfather, his focus was always in what would personally interest him to perform. Tell Them Willie Boy Is Here was the first to be fully filmed, in May and June 1968, although Downhill Racer’s abortive first attempt at filming preceded it by a few months. Willie Boy is an intriguing film, especially in opposition to Blue and the youth film phenomenon. It had been developed for several years throughout the 1960s by Abraham Polonsky, who had been blacklisted in the HUAC witch-hunts of the 1950s and had been forced to move to France. The story is infused with Polonsky’s experiences: a Native American man, Willie Boy, pursued by a relentless posse of white men. Redford was, ludicrously, offered the part of Willie, but turned it down as an absurd suggestion and instead, took the ambivalent role of the sheriff. In spite of its honourable and heartfelt political sensibilities, Willie Boy plays almost like a TV Western: an extended episode of The Virginian, perhaps. Although based on real incidents, and on Harry Lawron’s carefully documented 1960 novel describing these, Willie Boy: A Desert Manhunt, distance from this authenticity developed not only with Polonsky’s desire to make the plot metaphorically represent his HUAC experiences, but also because Paramount refused to allow him

56

Robert Redford and American Cinema

to re-enact the incidents using Native Americans (hence Redford and then Robert Blake being offered the Willie role). Certainly, the iconography, the somewhat standard costuming and weaponry, and the rather flat lighting do not lend it great cinematic appeal. Paramount loaned Redford out to Universal to make the film: an arrangement that represents the tail-end of a contractual arrangement that the Studio System in Hollywood had found convenient for several decades by this time. It is also, perhaps, an indication of the lack of interest Paramount had, especially after the falling out over Blue, in doing something themselves with Redford as a potential box office draw. The loan out has all the hallmarks of a studio making a quick, perhaps last, buck out of an actor they had lost faith in. One particularly interesting feature of the film, however, is Redford’s decision to play the sheriff, a none-too-likeable character who treats his mistress appallingly, has disdain for many of the white avengers, but, to his credit, some sympathy for the Native Americans which inevitably places him in opposition to his own posse. Redford was interested in the ambiguities of the character without much thought about how this might play with audiences or any kind of fan base he might be building: an interest in complex, difficult unlikeable characters that would become a marked trope over his next few films, with one possible exception. In key scenes, Redford acts to consciously play on his good looks and irresistible sexual attraction – whenever he deigns to call on his mistress for sex, she hates herself for always surrendering to him – but this is never in a good way: we really dislike him for his boorish and arrogant manner. However, his contempt for the bigoted and racist attitudes of his fellow lawmen, and his eventual respect for Willie himself, redeems his character by the end of the film. In this way, Redford can be seen to be ‘warming up’ his anti-star screen persona – a presence that will be continued, in a more extreme way, in his next official film release, while being intensified in two other of his films of these years, both made after his meteoric rise to superstardom as the Sundance Kid. In light of this, we must consider the conundrum of his next two films, the first, Downhill Racer (1969), developed and filmed both before Butch and then while Butch was in post-production, and the second, Little Fauss and Big Halsy (1970), agreed by him while on location filming Butch and made after its completion. In neither film does Redford allow his character the slightest

Maverick Superstar for a New Hollywood

57

redeeming feature. Both David Chappelet in Downhill and Halsy Knox in Little Fauss are despicable human beings: selfish, vain, ruthless. Their only desire, their only raison d’etre, is to win: Chappellet more significantly, in conventional status terms at least, as a member of the American Olympic ski team, and Knox as a lowly and ultimately anonymous dirt-track motorcycle rider. Of the two films, Downhill Racer is the colder and more brutal, perhaps consequent upon the more global arena in which it is played out. It is striking that Redford began development on the film even before his involvement in Willie Boy and then continued it after the massive success of Butch Cassidy might have made him consider, given his sudden stardom, more likeable characters in more popular films with broader appeal. Downhill Racer originally came as one of the two packages offered by Paramount to fulfil his multi-film contract with them, and the film was originally to be directed by Roman Polansky after completion of Rosemary’s Baby (1968; in which Redford had, intriguingly, been offered, and turned down, the part of the husband later played by John Cassavetes). But the package on Downhill involving Polansky fell through when the director fell seriously behind on production of the horror film, leaving Redford to come to see the production of Downhill Racer as a personal project which would allow him, as already mentioned, to set up an independent production company – Wildwood – to make it. Actors setting up independent companies to produce, and also sometimes direct, their choice of films was nothing new by the end of the 1960s. Actors had been doing so since back to the 1910s, when Douglas Fairbanks, Charlie Chaplin and Mary Pickford, along with director D.W. Griffith, had set up United Artists. Into the post-Paramount 1950s, leading actors such as Burt Lancaster, Kirk Douglas and others had been setting up their own companies in order to ensure a greater measure of control over the films in which they appeared, and above the titles of which their star names virtually guaranteed box office success. Redford was merely continuing that tradition, but within the context of modern stardom, where the production line processes of Old Hollywood had been largely dismantled, and the rise of the agent-package model had made the star actor the most powerful element in the combination of talents assembled for every one-off production. And these independent,

58

Robert Redford and American Cinema

star-led production companies were designed to choose projects that would advance that star’s position in the market: largely in a positive light as the hero rather than the villain. All the more significant, therefore, that Redford’s first independent production would feature him as a totally unattractive character who uses and abuses everyone around him in his pursuit of success and fame, and is incapable of forming meaningful relationships with teammates, girlfriends and father alike. Redford, working with screenwriter James Salter, junked most of the source novel which was, according to him, ‘apres-ski stuff ’ (Callan, 2010:139). Redford wanted the film to explore the pyrrhic victory qualities of winning at all costs, and therefore focused on Chappellet’s ruthless attitude and behaviour, working with director Michael Ritchie to film in a handheld documentary style which emphasized the brutal coldness of the character’s action and the physical demands required to beat out all competitors in order to win. Redford’s theory about Chappellet, honed with Salter, was that he was a team skier in name only: in fact, dazed by the hunger for personal victory, Chappellet is disconnected from the world, from his father, his coach, his life. Ritchie thought this brave, that Redford was disdainfully anatomising the sacred place of the jock in society. Redford felt impelled: ‘I’d been sold on the wondrous jock since childhood. Sports was the glory business. But in my lifetime it changed. The way the old guys conducted themselves – Jack Dempsey, Joe DiMaggio – was a whole lot different from the guys of the sixties. …. It was cool to be a jerk. Winning was everything, bad behaviour now excused. That was what I wanted to plumb: Chappellet the asshole. He isn’t nice to his coach because he doesn’t have to be. That’s the privilege of the sportsman now, good or bad: he can conduct himself however he feels. I thought, This is not a good role model marker for the way we, as a society, are going.’

(Callan, 2010:156) We have to agree with Ritchie: this is a brave move on Redford’s part, continuing a trajectory of risk-taking in roles that had begun with his debut as Wade Lewis in Inside Daisy Clover. Although in Autumn of 1969, the success of Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid was still to be confirmed on its release, the signs during post-production were good, and Redford could have chosen,

Maverick Superstar for a New Hollywood

59

Figure 2.4  Pyrrhic victory I: Downhill Racer.

in the wake of that anticipation, to quietly drop the return to filming of the production as unsuitable for an actor on the verge of stardom. Or even, to transform the character and his story into a more conventional sporting hero. Instead, he pressed ahead with it, relishing the anti-star dimensions of the role (Figure 2.4). The same goes for Little Fauss and Big Halsy, which Redford made after Downhill and when the huge success of Butch was known. In this film, he is every bit as much of a narcissistic, manipulative anti-hero. Producer Al Ruddy approached Redford for the part of the arrogant Halsy Knox while Redford was on location shooting Butch Cassidy. In principle, it was a film that might well have fitted snugly into the anti-establishment, anti-classical formats of New Hollywood. Certainly, Little Fauss exhibits certain tropes of the emergent anti-Hollywood movement: a wandering narrative, lacking in simple causal drive; unattractive characters it is hard to empathize with; no clear-cut hero (such as a Redford ‘type’ would have been ideal for); no clean resolution to the story, it being left in media res with failure at the latest of a series of calamitous races. For Nicholas Godfrey, it is one of New Hollywood’s forgotten films, failing at the box office in the wake of Easy Rider (1969). More so than Vanishing Point and Two-Lane Blacktop, Little Fauss and Big Halsy is an overt repackaging of the elements of Easy Rider … the central

60

Robert Redford and American Cinema

fixation on motorcycles … the conspicuous branding of a rock ‘n’ roll soundtrack (in the case of Little Fauss and Big Halsy, a slate of original songs by Johnny Cash), the presence of a screenwriter with a strong literary pedigree [Southern/Eastman], and the casting of a buddy/antagonistic duo in the two lead roles [Fonda/Redford, Hopper/Pollard] … Little Fauss and Big Halsy also adopts the kind of generational animus [antagonisms] that is central to Easy Rider and makes it a main feature of its promotional identity, with its tagline reading, ‘not your father’s heroes’.

(2018:105) We cannot position the film as a pre-planned opposition to traditional Hollywood filmmaking. Any narrative that places this film as an explicit reaction to this, and to Redford’s sudden superstardom, coming out of Butch, within this would be a misrepresentation. Godfrey, certainly, recognizes this, arguing that the film ‘does feature one bona fide movie star: Robert Redford, playing defiantly against type’ (2018:103). What ‘type’ would that be at this particular juncture? The relatively user-friendly Sundance Kid, certainly. But others? Redford’s accumulation of psychotics from his years in television? His stuffy lawyer from Barefoot? Or just the blond, blue-eyed handsome jock image that Redford’s looks had already saddled him with in real life? At most, it indicates Redford’s continued interest, at this particular relatively unformulated point in his stardom, in both maverick (anti-, or at least non-) Hollywood productions and the possibilities of playing with his developing screen image. At this particular point in his career, he was still primarily interested in the potential qualities of the characters he was playing, and what this might ask of him in terms of his own performance in realizing them on screen. Clearly the role of Halsy was not a showcase vehicle for Redford’s established screen persona. Halsy Knox is a singularly unlikeable character. Viewed in a certain light, Little Fauss functions as a deliberate subversion and deconstruction of Redford’s stardom and golden-boy looks, as Halsy, the loafish cad, relies on his looks and charm to manipulate all those around him. Redford, an actor possessing the charisma to anchor a film, should by all rights be the draw-card attraction of Little Fauss, but the film does not treat him kindly. Eastman’s script goes out of its way to paint Halsy in unflattering terms …. He spends much of the film looming on the sidelines

Maverick Superstar for a New Hollywood

61

of the action, observing as he chews gum or compulsively brushes his teeth, a leering, often shirtless force of teeming masculinity.

(Godfrey, 2018:108–9)

Mainstream superstardom It is only from 1973 onwards, with films such as The Way We Were and The Sting that Redford fully adopted the dashing leading man identity. But even here, the commitment isn’t 100 per cent; there are still flaws in his characters (usually insisted on by him in script rewrites before he would consider signing on to a project). His Gatsby is dark and unapproachable (as he was in the original novel); his Waldo Pepper is reckless and irresponsible and causes the death of a young woman in an aerial stunt; his Hubbell Gardiner cannot match the political commitment of his life-love Katie (Barbra Streisand) in The Way We Were: he likes the good life a little too much and wants a pragmatically compromised life over one of political commitment. These are not roles that identify Redford as the untarnished hero of the story; rather they insist that the hero should always be flawed, because not only does that way lie more believable reality, but also characters that were more interesting to play as an actor. Godfrey’s comment quoted earlier, regarding Redford playing against type in Little Fauss and Big Halsy, indicates the tensions operating on Redford as he gained mega-stardom – a status that increasingly mitigated against his interest in continuing his alternative acting career. As Godfrey comments: Redford’s star persona was very much in the old-time mold, and his breakout roles were in essentially classical films that resisted the trends of the New Hollywood moment, allowing him comfortably to weather the changes in the industry in the late 1970s, ensuring the longevity of his career.

(2018:113) 1971 therefore became a watershed year for Redford. Behind him were a string of low-budget movies, independent in most definitions of the term, most made with personal passion and commitment. And one blockbuster had generated instant super-fame, his face on countless magazine covers, with incessant demands for interviews and media exposure (most of

62

Robert Redford and American Cinema

which he refused). No matter what Redford’s commitment was to remaining independent of mainstream Hollywood, the success of that one film would determine the way his career progressed through the coming decade. For some, it was an easy call, especially given Redford’s financial commitments to other ventures, most notably, the ski resort in Utah. That needed funding, to the tune of more money than he could hope to earn by remaining aloof from mainstream Hollywood and preserving his indie credentials. The underlying dilemma, however, was about the essence of his acting career. [Richard] Gregson [Redford’s agent], like Paramount, saw a big future for Redford as a glamorous attraction, making headline movies with the likes of Paul Newman and earning big paychecks to underwrite Sundance or whatever extracurricular notion appealed to him. Redford was more considered. Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid was a joyous experience, but he was realistic about it; it might be a fluke. He also didn’t want to base his decision making on Hollywood mores. He wanted independence and experiment. ‘The trouble was, his obligation to Paramount meant they had some control over his direction’, says Mike Frankfurt [Redford’s lawyer]. ‘He liked the experience of the small-time movie with Ritchie so much that he wanted more. But Paramount now had a positive sense of what Robert Redford should be. He was a romantic adventure boy, and that’s how they’d pitch him from now on.’

(Callan, 2010:164) The binary opposition between big-budget Hollywood and low-budget indie as possible routes for Redford to take immediately crystallized around a project Sydney Pollack (ever the more mainstream figure) brought to Redford as Redford was in the middle of promoting the semi-indie Jeremiah Johnson (1972) at Cannes. The Way We Were was a Ray Stark project, and Redford had no time for Stark, and no initial interest in the project. Moreover, his character, as originally written, was an empty sounding board for his co-star Barbra Streisand’s character. And Redford certainly knew he didn’t want to occupy that role and so, in order to make it feasible, his role had to be enlarged and strengthened. Furthermore, Pollack’s involvement as director was dependant on the promise of securing Redford as star, and so the production gradually

Maverick Superstar for a New Hollywood

63

coalesced around the various relationships, affiliations and pragmatisms, of those involved. Robert Redford finally said yes to starring in The Way We Were, because he trusted his friend Sydney Pollack to make something more of his character than then existed in the script. This is perhaps best seen as symptomatic of the realignment of Hollywood towards the personal during these years: friends made films together, got one another co-starring roles, worked together on scripts while (e.g. Spielberg and Lucas) one produced and the other directed personal projects. Redford made The Sting because there was a hiatus before the start of his next planned production but principally because he wanted to work again with George Roy Hill and Paul Newman after having enjoyed working with them so much on Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid (Figure 2.5). He made The Great Gatsby (1974) because he loved the book and found the character of Gatsby an intriguing challenge. In retrospect, of the three he would probably only have been happy having made one: and identifying it is fairly obvious (it’s The Sting). But doing the three films virtually back to back propelled Redford into the film superstardom stratosphere. He came top of Quigley’s Top Ten Stars of the Year poll in 1973, 1974 and 1976.

Figure 2.5  The passing of the baton: The Sting.

64

Robert Redford and American Cinema

It is really the trio of glossy, big-budget films – The Way We Were, The Sting, The Great Gatsby – all made within two years from 1973 to 1975, which cemented Redford’s matinee idol image. In those two years, he became the world’s favourite male film star. Indeed, there was a mere four-year gap between Butch Cassidy and The Way We Were. But those two years, even with indie films and failures, were more than enough for his superstar, Golden Boy, image to be set in place. And, as indicated above, we cannot also discount Redford’s private and personal agenda during those key years, which was concerned with developing his Utah wilderness estate, ski resort and environmental interests. For these he perpetually needed large injections of money, which in turn required him to occasionally be pragmatic about the roles he accepted, and the salaries that could be attached to them. One could argue that Redford effectively became a megastar by accident, allowing himself to be used in feature films for big fees to support his other interests. The 1970s, for Redford, was a period of some compromise, prompted by both personal (the funding of his private concerns) and professional demands (how to maximize his worth within the various redefinitions of Hollywood). Redford might see it as making a pact with the devil, but the reality was so much more: the freedom, on occasion (though not for some years), to make small, more personal films; more significantly, to buy the freedom and, call on the Hollywood contacts, to realize an alternative, perhaps, to his own imagined, and thwarted, future as an independent filmmaker: the Sundance Institute, Film Festival and associated endeavours.

New generation of actors revisited However, Redford was perhaps not alone. It could be argued that most of the major New Hollywood stars ‘sold out’ by going mainstream as the 1970s wore on. Redford, having hit big with Butch Cassidy, and making anti-establishment films such as Downhill Racer and Little Fauss and Big Halsy, and politically critical films such as The Candidate (1972) and All the President’s Men (1976), also became a romantic lead in The Way We Were and The Great Gatsby and

Maverick Superstar for a New Hollywood

65

ended the decade in the relatively lightweight The Electric Horseman (1979). Beatty, after McCabe and Mrs Miller (1971) and The Parallax View (1974), almost immediately went ‘light’ with Shampoo (1975; a faux political film, but too metaphorical to have that kind of impact) and the comedy farce The Fortune (1975; in which he co-starred with Jack Nicholson), ending the decade with Heaven Can Wait (1978). Of all the new breed of actors, perhaps only Nicholson maintained his integrity, with counter-culture and Euro-influenced works such as Five Easy Pieces (1970), Carnal Knowledge (1971), The King of Marvin Gardens (1972), The Last Detail (1973), Chinatown (1974), The Passenger (1975) and One Flew over the Cuckoo’s Nest (1975) before eventually drifting back to the mainstream for the big bucks with The Last Tycoon (1976), Terms of Endearment (1983) and Heartburn (1986). [Andrew] Sarris [argued] that even if the reach of Hollywood’s pseudonouvelle vague exceeded its grasp, men like Nicholson would provide pleasure. In the midst of supposed disillusionment, we could rely on a star like Nicholson to make us happy with ‘fantasies’ and not to advocate systemic change. Even in the summer of 1969, this mixed blessing foreshadowed Nicholson’s star image and career that eventually privileged his skills with traditional melodrama over his participation in risky, experimental projects.

(Smith-Rowsey, 2013:84) Dustin Hoffman mixed mainstream with alternative more than most, interlacing the big-budget and traditionally filmed Papillon (co-starring with Steve McQueen in 1973) and All the President’s Men (co-starring with Robert Redford in 1976) with the edgier Lenny in 1974, Marathon Man in 1976 and Straight Time in 1978. By the end of the decade, however, Hoffman was starring in the ill-advised period film Agatha (1979) and, more successfully, the blockbuster weepie Kramer vs. Kramer (1979) (he won Best Actor Oscar as the film swept the awards ceremony). Clint Eastwood also mixed serious and light roles, from the Shaghetti Westerns that launched his film career through Play Misty for Me (1971), High Plains Drifter (1973) and The Outlaw Josey Wales (1976) to lighter fare such as Every Which Way but Loose (1978) and Any Which Way You Can (1980).

66

Robert Redford and American Cinema

What this all proves, if anything, is that the seventies was a mixed up decade in terms of the kind of cinema Hollywood was trying to put out into theatres for the public to see. Having, as the grand narrative of film history has it, started in chaos, surrendering the creative reins to an inexperienced, iconoclastic younger generation of filmmakers, Hollywood then gradually re-stabilized across the first half of the decade to establish a new kind of filmmaking by the latter half of the decade – a cinema of fantasy escapism, spellbinding special effects and the high-risk financing of fewer films, bigger budgets and expected huge box office returns. In amongst this somewhat fluid and uncertain renegotiation and redefinition, the stars of the decade were expected to make the right choices and to maintain whatever illusory credibility they might have once had. Decisions to make this film over that film, to take a career in this direction rather than that, were all made in a constantly shifting landscape. Robert Redford has been criticized for squandering his early promise as a committed and edgy actor for the easy money of one-dimensional roles in glossy mainstream films. But, then, how many of their lists of films across the 1970s and into the 1980s would any of Redford’s peers have been proud to have made? Each of their lists contains some films that failed, and some that were, to a cold eye, unexplainable as sensible career-building decisions. The cold truth is that, like any freelance worker, even the most successful and famous of film actors sometimes have to choose to make films because, if they are fortunate, something in the story or the character captures their attention, or because they want to work with particular directors of fellow actors. As often, it is because the project was the best option at that particular moment and what was a priority was the need to maintain their career profiles, and/ or to earn sufficient money to finance their personal interests. Redford, as the decade wore on, increasingly found himself in that latter position – that trap, one might argue. His frustrated response to this situation can be seen to have cemented his already marked interest in alternative cinema: an interest that would reach fruition in his founding of the Sundance Institute and Festival by the middle of the following decade. But before this major and significant development, Redford would use his global fame to allow him to call the shots on a number of films with political agendas which would explore the dark heart of American politics in the 1970s.

Maverick Superstar for a New Hollywood

67

A Bridge Too Far (1977) Given all of the above, namely, Redford’s complex negotiations across the decade between the mainstream and independent arms of the American film industry, together with his private agendas concerning the environment and other issues, let us try to set some kind of context for Redford’s participation, in the latter half of that decade, in a project that might have seemed to have been anathema to him at that time. Richard Attenborough’s A Bridge Too Far was a huge-budget, multi-star production that was personally funded by a maverick of the American movie industry, Joseph E. Levine: primarily a low-budget hustler who had brought the dubious delights of the Italy/Spain production Hercules (1958) to the screen, but had also financed the seminal New Hollywood film The Graduate in 1968. That precis, in itself, is more than can comfortably be assimilated, at least for historians of a black-and-white history of modern Hollywood. A Bridge Too Far was to be an unconventional ‘mainstream independent’ blockbuster. In the role of Major Julian Cook who, in the film’s narrative, had to marshal his men in a virtual suicide mission across a river in full daylight and in front of heavy German artillery in order to secure one of the main bridges of the film’s title, two American stars were courted for the role: Redford and McQueen. McQueen proved to be too demanding, in terms not only of salary but also of additions (amongst other items, he wanted a redundant property he owned purchased as part of his package). Redford, meanwhile, while by no means creatively interested in playing the role, was at the time in need of funds to finance the development of Sundance. Redford secured the deal, being paid a record breaking $2 million for four weeks’ work, plus overages if his filming ran long. Two main things need to be drawn out of this precis. Firstly, this bloated, mega-budgeted production was independently financed, derailing any easy notions what was, or was not, a ‘Hollywood production’ at this time. New Hollywood had shifted the parameters in the decade. By the time of A Bridge, Lucas and Spielberg had effectively ‘gone indie’, producing their own films on their own terms, with studio financing, maybe, and then distribution. A Bridge Too Far seems, immediately, to be a traditional studio product: a roster of top names, heroic story, big production values. Levine, financier of

68

Robert Redford and American Cinema

The Graduate and independent player, completely undercuts that standard reading. The second is Redford’s performance. He is involved in a fifteen-minute sequence in a near three-hour movie. He could easily have ‘phoned in’ his performance – just one more in a range of star-studded, clichéd markers being followed by fellow stars Connery, Hopkins, O’Neal, Gould, et al. But he doesn’t. Redford’s performance, in his fifteen-minute of fame, is extraordinary for striving to be so real. When initially told by O’Neal’s superior that he (O’Neal) needs a commander who is ‘tough, experienced and dumb’, Redford’s subtle facial modulations across the three terms register, more than dialogue could, his recognition of the enormity facing him and his men the following day. This is not macho, superstar overacting, but the smallest of registers to indicate the realization of the dangers involved in what he, and his men, are being asked to do. When asked by one of his men what O’Neal’s character had been talking about, Redford replies, ‘a real nightmare’. This is confirmed in the following scene, where O’Neal has to tell Redford that the crossing has to be done in daylight. Redford barely finches, before saying ‘better in daylight’. Redford’s screen image is explicitly being used here: ostensibly, All-American Golden Boy, that he obviously is, as a character that wouldn’t flinch in the face of challenge – that is up to that challenge. But the flickers of the eye, the slight delays in responding, speak otherwise. Redford knows the score, and knows it’s not looking good. Hence the scene showing him anxiously awaiting the arrival of the necessary boats with his men, the self-conscious speech about standing as Washington on the prow of the leading boat: the honest and respected troop leader. What pays off Redford’s segment in this film is what he does (or, more accurately, what he presumably agrees to do with director Attenborough) during the crossing of the river, with his obsessive reciting of the Catholic incantation, ‘Hail Mary, Full of Grace’, as the artillery rains in and his soldiers die around him. It is a powerful reaction to the fear of imminent death, and is a disconcerting ‘voiceover’ to the dramatic events taking place in front of us. And, so, even when Redford is afforded the hero’s closure, in close up, as the bridge he has ‘rescued’ is crossed by Allied tanks (the German sabotaging of it, notably, having failed: so, no out-and-out-heroic achievement here), it cannot

Maverick Superstar for a New Hollywood

69

quite erase the humanity of his quiet appeal to the Almighty involved in that previous, obsessive incantation. Two-million dollars is quite a sum to pay an actor to appear in a mere fifteen minutes of a three-hour movie. But Redford brings to those minutes, I think, an understated integrity and simple believability, that is perhaps lacking in some of the other performances by actors who were simply going through the motions in an anonymous production which was primarily focused on the technical logistics of the event. A non-committal look, or facial gesture, is quite different when Redford plays it to when O’Neal plays it. O’Neal is four years Redford’s junior when the film was made – many divisions less than him in has-been/still-is stardom by that date. Nevertheless, Redford acts O’Neal off the screen in their two short scenes together; O’Neal all proper delivery of lines, Redford, as I hope I have previously established, always interested in the ‘what more’. How would Cook have been portrayed in the film if McQueen had played him, as he was so near to doing? More rugged, certainly, and more overtly masculine. More goal-driven and unproblematic, an altogether more conventional portrayal of a taciturn hero who knows the score. More in line with most of the other major actors in the film, in fact. Redford’s Cook knows the score too, but knows that heroism isn’t going to get him and his men through. Dumb luck will, and this is what makes his heroism even greater: knowing they were going into virtually certain death with little chance of controlling any of the circumstances for their end. McQueen’s star image would never allow that degree of impotence (which is maybe why he declined the role?); Redford’s star image, or rather his interest in exploring unknown aspects to any character he chose to develop, would. It is to Redford’s credit that he nuanced his character in the few short minutes he was on screen, such that he was believable as an experienced military man, he had the utmost respect of his men, and he could come across on screen as an active and experienced soldier. Again, this believability is lodged in the smallest of details: his stroke of the nose as he thinks how to maintain his men’s morale as they wait for the boats to arrive, his self-deprecating body language as he makes mockery of himself in front of them. I don’t think McQueen would have explored these options. That Redford did is to the benefit of the film: coming two-thirds of

70

Robert Redford and American Cinema

the way through the narrative, his character’s role is to humanize the extreme sacrifices being made everywhere in the operation. He is the quiet, measured, almost unimpressible centre of the film. It would have been another film, I think, or at least a differently presented segment within it, had McQueen taken the role.

3

Political animal

Robert Redford has repeatedly returned to the arena of the political film throughout his long career, in response to then current socio-political conditions in America. He has acted in some of these, produced them all and acted-directed in two. The moral and political health of America has been a continual concern of his, compelling him to offer critiques and commentary upon it when he perceived that health to be in decline. The following chapter will begin by briefly summarizing a number of the key crises in American socio-politics through the post-war period, before moving on to consider Redford’s particular contributions to the sub-set of the political film.

US post-war political landscape At the end of the Second World War, America had risen to become the preeminent global power. The UK, although having ‘co-won’ the war with the Americans, was crippled by the costs of doing so and was entering a period of austerity and the rapid erosion of its real-world global relevance (withdrawals of key countries from the Commonwealth; Suez crisis and other humiliations). The Soviet Union had yet to assert its ambitions to become a rival global power through political and military dominance of parts of the world and, more threateningly, its acquisition of nuclear weapons capability. The United States was the greatest global power. Henry Luce, in 1941 had coined the term ‘The American Century’, referring to America’s primary role in the spread of democracy and capitalism throughout the world. Walter Lippmann, a widely read columnist, predicted in

72

Robert Redford and American Cinema

1945: ‘What Rome was to the ancient world, what Great Britain has been to the modern world, America is to be to the world of tomorrow’ (quoted in Patterson, 1996:7–8) – a view that Patterson augmented when he commented that ‘Alone of the world’s great powers the United States emerged immeasurably stronger, both absolutely and relatively, from the carnage [of the Second World War]. In the new balance it was a colossus on the international stage’ (1996:82). But the higher the ascendance, the greater the fall and the greater the trauma of loss suffered as a consequence. A mere thirty years later, America had become a global laughing stock: a wide series of political and military catastrophes having riven apart the comfortable fabric of its assumed moral and political superiority. This disillusionment had climaxed, most shockingly perhaps, in the exposure of the total corruption and paranoia of the Nixon administration in the Watergate scandal between 1972 and 1974. How could America have gone from the world’s respected preeminent political and military power to this humiliating nadir? The era from John Fitzgerald Kennedy’s Inauguration to Richard Nixon’s resignation has had an unparalleled hold on the imagination of modern America. The 1960s had initially appeared to herald a new optimism and idealism, but the pervasive influence of television made Kennedy’s murder an instantaneous global trauma. It was the first act in a national nightmare that lasted a decade. Within a year, race riots had begun to erupt in major US cities, and flames would engulf more than a hundred of them before the 1960s drew to their bloodied, wearied close. Within two years, Lyndon Baines Johnson had increased the American military commitment to Vietnam. Assassins would claim the lives of Martin Luther King and Robert Kennedy, just two months apart, in the summer of 1968 – and LBJ was hounded from office, a broken man denounced as a child killer. Yet, far from ‘bringing us together’ as he had promised in the election of 1968, Johnson’s successor would eventually give way to his own worst paranoid impulses and he became mired in a scandal with which his name will forever be linked.

(Coyne, 2008:66) This chapter is concerned to explore how cinema generally, and Robert Redford in particular, negotiated and responded to these and future seismic shocks to

Political Animal

73

the nation’s sense of self-belief; how it could have plummeted so rapidly and so far from the pinnacle of global respect to the depths of global contempt. Perhaps it might be apposite to suggest that all was never rosy in this particular Garden of Eden. The American Dream was never a realizable reality. The thin veneer of perfection promoted by America during the 1950s was always the result of a forced suppression of any individuality or dissent: conformity was the order of the day, only maintained through the repressions of a society in which each citizen was expected to behave according to expected and accepted norms. Redford always railed against such idealistic constructs, using that rejection as the energy in making alternative visions of American life such as Downhill Racer and The Candidate. A firm lid was put on suppressed desires and, like a Hollywood melodrama, this suppression of desire and aberrant emotion caused an inevitable pressurebuild which had, eventually, to erupt into its opposite – the raw, ugly and violent expression of resistance and disillusion with ‘the System’ in the real America of the 1960s, and, within the important cultural arena of cinema, the representation, and painful examination, of the dissimulations, myths, counter-narratives involved in this national decline and betrayal. How were the arts to comment upon these seismic shifts in any meaningful way? While literature and the fine arts had a degree of freedom to do so, film and television were both significantly censored during this period: television, as prey to the sponsors, largely safe and saccharine, although with notable exceptions (some, featuring Redford, covered in the first chapter). Cinema was similarly heavily censored, resulting in anodyne fare: family films featuring spotless parents and children, Westerns re-treading the Frontier myth, war films reliving the glories of US global might and the recent global conflict, and comedies confirming conventional gender and generational roles.

Outright political films – box office poison Within this strictly sanitized framework, films dealing directly with political subject matter were never seen as attractive movie vehicles: unpopular with

74

Robert Redford and American Cinema

audiences and consequently unimpressive in terms of box office: ‘Box-office poison’, to use the clichéd term. However, as Coyne counters, American political films have featured as part of Hollywood’s output since the early 1930s. The political film has never been a high-volume, mass-market staple, but its qualitative contribution to movie history and twentieth-century US popular and political culture has been considerable. Despite the trite assertion that political films mean the kiss of death at the box office, the genre has proved both protean and durable, reflecting and addressing major issues and tensions at the heart of American life.

(Coyne, 2008:10) For example, in his study of Warners in the 1930s, Nick Roddick argues that the new cycle of social and gangster films that began production at the studio in the mid-1930s was less critical, reflecting a more optimistic feeling that the New Deal could defeat the manifest injustices of American life. After the enforcement of the Code, an ‘amoral world view’ and anti-social protagonists were no longer possible (quoted in Neve, 1992:15). During the Second World War, it was unpatriotic to be critical of America’s political machine, which was dedicated to fighting for global democracy. However, immediately post-war, many of those working in Hollywood, hardened by the realities of that war, still coveted the hope of making films addressing real social problems rather than offering mere escapism. But this was not what people recovering from the horrors and privations of the conflict wanted to hear. Society needed normality, conformity, as little rocking-of-the-boat as possible. Eric Johnston, head of the main industry trade association, the MPAA, in the post-war years argued: ‘We’ll have no more Grapes of Wrath, we’ll have no more Tobacco Roads. We’ll have no more films that show the seamy side of American life’ (quoted in Neve, 1992:90). Darryl F. Zanuck, head of 20th Century Fox, wrote in 1945 of American films as selling not only ‘bathtubs, telephones, automobiles and sewing machines’, but the ‘American way of life’ (quoted in Neve, 1992:91). And as Richard Maltby points out, ‘the importance of [foreign] markets, and the industry’s need for State Department help in exploiting them, hindered Hollywood’s “social conscience” by obligating “an optimistic portrayal of the American way of life”’ (Neve, 1992:91, quoting Maltby, 1984:64). James McGuiness, chairman

Political Animal

75

of Motion Picture Alliance for the Preservation of American Ideals, argued that the role of movies was in supplying ‘balms for the spirit’ (quoted in Neve, 1992:112). Countering this view, however, for the writer Robert Riskin, the failure of Hollywood to deal with the world problems would be akin to it ‘debasing itself artistically’, and ‘would represent an unforgivable disregard for its obligations to the public’ (Neve, 1992:112). In the early 1950s the post-war impetus towards social realism ran up against the new and persuasive ideological concerns of the period. … It would seem likely that the decline in the social content of Hollywood films that Dorothy Jones finds for the period 1947 to 1954 reflects a number of factors. The blacklisting and exile of many of the writers and directors who were most interested in social issues may have had an effect, but more important were judgements made by those who produced and financed films ….it became prudent to be wary of scripts that might attract the attention of the professional anti-communist.

(Neve, 1992:181–2) Attempts to make films which directly addressed real-world social issues were simply not popular with audiences in a climate of increasing political fear, as anti-Communist sentiment grew across the 1950s in the McCarthy witchhunts. Nevertheless, as Coyne’s summary earlier suggests, political films did continue to be made throughout the 1950s and into the 1960s. Some of these challenged and questioned aspects of the political-military machine, though almost all eventually concluded that that machine was essentially stable and reputable, with the defeat of any potential threats to that machine by the right ‘good men’ outmanoeuvring those posing the threat, by identifying them as rogue or maverick operators rather than inherently rotten parts of the central political system. I will go on to look at some of these films shortly.

Genre redefinition A more common form of veiled political representation was the result of the reformulation of certain established film genres: the Western, the

76

Robert Redford and American Cinema

science-fiction film, etc., as well as the emergence of others – disaster, vigilante cop, etc. – to allow them to stand in, metaphorically, for the current political situations and crises. ‘Oblique references to the political events were more acceptable in the context of recognised film genres of science fiction and the Western; It Came from Outer Space (1953) and High Noon (1952) are two prominent examples’ (Neve, 1992:182). In these generic re-purposings, some elements could be made to surreptitiously stand in for political realities of the time. Hence, Western villains in black hats, or evil aliens threatening to take over human bodies, replicating themselves to look identical, could be taken at face value, while also offering metaphors of real-world equivalents (sinister Cold War operatives; brainwashing scientists, oppressive military regimes).

Television, blacklists and Europe The 1960s also saw the influx into film and TV, from a number of different directions, of creative personnel with a political realist agenda. Those who had been blacklisted under the McCarthy witch-hunts began to find their way back into the industry. Television, as that medium began to see the ending of its Golden Age of serious realist drama, supplied a substantial number of relatively new and talented figures into the film industry. And the influence of the exciting New Wave movements in Europe, as noted in Chapter 2, was also beginning to have their impact on the more artistically inclined writers and directors beginning to formulate what would become the New Hollywood by the end of the decade. [A] number of directors and writers who had worked in television drama in the 1950s, made their first films at the end of that decade or in the early 1960s. Such directors as Delbert Mann, Martin Ritt, Robert Mulligan, Sidney Lumet, John Frankenheimer, Arthur Penn, and Franklin Schaffner contributed to a modest revival of social realism in American film, while some also reflected the first signs of an influence of the European art film.

(Neve, 1992:212) These various politically and artistically driven elements met, and responded to, the mounting political crises of the 1960s, as well as the new phenomenon of politics becoming sexy, dramatic or both with the media excitement over

Political Animal

77

Kennedy’s presidency. His handling of the Cuban Missile Crisis in October 1962, for example, prompted certain filmmakers and studios to produce features that responded to the rising tensions of the Cold War: The Manchurian Candidate (1962), Seven Days in May (1964), Fail Safe (1964). Studies in political infighting, in films such as Advise and Consent (1962) and The Best Man (1964), also became notable. Together, as Neve argues, they ‘all dealt with issues of state and occasionally raised substantive issues (nuclear war, McCarthyism) beyond their concern with the ethical problems of individuals’ (1992:212–13). Redford, while missing the first flush of political films across the 1960s, largely because he was still operating within the television serial form, would come to inherit many of the central interests and agendas from this strand of American filmmaking when he came to be able to control the form and content of the films he produced and starred in across the 1970s. We will come to these in more detail through this chapter.

The (movie) race issue Race relations and the war in Vietnam dominated the politics of the sixties like no other issue, yet Hollywood avoided both issues until late in the decade … In the sixties, however, Hollywood discovered that race could sell tickets. Minority issues were hot, and a vaguely liberal national consensus on civil rights had developed; as long as filmmakers played safely within that consensus they could appear controversial yet please the majority. This trend accelerated when the film industry belatedly noticed that minorities themselves constituted a substantial potential audience.

(Christensen, 1987:120) Certainly, genre was used to represent political and social issues, and to address growing sites of tension within American society across the 1950s and into the 1960s. For whatever reason – and to a non-American, it seems nonsensical, as both instances are equally unjust and oppressive – Native Americans were most readily made to represent the race issue, not only on their own terms but also, metaphorically, as representative of the oppression of African Americans. Broken Arrow (1950) was a politically loaded film on all levels. Another writer

78

Robert Redford and American Cinema

(Michael Blankfort) ‘fronted’ the writing process and receive the fee before passing it on to the film’s actual writer, the blacklisted Albert Maltz. The film’s sympathetic portrayal of Native Americans drew praise from the Association of American Indian Affairs, as one of the first films to attempt ‘a serious portrayal of the Indian side of American history’ (quoted in Neve, 1992:121). Later films, such as Cheyenne Autumn (John Ford, 1964), continued that respectful revisionist historicizing (especially poignant, coming from the director of a number of anti-‘injun’ Westerns of the 1930s and 1940s). But by the time we get to Soldier Blue (1970), the events of the movie which lead, especially, to the horrific climax cannot only be made to refer or relate to the atrocities that were committed against the Native American Indians of North America. It also had, perforce, to refer, metaphorically, to the appalling violence that had been the hallmark of the African-American racial tensions of the previous decade – Detroit, Los Angeles – as well as, in a broader global context, equivalent atrocities perpetrated by the dominant, white, American regime against other indigenous peoples; for which read, Vietnam. This is not to say that Hollywood didn’t attempt to address the AfricanAmerican ‘problem’ directly. A number of tentative and largely unresolved attempts were made in the 1950s. In the late 1950s the cautious interest of the US Senate in civil rights, a belated response to the civil rights movement in the South and the Supreme Court’s pioneering 1954 decision on school desegregation, have been reflected by the appearance of a number of films on the topic (e.g., The Defiant Ones [1958]) ….. The victory of John F Kennedy in the presidential election of November 1960 encouraged producers to greater boldness in seeking support for films dealing with subjects on the liberal side of the late 1950s anti-communist consensus. While Kennedy’s rhetoric primarily addressed the issue of the Cold War, and the rivalry with the post-Sputnik Soviet Union for technological and international influence, there was also a renewed interest in domestic issues that threatened international embarrassment.

(Neve, 1992:211–12) More followed, almost all featuring the then ‘acceptable black’ Sidney Poitier, who had a long track record of almost solely fighting the Black American corner: on TV (‘Cry, the Beloved Country’ in 1951) and in films from The

Political Animal

79

Defiant Ones (1958), through Lilies of the Field (1963) to Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner and In the Heat of the Night (both 1967). But all of these films, variously laudable and well meaning as they were, relied upon a certain, confined, identity for the Negro as middle-class, educated, noble, well mannered: Sidney Poitier. It took Blaxploitation in the 1970s to explode this comfortable, firmly contained myth of the black man, and the film movement, while principally very popular amongst black Americans, and also appealing to a smaller audience of liberal whites, effectively side-streamed the further engagement that mainstream white America needed to have with the ‘Black Problem’. Robert Redford – white, blond-haired, adonis, WASP – was, as might be imagined, certainly not the person to be immediately identified as the movie star to take on that agenda. And, to his credit, perhaps, he never did, at least in terms of African-Americans. His focus was always on the Native American experience, and not as metaphor for other minority tensions. One of Redford’s first films following his sudden and meteoric rise to superstardom, and, in many ways, an anti-star vehicle, was Jeremiah Johnson (1972). While ostensibly a Wild West wilderness narrative, this film has, as its central theme, the need of its main character to escape the stifling and superficial trappings of then modern society. His attempts to live at one with that wilderness, and in harmony with Native Americans, are compromised by the destructive invasion into that natural world of a troop of boorish and ruthless military men, a cavalry troop, representing the forces of civilized American society. This military troop then force Johnson to forsake his environmental ideals in order to guide them through Native American lands, including a sacred burial ground, violating those lands and that site and destroying the ideal of the original American Way of Life.

Vietnam Films addressing the experiences and the increasing political chaos of the Vietnam War were noticeably absent across the 1960s. John Wayne produced, directed and starred in a jingoistic, right-wing defence of the Vietnam War in The Green Berets (1968), a vanity project that was certainly not his finest

80

Robert Redford and American Cinema

hour, in terms of his enduring legacy as a Hollywood great, but was certainly a marker of the times, and of the resistance by the right-wing to left-wing denunciations of the conflict. Returning to the more allusive representation of the conflict, ‘It was through the Western that filmmakers made oblique and metaphoric reference to the Vietnam war, in a series of films including The Wild Bunch (1969), The Professionals (1966), Little Big Man (1970), Ulzana’s Raid (1972)’ (Neve, 1992:216–17). Several other films of the late 1960s also framed metaphorical allusions to the war; in the doomed outlaws, hounded by the bigoted forces of law enforcement in Bonnie and Clyde (1967) and, two years later, Easy Rider (1969), to the romantic outlaws defending their outmoded way of life, and finally brutally gunned down by military forces, in Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid (1969). The Korean War also stood in, fairly obviously, for the Vietnam War in M*A*S*H (1970). But if not existing in the realm of metaphor, where were the explicitly political films of the latter half of the 1960s? Why weren’t the real-world political crises worthy of direct comment and examination? Or were the horrors of the JFK, Robert Kennedy and Martin Luther King Jr. assassinations, the ongoing Civil Rights rioting and violence, as well as revelations about atrocities in Vietnam and elsewhere, just too excessive and unpalatable for the American people to cope with? Perhaps seeing it all unravel nightly on TV was the issue: what need delayed (because of long production timeframes) cinematic responses, when television could respond and represent instantly? Therefore, for the cinema of the time, it was perhaps better, even the only credible option, to play it safe and only address contentious political issues as general metaphor, which would at least remain relevant for a longer period of time. This practical consideration, together with the real business issues of plummeting audiences and declining numbers of films being made, conglomerization, studios such as RKO and MGM going out of the business, and so on, meant that the industry felt it had to ‘play safe’ and produce product that was escapist entertainment rather than overt political commentary. It took until the late 1970s before American cinema directly responded to the Vietnam conflict, in films such as Coming Home (1978), which focused on a soldier paralysed in the combat, and The Deer Hunter (1978), which followed a number of friends through the pains and losses caused by their signing up to

Political Animal

81

the war. Most controversially, perhaps, was Apocalypse Now (1980), which, by adapting Joseph Conrad’s early twentieth-century novel The Heart of Darkness to comment upon the war in South-East Asia, exploded the insanity of the whole operation and what it put the nation’s young male generation through, to finally address the events, mythologies and post-war traumas of the conflict. One argument is that when TV took over the middle ground, it allowed movies to become more adventurous, to say what was difficult to say, even on politics, than the heavily monitored television networks. In the cinema, a strong, critical, voice could now be heard. The rise of the independent production sector, at this point largely restricted to Hollywood creatives (mainly stars) wanting to establish their autonomy, together with the input from European art cinemas, which had been less squeamish about addressing serious social and political concerns head-on, opened up a new space for American cinema to begin to comment on the complexities, frustrations and inadequacies of contemporary American politics.

The 1969–72 film industry crisis This catalogue of crises and tensions within American society through the 1960s must be placed alongside the equivalent crisis within the American film industry noted in the previous chapter. But to recap: by the late 1960s, that industry was suffering record losses from ill-advised productions that seemed to flatly refute the changing social, political and generational zeitgeist. Big productions such as Hello Dolly! (1969) and Ryan’s Daughter (1970) lost more money than most of the political films cost to make, triggering the crisis that the New Hollywood was supposed to solve. The heady alternative youth rebellion however, although representing a certain Younger Generation protest against the evils of ‘the System’, was a short-lived phenomenon, as Christensen bluntly summaries: By 1968, the counterculture was falling apart. It had finally become clear that drugs led to addiction instead of liberation. The Manson family made communes a nightmare, Martin Luther King Jr. was murdered, and the civil rights movement was weakened by calls for black power and cultural

82

Robert Redford and American Cinema

separatism. The hopeful politics of the anti-war movement was shattered by the assassination of Robert Kennedy and riots at the Democratic convention in Chicago, and the New Left moved from sit-ins to revolution. Richard Nixon was elected president.

(1987:122) It was at this moment of national trauma and turmoil that Redford became a huge movie star.

Robert Redford’s politics What were Redford’s politics in the late 1960s and early 1970s? It’s an interesting question. By his own admission, Redford was not, through the 1960s, particularly active politically. He has acknowledged that he held politics, and American politics in particular, as having become increasingly false and meaningless in real terms. By the ‘real’ here, I am meaning capable of resulting in actual action, rather than being simply a self-perpetuating mechanism for re-election of politicians and the maintenance of ‘the Political Machine’. Redford’s political stance was, is and probably always will be ambiguous. He claims to be apolitical but the truth is that he uses politics in much the same way he uses Hollywood: as and when he needs them. … On a local level, he fights the political fight to protect his beliefs and privacy at Sundance.

(Clinch, 1989:82) In fact, during the period of his ascendancy to superstardom, he often projected himself as being quite conservative: personally selfish, principally protective of his own life, his own personal privacy and that of his family. This was, undoubtedly, a reaction to the intrusions into his private life that sudden stardom threatened him with. His primary objective in building his house and estate in Utah was, therefore, largely to allow him and his family to maintain its ‘normal’ life, especially in the aftermath of his sudden escalation to superstardom following the success of Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid. As he said at the time, he was ‘buying up all the acreage around my house to sort of wall us in, but also because I want to keep anybody else from screwing it up. The one cause I am interested in is this conservation thing. I don’t think

Political Animal

83

I’m very patriotic about the country, but I am patriotic about my family, my wife and kids’ (Clinch, 1989:83–4). Within the context of this intense personal privacy, Redford’s public politics in this period are hard to gauge. He had a tendency to personalize politics: committed to the universal ideals of the political process while despairing of the failings of the principle individuals occupying the highest seats of office: Redford has vivid recollections of his first meeting with a major figure, Richard Nixon, then Vice-President in Eisenhower’s administration, and the memories are hot happy. ‘He presented an athletics award to me when I was a teenager. I had no pre-judged attitude towards the man. But when the award was presented, he shook my hand and said a few words to me; it was almost chilling how hollow it was, and I never forgot it. That had a lot to do with my attitude towards politics.’ With Nixon in the White House, Redford had more to say. ‘I can’t talk about him. I get sick to my stomach. And Agnew. That fool! Those fools! But you know, I think this country is pretty great, and it’s possible, if we keep talking it down, to bring it down.’

(Clinch, 1989:82–3) But while Redford’s take on contemporary politics was somewhat jaundiced, distanced and personalized, working away more productively in terms of that, perhaps, somewhat self-focused stance, was an energy which galvanized him to enter more directly into the political arena. Certainly, he became far more directly involved in politics in the 1970s: The 1970s for me was a time of tremendous growth. I was very, very active in the 1970s politically, both in film and out. I was in the process of trying to incorporate my political thoughts and feelings, questions, concerns, into the work, but not have politics dominate the work, so it became agit-propaganda, because I don’t think that works, and people will basically reject that.

(Redford interview, ‘Making of ’ documentary, Three Days of the Condor DVD) Presumably, Redford means here that he was not wanting a strident or didactic tone to any politically oriented fictional, or even any fully documentary, production in which he might be involved. Rather, he was primarily interested

84

Robert Redford and American Cinema

in exploring a political theme through the entertainment values of an engaging fictional story and its characters.

The Candidate (1972) The first fruit of Redford’s move into politics on screen was The Candidate (1972) which, across its narrative arc, moves from small to big politics as his character, Bill McKay, is persuaded to leave his role as a lawyer fighting for local rights and individuals to become a professional politician operating at the senatorial level. One can see Bill McKay at the start of the film being a version of Redford’s local politics, and it is important to note, in this respect, that the film was personally created and driven forward by Redford himself. He came up with the basic idea while watching Richard Nixon and Hubert Humphrey presenting themselves on television fundraisers during the 1968 presidential elections. A hundred cities across the country were in flames on racial issues; half the nation was calling for a stop to the bombing in Vietnam. The youth, the poor, the blacks wanted a voice, and those who might have spoken for them – Kennedy and McCarthy – were out of the picture. And here was this oil salesman monopolising the airwaves and selling us snake oil for a re-election. I thought, it’s not about substance, it’s about presentation, about perception of reality, which allows for manipulation.

(quoted in Callan, 2010:180) Thereafter, Redford developed the script slowly over a number of months, working with two screenwriters: Pete Hamill, whose version of the script was rejected by Redford as not fitting his conception of the movie as a satire on modern politics and politicians’ image-consciousness, then Jeremy Larner, who had been Eugene McCarthy’s scriptwriter and so knew more directly of what he spoke. The project proved a hard sell to the studios. Even with his rise to superstardom, Redford still had to tout it around the studio heads, only to be repeatedly knocked back. And to reiterate the industry view of political movies, ‘When Redford did the studio circuits once again to raise money for

Political Animal

85

The Candidate, he discovered that the moguls too had some comparisons to make [between sports movies and political movies]: political movies, like sports movies, were death at the box-office’ (Clinch, 1989:86). Eventually, Redford was able to agree a deal with Richard Zanuck at Warners – a $1.5 million budget with no off-the-top fee for Redford. Redford’s commitment to the project was such that he ‘accepted because I wanted to get on with it, and Mike [Ritchie] and I decided we’d do it tight and in documentary style, with the camera frame jumping around’ (Callan, 2010:184). The Candidate was effectively a low-budget, independent production – an explicit companion piece, both thematically and in production terms, to Downhill Racer (1969). In this decision to give the film a documentary style, Redford and Ritchie were acknowledging their debt to the seminal Direct Cinema documentary, Primary (Pennebaker, 1960), which similarly used hand-held cameras to get up close and personal with the two campaigning politicians, John F. Kennedy and Hubert Humphrey. The Candidate offers an intriguing double agenda, a two-layered text. On the first level, it is an explicitly political film: the characters are engaged in real political processes and the narrative drive is towards winning a senatorial election race. On the second level, it is a metaphor for Redford’s relationship with Hollywood: standoffish and interested in ‘doing different’ before being sucked into the machine and made to be a packaged, audience- and mediafriendly commodity, as Redford did when he moved from low-budget movies, such as The Candidate, Downhill Racer, Little Fauss and Big Halsy and Jeremiah Johnson, to big-budget blockbusters such as The Great Gatsby and The Sting. One other film that could be included in this latter group – The Way We Were – straddles the two groupings, and will be discussed further below. What is most intriguing about The Candidate, therefore, is how the film uses Redford’s various public identities: environmental champion, indie filmmaker, mainstream superstar – to create a film with multiple addresses. The film begins by explicitly mapping Redford’s character, Bill McKay, onto himself: McKay is a committed ‘Man of the People’, dedicated to defending their rights against Big Business and the danger it poses to the environment. He is happy in that role … seemingly, and initially uninterested in moving up to a wider arena. So far, so Redford, who was similarly (seemingly) content to only make films that interested him, who was always eager to escape Hollywood

86

Robert Redford and American Cinema

and retreat to his home in the Utah wilderness (where, for example, he served several years on the unglamorous committee controlling sewerage in his region), and to protect the rights of Native Americans. In The Candidate, McKay’s big betrayal, unacceptable in the eyes of some of his former colleagues in the film, including close friends, is that he seems somewhat duplicitously resistant to the proposal pitched to him by Marvin Lucas, a professional campaign manager, that he forsake the small victories of local politics for the potentially bigger platform of state politics. Certainly, he rapidly agrees to the proposal, albeit with demands attached. The stinger is that Lucas frames McKay’s campaign as one in which he has no hope of emerging the victor: ‘You Lose’, Lucas writes in a match card, by way of a pledge. McKay can say whatever he wants because, having no hope of winning, he isn’t bound by the cautious and platitudinous constraints under which his opponent, seasoned politician Crocker Jarmon, will have to operate. As noted previously, Callan argues that, following the success of Butch Cassidy, Redford began to be framed, by his own team and by the studios, as a movie matinee idol rather than a grungy and maverick indie player. Redford resisted. Redford was more considered. Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid was a joyous experience, but he was realistic about it: it might be a fluke [‘You Lose’]. He also didn’t want to base his decision making on Hollywood mores. He wanted independence and experiment. ‘The trouble was, his obligation to Paramount meant they had some control over his direction’, says Mike Frankfurt. ‘He liked the experience of the small-time movie [Downhill Racer] with Pakula so much that he wanted more. But Paramount now had a positive sense of what Robert Redford should be. He was a romantic adventure boy, and that’s how they’d pitch him from now on.’

(Callan, 2010:164) In this, we can perhaps too easily see parallels between McKay sacrificing local influence for the possibilities of larger-scale power, and Redford doing likewise with small, low-budget indies and the glossy big-budget movies that Hollywood is famed for, which earn hundreds of millions at the box office, and which make their stars household names (while also helping fund expanding ski resorts in Utah).

Political Animal

87

If so, it is a useful trope by which to understand Redford’s personal attachment to the project and its particular narrative, and his own ability to play the part with such conviction. Further examples of double-layering are spread through the rest of the film. McKay undergoes basic media training in how to work with a television camera – something Redford, by this point in his career, would be expert at. Later in the film, reference is made to explicitly editing raw footage to artificially create situations and reactions between people, omitting material potentially damaging to McKay’s image. At a real political banquet, at which Hubert Humphrey and other politicians are the key guests, Redford is added into the scene in separate close shots to make it seem as if he is attending the real event. The fictional comedian-host then subsequently refers to McKay as a ‘fresh new talent, because two weeks ago he was discovered on a stool at Schwab’s’: the reference being towards movie star Lana Turner supposedly being ‘discovered’ at the counter of the famous pharmacy in 1937 (the event actually happened at the Top Hat Café two miles away). Anyway, the joke fails to get a laugh from the audience, too ignorant of movie folklore, and the fictional host awkwardly moves on with his introduction. The politics-movie parallel reaches its height when real-life Hollywood actress Natalie Wood appears at the after-dinner event to meet McKay and praise his work; they end up discussing health food recipes while those around them are trying to muscle in to meet the famous movie star (in the film, Wood, not Redford!). The significance of the scene is that Wood and Redford were actually close friends, having appeared in two films at the start of Redford’s movie career (Inside Daisy Clover and This Property Is Condemned). Real friends, real movie stars, trying to pretend they don’t know one another while one of them pretends to be a politician: a fiction betrayed during their conversation by their natural intimacy. In addition, two scenes feed off Redford’s personal interest in the environment. The first occurs when he meets a group of surfers on the beach and discusses the degradation in the quality of the coastline through pollution. The second shows him racing to be filmed at a forest fire in Malibu only to be outshone by his opponent, Crocker Jarman, who arrives trumping McKay’s efforts to help by announcing he has the ear of the president. In all of these references, the ‘real’ Redford (environmental activist, movie star) maps onto the within-film fictional character in order to use the values and

88

Robert Redford and American Cinema

resonances attached to the former (private commitment, public scepticism) to help frame our response to the film’s main character: that he is a committed public figure made hollow and superficial by the distortions of the political machine within which he is forced to operate. The meaning of this has been debated by many critics since the first release of the film in 1972. Andrew Sarris, in a highly condemnatory piece, criticized Redford’s holier-than-thou proselytizing and called the film out as an empty gesture: Why would so many critics fall for a piece of cheese like The Candidate? Robert Redford cultism? Partly, I suppose. Redford seems to have convinced a great many people that he has more integrity than any other 30 actors put together. He comes down from his kingly mountaintop in Colorado only rarely and reluctantly to mingle with the madding crowd for the sake of his muse.

(1978:16) Utah, actually, not Colorado: Sarris should really have got his facts straight if he was going to deliver this kind of attack. He concludes his piece by deciding that he ‘despise[s] Robert Redford’s mealy-mouthed reluctant virgin of a politician in The Candidate. I think Nixon can be beaten in 1972, but not by reluctant virgins and pure ideologues’ (1978:18). Sarris is perhaps both right and wrong. Right to acknowledge that it would take more than naïve, inexperienced new-politicos to topple Nixon’s fearsome, and corrupt, political machine. Wrong, in two other respects: firstly, that McKay was always in it to lose it (at least for the first half of the movie, and then in the second, only to avoid humiliation), and therefore there was no expectation that he would have the staying power to topple a president (and all his men). That was never the agenda of his character or his character’s campaign. Secondly, an alternative reading is that in spite of the acquiescing to the glitz and show of political presentation, McKay still wants to defeat his opponent on ideological grounds; that is, McKay’s values are right and Jarmon’s are wholly wrong. Hence, the problematic ‘What now?’ moment that climaxes the film must be laid alongside earlier scenes of proclamation and triumph, in which McKay does say what he truly feels, and does so by casting aside the slick presentational techniques his team have been so determined to teach him.

Political Animal

89

A later Redford characterization, Bob Woodward, would more fully aspire to that agenda. In partnership with Carl Bernstein, the two journalists for the Washington Post, had to fight initial perceptions of their professional naivety and inexperience to doggedly investigate the Watergate scandal which eventually brought the House of Nixon tumbling down. This film, All the President’s Men, will be dealt with at length later in this chapter. All I want to record here is the distortion Sarris brings to his analysis of this earlier film (The Candidate). Redford was not descending from his high-ground in Utah to preach to the uneducated and ignorant. He simply had a personal reaction to the falseness of modern political presentation, decided to make a film which spoke to that discomfort, and used his own blossoming/burgeoning star image as a medium through which to explore the connotations of media celebrity, manipulation and artifice, here in a political context. That is not godly egotism so much as a player operating in the two arenas (movies foremost, local politics thereafter), employing the terms of the first (his recently acquired superstardom) to heavily criticize the latter. If he wanted to be the crusading hero in this narrative, McKay would have been triumphantly victorious. But although he wins, McKay-Redford is at least initially nihilistic, having no concrete idea what to do next (Figure 3.1). Perhaps in this inconclusive, almost disillusioned ending, we can discern the continuing remnants of the alternative cinema promised within the New Hollywood: a cinema of heroes reaching ambiguous ends, of narratives denied the certainties of their own closure. McKay is left as irresolute and defeatist as Fonda and Hopper in Easy Rider (1969), Nicholson in Five Easy Pieces (1970) or Hackman in The Conversation (1974). Scott, for example, sees the ending of The Candidate as an early indication of the inherent problems Hollywood was having with the realities of contemporary American politics in the early 1970s. [G]iven the time and context, the openness of the options left vacant at the end is perhaps understandable. Hollywood was in the process of working out its new role in the political world, the Camelot era was over, and cynicism was being associated with political action in a growing sense of disenchantment about to be manifest in Watergate.

(Scott, 2000:81)

90

Robert Redford and American Cinema

Figure 3.1  Pyrrhic victory II: The Candidate.

And as Christensen comments: We watch McKay sell out, but we cheer him on because we, too, want him to win. We laugh at the cynicism of the campaigners and of the ‘now what?’ ending, but all this cynicism is softened by the casting of Robert Redford as the candidate. He may be naïve, but he means well, and in the end, we still like him, which makes it easier for us to understand how decent people get drawn into the political process and forget their good intentions.

(1987:130) Significantly, however, Nixon tried to get the film banned during his re-election campaign, as the film’s lead character was clearly a Democrat. In actual fact, it had no effect on the campaign: Nixon won by a landslide. Nevertheless, Redford here is consciously exploiting the shallowness of his newly found movie star status to draw equivalent parallels with modernday image-mongering of political presentation. It is a move which is wholly understandable, given his ambivalent attitude to movie stardom itself. That he is happy to use and undercut his own emerging star image to illuminate the

Political Animal

91

processes which were creating the equivalent in the contemporary political arena is indicative of his lack of interest in nominally protecting his movie star image. That in attempting to play a flawed individual, his presence in the film actually increased that movie star image by helping it become a box office success is a tension that Redford would have to learn to live with, for good and bad, throughout the rest of his career.

The Way We Were (1973) This brings us to the set of contradictions that is The Way We Were, a bigbudget romantic weepie that is also the first substantial Hollywood feature to deal with the Communist blacklistings in the industry in the 1940s and 1950s. The screenplay was initially written by Arthur Laurents, who had had direct experience of the blacklistings. Indeed, director Sydney Pollack’s initial enthusiasm for Laurents’ treatment was grounded in its political originality: ‘You know what you’re proposing here? This is dynamite. This will be the first-ever blacklist movie, the first one to show how it was’ (Callan, 2010:191). Pollack’s seeming enthusiasm for making the political agenda of the HUAC blacklisting of left-leaning creative talent in Hollywood the focus of the film extended to him hiring eleven other writers to fix what he saw as structural flaws and issues of authenticity in Laurents’ original script. Included in the eleven was Dalton Trumbo, who had actually been blacklisted by HUAC. The finished product, however, was heavily criticized for sacrificing the political potential of the Hollywood Blacklist strand of the story in favour of the romance. Pollack, under pressure from producer Ray Stark, who was keen on creating a smash hit vehicle for Barbra Streisand, decided to favour the love story over the politics, in spite of opposition from his two stars. As Redford admitted: ‘I think we’d both have preferred a more political Dalton Trumbotype script. But Sydney came down on the side of the love story. He said, “This is first and foremost a love affair,” and we conceded that’ (quoted in Callan, 2010:194). But, actually, the issue of the balance between love story and politics had been carefully considered by Laurents, even as he was beginning to write the original treatment:

92

Robert Redford and American Cinema

The Way We Were was for a major studio … But I was going to counterbalance that with an apple from the garden: it was a love story. What’s more, a love story between two people who were not meant for each other. Different beliefs, different styles; they loved each other until their principles were put on the line. What happened then, I wasn’t sure but I did know it would not be a political polemic …. When Katie and Hubbell got to Hollywood, I slowed down to make sure the political element didn’t overpower the love story.

(2000:263–4) Significantly, one marked motivation for increasing the focus on the HUAC witch hunts was that it strengthened Redford’s character by ‘fulfil[ling] the metaphor of Hubbell as America … [and] giv[ing] him something to do …. we needed it [the HUAC material] if only to beef up Hubbell’ (Pollack, quoted in Callan, 2010:193). Therefore, the HUAC blacklisting dimension is kept in the film partly because Redford’s character, having fulfilled his gift by becoming a successful writer, is seduced to Hollywood just as the witch hunts were happening. Being the partner of a Communist subversive such as Katie would only inevitably lead to problems. It made Hubbell, and Redford, if not the main focus of the second half of the film, then at least an equal focus, whereas the first half had been predominantly Katie’s narrative. The climactic argument that takes place in the railway station restaurant as Katie returns from campaigning in Washington is an instance of giving Hubbell, and Redford, something to do. Laurents heavily criticized the unrealistic clumsiness of the scene: ‘a politically crude scene that never would have happened to the characters in the movie and was completely unnecessary’ (2000:277). The scene is designed to set Hubbell up as a man of action, not only ready to punch the man who calls his wife a commie bitch, but also, in an unnaturally empty restaurant, to give as good as he gets in political argument with his more politically experienced, and hereto more passionately subversive, wife. Hubbell’s ultimate frustration at Katie’s intransigence causes him to angrily trash a nearby table; to Laurents’ disgust: ‘Robert Redford shoved the table over, not Hubbell Gardner. Hubbell would have gotten Katie’s point’ (2000:279) (Figure 3.2). However, an important point is being sidelined here. The binary opposition which ends the argument – Hubbell arguing that people are more important than principles, Katie countering ‘Hubbell, people are their principles’ – goes

Political Animal

93

Figure 3.2  Giving Redford something to do: The argument in the restaurant in The Way We Were.

to the very heart of their differences: Hubbell more interested in people than politics, Katie more comfortable in the realm of political activisim than relating to people socially. It sets up the dynamic of the rest of the film: from Hubbell sleeping with an ex-girlfriend as a means of reconnecting to a particular easy social network, through to Katie being unable to renounce her political identity, even if it means losing the man she has always loved. The film was originally meant to have climaxed in a string of scenes which make clear that Katie has been informed upon, by a friend from her college days, as a member of the Communist party. The Hollywood Studios, knowing this, will refuse to offer Hubbell, her husband, any more work; his career will be finished. Katie realizes she has a choice of renouncing her allegiance to socialism, or to divorce Hubbell so that she stops being a block on his career. The first option is what Hubbell is hoping, and perhaps expecting, her to do. But she won’t, leaving divorce the only option. The detailing of these complex emotional negotiations takes several minutes of discussion between the two characters: a lengthy hiatus in the forward flow of the narrative as they bat political positions back and forth between them. When the film was previewed in San Francisco, on a Friday night with the final political scenes in the cut, and on the Saturday night, when they had been block-removed, audiences proved cold to the first, politicized, version, but loved the second, edited version. ‘Nobody cared about the Witch Hunt, nobody cared about the politics …’ (Laurents, 2000:281). The cuts made the decision to divorce seem either ambiguous, the culmination of the couple’s long ill-fated, mismatched love affair, or, at least, the direct result of Hubbell having

94

Robert Redford and American Cinema

recently slept with a former girlfriend. The changes made the split seem not to be explicitly political, allowing the romance element to finally overpower the political one, and confirming The Way We Were as a grand romance set against a political backdrop, rather than a political movie whose political explorations were articulated through the relationships between its characters. Nevertheless, the success of The Way We Were, followed by the box office success of his reunion with Paul Newman and George Roy Hill on The Sting (1973) and the somewhat less financially successful, but equally glamorous, The Great Gatsby (1974), allowed Redford to cement his position as the leading romantic male movie star of the 1970s. These choices of movie role, covered in the previous chapter, seemed to clearly signal Redford’s decision to have moved away from difficult and contentious roles towards more box office and audience friendly ones. This makes his decision to subsequently appear in two of the notable films of the so-called American Paranoid Cycle of the mid-1970s all the more telling. Here, seemingly, was an actor who was not yet prepared to surrender his personal political agenda to the seductions and diversions of Hollywood fantasy-escapism. Throughout the 1970s, Redford would play both ends against the middle: appearing in a big-budget feature designed to appeal to the mass mainstream interspersed with more personal projects (admittedly not necessarily lower budget) in order to attempt to achieve a balance between the demands of the New Hollywood marketplace: initially, perhaps, low budget and alternative, but very soon into the 1970s, looking again towards the bigger budget attraction. The 1970s leading actors and wannabe superstars, no matter how committed they seemed to be to the new American filmmaking revolution, were also very aware of the need to cover their backs, and to sign up to any semi-respectable production that would not immediately expose them as ghettoized, should the New Hollywood express run out of steam (which it did, fairly quickly, by mid-decade). Within this potential conflict of interests, real-world politics and cinematic opportunism combined to create the Paranoid Cycle of films, which endeavoured to expose the cynical, dark, calculating, anti-illusionistic, perhaps anti-American Dream world of early 1970s America. Redford had been trawling this furrow for a few years, in films such as Downhill Racer and The Candidate. As he progressed towards the mid-1970s, that disillusionment would substantially intensify into the Paranoid Cycle.

Political Animal

95

The Paranoid Cycle of the mid-1970s The Paranoid Cycle has been labelled to describe a specific strand of political filmic narrative that became very evident in Hollywood’s output during the mid-years of the 1970s. I will go on soon to discuss the most significant film examples of the cycle, including those produced by and starring Redford himself. But to immediately frame it within a broader historical and cultural context, Richard Hofstadter has argued that America has always been a paranoid nation, in which ideologically committed groups – the Illuminati, the Masons, the Catholics; the Communists – have, across American history, implacably sought to counter and defeat the emerging and prevailing American state. Let us now abstract the basic elements of the paranoid style. The central image is that of a vast and sinister conspiracy, a gigantic and yet subtle machinery of influence set in motion to undermine and destroy a way of life. One may object that there are conspiratorial acts in history, and there is nothing paranoid about taking note of them. This is true. … The distinguishing thing about the paranoid style is not that its exponents see conspiracies or plots here and there in history, but that they regard a “vast” or “gigantic” conspiracy as the motive force in historical events. History is a conspiracy, set in motion by demonic forces of almost transcendental power, and what is felt to be needed to defeat it is not the usual methods of political give-andtake, but an all-out crusade [Apocalyptic …. Massive ….worlds crumbling … time running out ….] The apocalypticalism of the paranoid style runs dangerously near to hopeless pessimism, but usually stops short of it.

(1966:29–30) The social and political turmoil of post-Second World War America is figured in its tumultuous collapse from the position of ideological gatekeeper for all that is true and right. The relentless erosion of that position by, to name a few, communism, as attempted to be exposed in the HUAC hearings and the secrecies and deceptions of the Cold War, the calamitous mistakes and the repeated dissimulations of the Vietnam conflict, the promises and betrayals of the Civil Rights movement, and the abject dishonour and humiliation of Watergate, created a climate of mistrust based on lies and subterfuge perpetrated by those in power.

Robert Redford and American Cinema

96

Paranoia and filmnoia According to George Wead’s adaptation of the Paranoid Cycle (2017), fitted to the specifics of the film medium, five elements make up the film version of paranoia, which he terms ‘filmnoia’. Paranoia

Filmnoia

1

An environment of moral chaos signalling a breakdown of Judeo-Christian order and political ideals. ‘Moral’ is a shiftable term, referencing how decay in any system in which prior confidence has been placed will throw ‘us’ into a moral limbo where a logical explanation is constructed, based on the very system that has decayed.

Evokes a chaotic historical or psychomatic environment

2

The hero marked by loneliness and singularity.

A single-minded, lonely hero

3

An outside oppression aimed ultimately at his life, and perhaps the lives of many others. Thinking in grand terms – not just local and personal, but national/global: CIA, Mafia, Big Business …

A story involving conspiracy and, possibly, unheroic death

4

Anonymous oppressors. ‘They’ have no A dark, impersonal, often distinctive personality, thus there is no monolithic opposition true Nemesis who is one’s own counterpart of evil.

5

The incapability of ever overcoming ‘Them’

A refusal of true catharsis.

In this framework, however, Watergate becomes the final straw; the betrayal that could not be rescued. Until that time, the political films that Hollywood had produced had, as Coyne (2008) argues, posited a ‘good man’ who would ‘save’ the nation from even the most ominous threat to its constitution and way of life. It is true that the doubt about the reliability of that ‘good man’ had begun to be eroded by the time of The Candidate. Even though earnestly well meaning in his ‘big-fish/little pond’ life, McKay is increasingly shown to be hopelessly out of his depth in the brutal cut-and-thrust of contemporary American politics, and is revealed to have no idea how to develop his political platform once he has won the first, modest, state election. And so, the insinuation seems to be, he will continue to be prey to those politically calculating professional advisors who have been so successful in manipulating

Political Animal

97

him into whatever politically expedient course of action suits the existing circumstance: it is not about the integrity; it is all about the winning and the continuing to win. Within the larger Hollywood context, the HUAC hearings had polarized identities of who were the ‘good’ and the ‘bad’ guys: the ‘bad guys’ being initially identified as the latest in the long line of enemies, coming out of the Second World War, who were seeking to bring down the legitimate democratic government of the United States and its Allies. History has confirmed, however, that the then good guy (the US Government) became the bad guy and, in a startling switch, the bad guy (the Commie-loving American citizens) the good guy. Pulling back from this particular confrontation, what seems most interesting is that the good/bad binary was negotiable, capable of redefinition according to specifically defined circumstances and contests. Hence, in coming years, we would get The Godfather and The Godfather, Part II (Coppola, 1972 & 1974) – where the usually malevolent Mafia are redefined as, at least, a complex mix of positive family values and negative thuggery, though always leading, inexorably, towards the increasingly paranoid through the Michael character, who ultimately suspects everyone, kills members of his own family and ends up isolated in his own hermetically sealed world. In this, he was not unlike Nixon. The Mafia and the US Government, at least in its Nixon administration, closely mirror one another: complex structures of command, insular trust systems, influence in all areas of social and political control through networks of loyalty; ruthless; paranoid. This is all just to consider how 1970s films both fed off the back of the previous decade’s anti-communist witch-hunts and then collided with the following decade’s dark corruptions surrounding the Nixon administration, for a consideration of how Redford’s Paranoid Cycle films contribute to that strand’s attempt to address the unacceptable crimes that the US Government was performing upon its citizens.

Three Days of the Condor (1975) Redford hardened his political credentials in developing the film that would become Three Days of the Condor. Pollack and Redford began their production process with a far-fetched novel about crooked CIA agents running a drugs

Robert Redford and American Cinema

98

operation by hiding heroin in hollowed out books. Finding the basic premise interesting (nefarious material hidden within books; rogue factions within the CIA operating according to their own interests), the narrative development, for them, became increasingly ridiculous. The original plot escalates to an ‘over the top’ climax, with forces parachuting down around the Washington Memorial. As Redford described it in a supplementary documentary on the DVD release, it was so much baloney; perhaps acceptable in the age of the action blockbuster which was only a few years away, or the current ubiquitous superhero franchise: back then, just ‘over-the-top’ (‘Making of ’ documentary on the DVD release of Three Days of the Condor). Both Redford and Pollack recognized an interesting kernel within this shoot-’em-up mayhem: as Redford commented, ‘[I]n the middle was a great concept, about a guy struggling to deal with a situation he cannot understand. It was basically about paranoia, and that did grab me’ (Callan, 2010:221). Redford, Pollack and the screenwriter they hired to realize the reworking, David Rayfiel, virtually rewrote the plot, junking the gung-ho heroics while retaining the interesting dynamics of the ‘stuff-hidden-in-books’ idea and, more importantly, the idea of an ordinary man at the centre of the narrative who simply didn’t understand what was happening around him. If we attempt to align the five elements of both paranoia and filmnoia to Three Days of the Condor, we get the following:

1

Paranoia

Filmnoia

Three Days of the Condor

An environment of moral chaos signalling a breakdown of JudeoChristian order and political ideals. ‘Moral’ is a shiftable term, referencing how decay in any system in which prior confidence has been placed will throw ‘us’ into a moral limbo where a logical explanation is constructed, based on the very system that has decayed.

Evokes a chaotic historical or psychomatic environment

Cold War; amoral choices; maverick forces;

Political Animal

99

Paranoia

Filmnoia

Three Days of the Condor

2

The hero marked by loneliness and singularity.

A single-minded, lonely hero

Joe Turner, happy-golucky, unattached joker transformed into a focused investigator (and killer) in the pursuit of the agency at the root of the destruction of his safe life. And Turner is told at the end of the film:‘You’re about to be a very lonely man.’

3

An outside oppression aimed ultimately at his life, and perhaps the lives of many others. Thinking in grand terms – not just local and personal, but national/global: CIA, Mafia, Big Business …

A story involving unheroic death

Turner is certainly threatened with death – both by a ‘Mailman’ hitman and von Sydow’s professional killer. But he doesn’t die – is just ostracized.

4

Anonymous oppressors. ‘They’ have no distinctive personality, thus there is no true Nemesis who is one’s own counterpart of evil.

A dark, impersonal, Higgins, Langley Centre; often monolithic Mr. Wabash (Houseman) opposition and his committee; other operatives

5

The incapability of ever overcoming ‘Them’

A refusal of true catharsis.

Turner seems victorious – he’s cracked the oil plot, and sent all details to the NY Times. But the final stinger is maybe the NY Times is in the control of the enemy?

Redford, by now a superstar, could have insisted on being positioned as an action-hero, rather than risk the potential difficulty of persuading his newly won public that he was a clueless and weak hero. For Redford, however, that very tension between identities was the major attraction of the role; yet another pulling-against-his-image that he was still then keen to maintain, although across the length of the narrative, his character does transform from the latter to the former. The film, as it was subsequently developed, was based around a character who is employed by the CIA to read all kinds of printed material, including novels, in order to identify passages in any of the material which may be encoded as a means of transporting secret messages by enemy espionage

100

Robert Redford and American Cinema

agents. Although he is obviously intelligent, his is a relatively menial job, and he views both it and himself light-heartedly: effectively, he is the joker of the small team who hides behind the façade of the American Literary Historical Society. The character as rewritten is, as Pollack notes: ‘A man who trusts everybody – so much so that he’s not doing that well at the CIA, because his boss says to him at the beginning – “You’ve got a problem Turner,” and he says “Well, I actually trust a few people.” And by the end of the picture he trusts nobody, including [the] girl’ (Pollack interview, ‘Making of ’ documentary, Three Days of the Condor DVD). Once the initial assassination of his team is accomplished (while Turner was out mundanely collecting lunch orders for his colleagues), reality hits him full in the face: he returns to find everyone brutally murdered and simply cannot comprehend what has taken place and is non-plussed as to what to do next. Being the male lead in what is nominally a Hollywood action thriller, however, he soon attempts to pull himself together, remembering the coding system for contacting central office in an emergency, and initiating the resultant protocols. But through the next third of the film, his character is battling his ignorance, forever behind the truth, playing catchup. In these early sections of the film, Redford’s star image is being explicitly used against itself to project a character who is struggling to understand the full complexities of the murky political world into which he has unexpectedly been thrust. As Redford has commented, Sydney did a good job in how to use me – fun-loving, devil-may-care, slightly cynical, squinty eyed towards things, but enjoying life. How to take that character and submit him to this horrific circumstance to see how it affected him. So the humour and the joy in the character that has him kind of fun-loving and make jokes and taking life lightly suddenly shifts into a darker, paranoid character.

(Redford interview, ‘Making of ’ documentary, Three Days of the Condor DVD) It is interesting how Redford blurs himself and his character in saying this. Is the ‘Me’ who is ‘fun-loving, devil-may-care, cynical’ Redford or Turner? Or both? The blurring is, at the very least, intriguing. Eventually, however, as indicated above, Redford/Turner ends the film as an action hero, solving the mysterious plot and confronting the main villains (Figure 3.3).

Political Animal

101

Figure 3.3  Bookworm turned action hero: Three Days of the Condor.

The same might be said for Warren Beatty’s character Joe Frady in The Parallax View of the year before, who is a recovering alcoholic, a maverick journalist and a womanizer (when Paula Prentiss’ character comes to see him to tell him of her fears of being killed, he has just finished having sex with an unknown woman; a lothario image that Beatty was well known for in his personal life, and would repeat in the film Shampoo the following year). Like Turner, Frady is drawn into, indeed trapped in, a murky political situation he barely understands. The film clearly references the two Kennedy assassinations, complete with mysterious gunmen and Grand Committees which offer unchallenged verdicts and brook no questions. Moreover, both Frady and Turner are non-achievers, Frady being ‘a third-rate journalist from Oregon’ who is the match of Turner’s underachieving bookworm. Beatty predicts Woodward and Bernstein (more the latter) in All the President’s Men: junior investigative journalists whose conspiracy suspicions are initially not believed, before their persistence begins to offer proof. At one point, Frady is asked if he thinks the CIA and FBI are involved. He believes it goes deeper than that, to a hidden organization capable of the dirtiest of covert operations. This is echoed in Three Days of the Condor.

102

Robert Redford and American Cinema

And the fact that the CIA had an action arm attached to it that was completely out of control. In other words, there was no accountability, no checks and balance to that part of the CIA which was the action arm. They could design plots, they could design assassinations, they could design all kinds of things in the interests of national security and get away with it, because there was no-one watching them. They were watching the CIA, but not that part of the CIA.

(Redford interview, ‘Making of ’ documentary, Three Days of the Condor DVD) So, Turner ends up a lonely hero, denied his catharsis in either total victory or death: just abandoned to a life in the wilderness, avoiding repercussions from ‘Them’. Again, as Max von Sydow’s hitman character tells Turner in their parting scene, ‘You’re about to be a very lonely man.’ In the end, though, Turner is luckier than Frady, who is murdered at the film’s climax. It should finally be noted that across the 1970s, corporate conspiracy thrillers ran in parallel with political conspiracy thrillers: Network (1976); Coma (1978); The China Syndrome (1979); Silkwood (1983), all centred their narratives on the consequences of social institutions (television, medicine, nuclear power) being dangerously, fatally, compromised by high-level corruption. And in films like The China Syndrome, as with Condor (more than Parallax), the use of traditional cinematic conventions to make radical points allows the moral high ground to move from naiveté to conviction, through the slow transformation of ordinary people into informed opponents of the corporate system. This populist position was designed to appeal to larger audiences than if the characters had begun as radicals: a strategy agreed to by Redford, as quoted above.

The role of Gordon Willis As a brief, but important, sidebar to the Paranoid Cycle, in terms of the visual look of the Paranoid Cycle films, the principal architect has to be Gordon Willis, the cinematographer on several of the key examples of the subgenre: Klute (1971), both Godfather films (1972 and 1974), The Parallax View (1973)

Political Animal

103

and All the President’s Men (1976). In each of these films, Willis worked closely with two directors, Francis Ford Coppola (The Godfather and The Godfather Part II) and Alan J. Pakula, (Klute, Parallax and President’s Men) to evolve a visual style that matched exactly the mounting sense of paranoia generated by the narratives of the films. Of the two sets of films, it is those directed by Pakula that principally concern this present study; not least because Pakula worked on the last of these – All the President’s Men, with Robert Redford, who had also worked with a cinematographer who had been heavily influenced by Willis, Owen Roizman, on Three Days of the Condor. Together, these creative talents established the look and sound of the paranoid-conspiracy thriller, after the initial personal/corporate paranoid narrative: Klute (1971), in which a seemingly solicitous, caring senior figure in a large company, a supposed friend to the man whose disappearance triggers the film’s plot, reveals himself to be a psychopathic and sadistic murderer, and the metaphorical corrupt family dynastic alternative, the Godfather films. All of these films depend heavily upon their distinctive lighting schemes, in which extremes of light and dark predominate, whether cutting across individual faces (suggestive of split personalities) or more generally across scenes, suggestive of the binary opposition between bright and transparent honesty and dark, primal and corrupt deceit. Together, perhaps, this polarity becomes representative of the positive/negative dichotomy in America’s own self-image. As writer William Goldman argues: ‘I believe that one of the reasons the movie [President’s Men] works is because Gordon Willis’ camerawork was so brilliant. He was so important for this movie because of the paranoia that is there’ (‘Truth about Lies’: documentary extra, All the President’s Men DVD). The filmmakers used lighting to convey a message about the workings of democracy. ‘They shot scenes representing the Washington Post’s office in bright, clean light and shot scenes around Washington D.C. in darkness and shadows. The former suggests openness and honesty, whereas the latter suggests a secretive, menacing environment’ (Toplin, 1996:189). The good/ evil, light/dark dichotomy becomes all the more sinister when the story ceases to be fiction and becomes real. Having brought All the President’s Men into the argument, the next section will examine it in further detail.

104

Robert Redford and American Cinema

What if the paranoia were true: All the President’s Men (1976) What if the unbelievably paranoid became the provable real? In the other films of the cycle, that is indeed the dynamic: both Frady and Turner find out the truth (the Parallax Corporation; the covert operation to protect oil supplies for America). But this tension between the ‘it cannot be true’ and the ‘can it really be true?’ reaches an apogee in All the President’s Men, with the conspiracy agenda and accompanying polarized lighting schemes being magnified by the ‘simple’ fact that the story was true. The uncovering of the dirty tricks, bugging, Watergate investigation, Woodstein probing and Nixon resignation all incontrovertibly prove that Watergate (or, rather, the vast conspiracy of corruption, lies, distortions and dissembling surrounding the Nixon administration’s dirty tricks campaign) was not the fictional product of a screenwriter’s fertile imagination, but did, in fact, happen. It was Redford himself who suggested, while the two reporters were writing the book, that they frame the narrative around what they themselves did in uncovering the story, rather than upon the story itself, which was, by that date, well known from saturation newspaper and television coverage. In the process of investigating the truths being concealed by the well-financed slush fund, Woodward and Bernstein both experienced real and mounting paranoia, as the power of the corrupt political machine they were gradually exposing bore down on them to hinder their progress. As Woodward admitted, ‘We had been warned our phones were probably tapped, our homes and auto bugged, and we had been told by Deep Throat that we could be in physical danger. We were getting a little paranoid’ (Hirschberg, 1976:37). The fictional paranoia which forms the centre of the unease in the earlier films of the Paranoid Cycle has magnified and cohered into real-life paranoia of real historical figures. The truth really is out there. Redford’s first inklings of something being awry with the Nixon administration came while, somewhat appropriately, he was on the road promoting The Candidate in August 1972. He confessed himself perplexed, even outraged, at the cynical and defeatist attitudes of journalists towards the rumours that illegal activities were taking place that could be linked to the Nixon administration and its re-election. This negativity led Redford to maintain an awareness of the developing story, and to keep it, and the two journalists, in his sights.

Political Animal

105

As it evolved, it seemed an increasingly unbelievable story, in which two anonymous characters, junior reporters, unearthed the greatest political scandal of modern American politics. As Alan J. Pakula astutely observed: ‘As I said to Woodward and Bernstein, if All the President’s Men had been a work of fiction, I never would have made it; I wouldn’t have believed it’ (Thompson, 1976:16). Redford approached the two journalists very soon after the first small news reports on the Watergate burglaries, bearing their names, began to be published in The Washington Post. At the time (October 1972), Redford had just begun The Way We Were, the politically compromised film that was to install him as the world’s leading male film star. As covered earlier, in the intervening four years since Butch Cassidy had propelled him to fame, Redford had largely made small, low-budget movies (Downhill Racer, Little Fauss and Big Halsy, The Candidate, The Hot Rock). His true, permanent megastardom was still to be confirmed, cemented by two huge successes in 1973 (The Way We Were and The Sting) with the lesser success of The Great Gatsby coming the following year. At this point in the story of his involvement in the Watergate story, therefore, he was certainly a megastar in waiting, but not quite yet a megastar arrived. This fledgling mega stardom of Redford’s possibly excuses Woodward and Bernstein’s coolness towards his initial approaches to them to obtain the film rights to their book: Bernstein totally ignored him and Woodward made contact only to say a polite no-thanks to even a short meeting, citing the pressure of finishing the book. Redford’s personal political commitment, more than any affront he may have experienced at being rebuffed by the two reporters, explains his dogged determination to pursue the story and to get to meet, and to finally get the approval of, the two Washington Post journalists. By the time the reporters had published the book, and Redford and Warner Bros were negotiating the film rights (in September 1974), Redford had made that string of big-budget star-vehicle movies, and confirmed, without any shadow of a doubt, his stellar filmstar status. It also transformed the film version of the book from Redford’s original vision of a small, low-budget, blackand-white movie, planned to cost a mere £2,000,000, which Redford would produce but not star in, into a big-budget movie in which he would take one of the two lead roles: an escalation of the ambition of the film that was reflected in the cost of the film rights ($350,000) and the budget for the production itself ($8,000,000). Paranoia was beginning to come at a heavy price. The film

106

Robert Redford and American Cinema

version of All the President’s Men therefore became another classic package deal: Redford (and later Hoffman) as major star(s), Alan J. Pakula as wellrespected director, William Goldman as famed writer and Gordon Willis as cinematographer (Callan, 2010:228). It also changed the narrative and aesthetic style of the film from the experimental text it may well have become as a low-budget, black-and-white movie with no stars, into a structure that married the demands of classical narrative’s cause-and-effect chains with investigative journalism’s drive to relentlessly follow up leads, chase down sources and make connections. All the President’s Men culminates the Paranoid Cycle by taking the biggest political paranoia story of the decade and absorbing it back into the classical Hollywood fold after the years of youthful New Hollywood experimentation. Two heroic journalists save America, restoring Hollywood’s conventional forms in the process. As Richard T. Jameson argues in Film Comment, ‘There is no more classical filmmaker than Alan J. Pakula at work in the American film industry today’ (1976:8). All the President’s Men, while paying fleeting homage to the new freedoms New Hollywood had forced into the industry in the early half of the decade, ultimately stands as confirmation that the ‘taking on of the establishment’, the central ethos of the ‘revolution’, could be as effectively achieved by using the form and address of the old school, ‘classic Hollywood’: mainstream stars, conventional cause/effect plotting, classical scene construction. The Paranoid Cycle posited faceless and omnipotent organizations against the lone hero resistor, who is largely ignorant of what he is up against. While this construction doesn’t initially appear to be in operation in All the President’s Men, at least in the early stages of the film, when the burglary is initially set up to seem just to be the hapless, amateurist work of independent Castro sympathizers, even in these early scenes, there are inexplicable anomalies: the lawyer, Markham, who is ‘there but not there’, won’t explain why he obviously is there, and smilingly rebuffs Woodward by saying that he has nothing to say. A little later, Woodward asks one of his editors (Rosenfeld, played by Jack Warden) who Charles Colson is, and gets a searing putdown for his ignorance: (‘Glad you asked me that question … because if you asked Simons or Bradlee they would have said, “You know, we’re going to have to fire this schmuk at once, because he’s so dumb.” The most powerful man in the United

Political Animal

107

States is Nixon ….you’ve heard of him? Charles Colson is Special Counsel to the President.’) The naïve journalists don’t even know the well-known names of the powerful figures overseeing the dangerous and corrupt organization which will be inducing so much paranoia as the film progresses. And this raises an interesting point, and a significant difference between the paranoid threat constructed by this film and the others in the Paranoid Cycle: the Nixon administration and its chief officers (the President’s Men) are visible in plain sight, famous enough for Woodward to be made to look foolish for not knowing them. They are not the invisible puppet masters of fictional organizations which provide the threat and corruption in the other films. Moreover, as a paranoid story, it gets resolved, even though the film itself ends with Nixon re-elected and Woodstein plugging away at uncovering further layers of the truth. The infamy of the real-life story means that the audience is, momentarily, called upon to fill in the future: that the two journalists will eventually get to the heart of the corruption and Nixon will be forced to resign. This communal forward projection is then confirmed by a series of teletype printouts, which chronologically detail the sentencing of each of the main offenders, and the final resignation of Nixon. The secret organization has been fully revealed, the paranoia dispelled, and America symbolically rescued by the dogged heroes (Figure 3.4).

Figure 3.4  Intrepid reporters: Hoffman as Bernstein and Redford as Woodward in All the President’s Men.

108

Robert Redford and American Cinema

Some shots in the film frame the reporters (and other characters) against huge and imposing government buildings. The humans are dwarfed by the size and scale of the architecture. As Pakula commented, the point being made was of ‘the enormity of impersonal government.’ Woodward, certainly, was intimidated throughout his investigation: ‘We were afraid a lot of times. Sometimes afraid for our lives. Maybe it was a paranoid reaction, maybe it wasn’t. Going out and seeing a source in an underground garage, Deep Throat; one incident in particular which ….it was just damned terrifying because I knew the stakes.’ (Pressure and the Press documentary extra, All the President’s Men DVD) One of the greatest temptations the filmmakers needed to resist was the tendency for a movie about crusading newspaper reporters to give a glamorous portrayal of the principal characters. It would be easy to make Woodward and Bernstein seem like national heroes. The filmmakers could depict the two journalists as humble giant slayers who brought down some of the most powerful men in the country by using their typewriters as weapons. The movie does this to a degree [by ignoring the contributions of a range of other people] All the President’s Men, as might be expected, assigns an inordinate amount of credit to Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein.

(Toplin, 1996:191) But the movie also doesn’t particularly ignore the sometimes questionable methods employed by the two reporters: the flirtatious cajoling of information out of female employees, the occasionally more threatening approaches to other figures, the duplicitous measures taken to obtain phone records from others involved. This is all essentially non-heroic stuff – not the typical actions of Hollywood movie stars, but certainly in the service of the end-process. American justice prevails – off the back of diligent journalistic endeavour and revelation, judiciary processes investigate and convict the wrongdoers, and prove ‘the System’ works. The natural order of the American Way is returned, ready for the new generation of representatives to occupy high office and continue the process.

Later films Discounting, for admitted convenience, his highly paid appearance in the star-soaked epic A Bridge Too Far in 1977 (it’s already been analysed in the

Political Animal

109

previous chapter, and he did it largely for the money, to aid development of his ski resort), the two films following the success of All the President’s Men further verified Redford’s political credentials, albeit at a more modest, localized and human level: The Electric Horseman (three years later in 1979) and Brubaker (1980). Both continue, in somewhat muted fashion, the Paranoid Cycle in so far as they both involve individuals doing the right thing against heartless and corrupt corporate institutions. The first stars Redford as a washed-up rodeo champion (Norman, ‘Sonny’, Steele) who is now forced to sell cereal for Ampco, a faceless multinational company, demeaning the integrity of the Western cowboy by appearing (habitually drunk) as the eponymous ‘lit-up’ Rhinestone Cowboy of the film’s title. The horse handler for the company mistreats its star commodity, the former racing champion Rising Star, by drugging and shackling him in order to allow him to malleably perform in front of crowds at promotional events. In an attempt to rescue the horse and, through this, his own self-respect, Steele absconds with the horse from a high-profile media event in Las Vegas, spectacularly riding through the streets of Las Vegas (Redford performing his own stunts), into the wilderness that surrounds the city. An ambitious, and initially coldly ruthless, female reporter (Jane Fonda) tracks him in order to get the scoop on his stunt. During the course of the film, they inevitably become closer, edging into a sexual relationship before parting at the film’s close – Steele having succeeded in freeing the horse but ruining his own career. Brubaker sees Redford play the eponymous hero, a prison governor who arrives at his next post anonymously in order to get a measure of how the place is run. To his horror, he discovers a wide-ranging system of abuse, culminating in the unearthing of a number of murders performed on prison inmates by those in authority and their underlings. The film ends with a kangaroo court attempting to cover over the truth of the crimes, with Redford’s Brubaker fired and escorted from the site in a state-driven car. As he leaves, however, the inmates begin a rhythmic clapping, acknowledging his ‘victory in defeat’ at exposing the corruption in the system. In both films, the final shot is a dramatic aerial pull-away as Steele heads down the highway, a man liberated from the falseness of his corporate life, and Brubaker, personal integrity intact, driven down the road leading away from the prison. Both characters are professionally ruined, their adherence to the truth making them unemployable within the work-frames within which they

110

Robert Redford and American Cinema

have been operating. While a conventional way to end a film in that period, by pulling the audience out of the drama through referencing the central characters moving towards a new phase of their lives, it is also possible that the two films are alluding to Redford’s own pulling away from the mainstream of his own film industry, certainly at that moment in his career. The two films allow Redford to similarly pull away from national and even global politics, and focus on the local and personal: Sonny can only release the horse, Brubaker fight the corrupt system of a single jail. We are perhaps back on The Candidate territory here, before McKay is torn from this context and asked to function on the bigger stage. Redford begins and ends the decade with the local integrity with which he was always most comfortable. It would take him over two decades to reengage with the larger picture.

The ‘War against Terror’ x 3 In that final phase of his career, in the new millennium, Redford directed three films, two of which he starred in as well, in which he, in different ways, addressed his concerns about America’s reaction to 9/11 and the rise in global terrorism. As a liberal, Redford could be expected to occupy a position that would be in opposition to George W. Bush’s extreme, gung-ho response to the terrorist attacks on the United States in 2001. That he chose to respond to this political agenda by directing three movies across five years, without acting commitments distracting him in between, with each movie very different in genre and style to the others, and to have waited a number of years following 9/11 before releasing the first, is perhaps a testament to his careful, thoughtful approach to all things politically serious (and, admittedly perhaps, to the difficult process of raising finance for the production of overtly political films in an age of politically hardened personal and national positions). In these endeavours, Redford joined a commendable company of filmmakers seeking to explore and understand the significance of the rise of political terror on the American psyche. From the earliest manifestations of this response, in The Guys (2002) through Syriana (2005), The World Trade Center (2006), Redacted (2007), Rendition (2007), The Hurt Locker (2008) and Zero Dark Thirty (2012), American filmmaking has been attempting,

Political Animal

111

sometimes subtlety, sometimes clumsily, to respond to the repercussions of the attacks. Many of these are serious and thoughtful in their consideration of the complexities of the situation, exploring either difficult emotional states for their characters or convoluted plots which try to describe the complex political landscape of the time. Redford made his three films within this fluid, volatile, emotionally raw period. The first was the wordy Lions for Lambs (2007), which narratively consists of three strands: two involving two characters (the first with Redford as a University professor talking to a student and the second a Congressman being interviewed by a journalist) debating the politics and personal morality of their stands on how terrorism should be combated. The third strand depicts the direct action of that response, as two of the Redford character’s ex-students, having enlisted, are shown in imminent danger of death after their mission goes badly wrong, isolating them on an Afghanistan mountainside. Redford was aware of the possibility of distorted politics in this construction – of a left-leaning liberal filmmaker making a movie that simply derides the far right’s political agenda. He was aware that he had to offer equally weighted positions throughout the film – hence the two one-on-one debates that make up two-thirds of the film: that between Redford as an idealistic college professor and his disillusioned, cynical student and the other between a liberal journalist and a far-right politician directly connected to the military response to the mounting tensions in Afghanistan. I thought it was massively challenging … because it could so easily slip into leftist bias, and that would defeat its purpose. Malley’s [Redford’s professor character] mission is to encourage social engagement in his students. It calls for talk before action. It’s about learning as much as teaching, but it couldn’t be preachy. It’s about morality, but it can’t be moralistic. Because of the divisive nature of Bush’s war on terror, I thought it was timely. As a director, I emphatically wasn’t taking sides. I didn’t want to say this or that was wrong. I just felt Lions for Lambs could provoke a meaningful wider discussion.

(Callan, 2010:390) If the reviews are anything to go by, he failed to avoid this conundrum. Long-winded polemical speeches are put into the mouths of some characters (Cruise’s, even Streep’s) while others (Redford and Garfield) argue

112

Robert Redford and American Cinema

inconclusively around the moral issues involved in the conflict. Illustrating the consequences of these positions in the deaths of the two trapped soldiers does not quite square the circle. Perhaps reviewers were looking for a more clear-cut decision on the situation. But conversely, the film should possibly be seen as a realization of Redford’s ongoing interest in the ‘grey area’, where political and moral positions are complex and by no means clear-cut. The film becomes an airing of all sides, rather than a pronounced statement of Redford’s own position. Referring back to the earlier section on genre, the second film, The Conspirator (2011), chose to examine the War on Terror metaphorically, by using the story about the pursuing and punishing of the assassins of Abraham Lincoln in 1865 to examine the moral complexities and corruption of justice that can occur when a threatened society collectively seeks revenge for an appalling act of national trauma. By focusing the narrative on the possible involvement in the plot to assassinate Lincoln of the mother of one of the conspirators, the film explicitly pitched personal morality and family bonds against the extreme needs of national security at a moment of great political instability and trauma. The cold and calculating professional politicians are constructed in clear comparison to the idealistic young lawyer, Frederick Aiken (James McAvoy) who is coerced to defend the mother, Mary Surratt (Robin Wright). The coercion is done by the young lawyer’s older mentor, played by Tom Wilkinson, who is adamantly committed to the concept of the ideals of open and free justice which would ensure even the most seemingly guilty person of a fair trial, but who cannot defend her himself, as he is a Southerner in the aftermath of the Northern victory in the Civil War. Aiken, a Union war hero, is initially appalled to be asked to perform the defence, but slowly comes to both align himself to the idealism of his mentor, but to also believe in the mother’s innocence. The Conspirator is a strange addition to the canon of films addressing the difficult issues and emotions operating in America in the years following the 9/11 attacks and the subsequent military campaigns in the Middle Eastern region. Its historical setting in one way distances us from the immediacy of those issues and emotions: the film can easily ‘just’ be read and enjoyed as an historical drama. But some of the scenes and the speeches are so pointed that it is virtually impossible to see it solely within this blinkered context.

Political Animal

113

In The Conspirator, Redford goes back to one of the only events in American history that tore at the country’s identity as violently as 9/11. And he demonstrates that what happened back then, during the trial of Mary Surratt, amounted to the squashing of rights, the twisting of protocol, the suspension of justice for ‘the sake of the nation.’ … Redford clearly intends this message as a commentary on all the legally dicey things that have gone on in the aftermath of 9/11: the detaining of terrorist suspects, with little or no evidence, and with no representation or deadline, in the prison at Guantanamo; the underground use of torture techniques that violate articles of the Geneva Convention; the willingness to suspend the law for the sake of an anti-terror, we-fight-fire-with-fire absolutism.

(Gleiberman, 2011) But the two levels function together in a very important way, by allowing the central characters (powerfully and persuasively played by Wright, McAvoy and Wilkinson) to capture the viewer’s emotional attention, because they occupy the safe zone of historical period distance, while simultaneously allowing their contemporary significance to inescapably circle round the events and issues being detailed. It is a clever strategy which delivers more emotional impact and more pause for thought than the more contemporaneous setting of Lions for Lambs, where similar debates on justice, morality, personal responsibility, etc. are more overtly, but also, perhaps, more alienatedly, offered. Redford’s film, finally greenlighted as a new directorial venture in the spring of 2010, was designed less as a historical piece than a polemic. Bob Woodward was thankful for his stubborn engagement with social issues in his films. ‘The gift me brought to me and Carl and All the President’s Men was the gift of an observer. He had a skill to hover above the project and cut to the key elements with amazing acuity’, says Woodward. ‘That degree of analytical skill enhances everything he does, and we need it in all divisions of our society.’

(Callan, 2010:395) The third of Redford’s three terrorist films, The Company You Keep (2012), continues this mission in a more explicitly contemporary context, by exploring the lifelong toll taken on characters involved in the Weathermen terrorist activities in America in the 1960s and 1970s, who then had to live the rest of

114

Robert Redford and American Cinema

their lives avoiding capture by assuming false identities and new lives. Redford plays one of these characters, Jim Grant/Nick Sloan, who has been living an anonymous life as a small-town lawyer until an ambitious young investigative journalist Ben Shepard (Shia LaBeouf) begins to relentlessly pursue his secret. There are clearly shades and echoes of All the President’s Men in this dogged uncovering, but the morality and rightness of the journalistic pursuit are made altogether more questionable in the film. LaBeouf ’s character is far more nakedly in search of fame than Woodward and Bernstein ever were; the potential impact of the story for his career, to the detriment of those he is investigating, is made explicit at several key moments. The moral framework is altogether different as the journalist’s editor makes plain to him at one point, ‘Don’t destroy someone to see if you can uncover something. That’s a shitty way of going about things.’ At the end of the film, Nick and Mimi finally meet, and have the following extended debate about the politics and morality of their terrorist activities. [Nick and Mimi in cabin:] Nick: ‘You shouldn’t have gone, Mimi. You should have said no. We were done.’ Mimi: ‘No. You were done. I never was. But you couldn’t accept that.’ Nick: ‘Mimi ….’ Mimi: ‘You fooled yourself into thinking I was someone else. And you’re still doing it.’ Nick: ‘I’m not the one fooling myself. It was over.’ Mimi: ‘It wasn’t over. It’s still not over. Every single thing we said then is true today. Any every single day it’s getting worse.’ Nick: ‘That’s not the point ….’ Mimi: ‘Oh, it’s exactly the point, Nick. I won’t give myself up to a system I despise. I won’t give up my freedom and accept their version of what life is supposed to be.’ Nick: ‘Mimi, how free are you, really?’ Mimi: ‘Well, I’m not in jail. But I don’t expect you to understand. They have you.’ Nick: ‘Oh, like hell ….’ Mimi: ‘A system that protects the super-rich, and the super-super-super rich and fuck’s over everyone else, and the planet to boot …’ Nick: ‘Mimi, would you just stop ….’

Political Animal

115

Mimi: ‘Everyone has given up and given in. They’re living at the expense of what they once believed and it’s so sad. You understood this. I’m sorry you’ve forgotten.’ Nick: ‘I wish I had forgotten, because my problem is I can’t stop remembering. So if you’ve built a wall so high, more power to you. You’re stronger than I am ….’ Mimi: ‘I will turn myself in, the day the politicians and the corporations turn themselves in for all they’ve done. That’s the day I’ll hand myself in. Scout’s fucking honour.’ Nick: ‘Stop hiding behind your fucking revisionary rant. You know what I see? I see the same person. I see it. I see it in your eyes. You can hide from everyone else in the world, and be someone else, but not with me.’

There are so many layers and subtexts to draw out from this interchange. Nick’s moral abdication – he should have been there but wasn’t – left his role to a less capable colleague, who messed up and caused the death of the bank worker. The Weathermen group and its activities were also a product of its time, and had a finite life; by the time of the bungled bank operation, that time was over, for Nick, at least. Finally, there is the recognition that idealistic agendas are personal, and they exist as long as the person wants them to. For Nick, the political effectiveness of anything the movement was planning to do had reached the point of being positively ineffective and was in danger of toppling into negativity. For Mimi, there was no other option but to remain extreme. Hence, the tenor of her later comments in the scene, where she telescopes the groups’ 1960s/1970s activities through to the modern day, arguing, in effect, that the terms, and the enemy, have not changed. What is interesting in this lengthy exchange, which the film has been overtly building towards since its beginning, is that Redford’s character is positioned as the pragmatic voice. He is the one who wants it to be recognized as over, as a past thing. He is the one forced to look back, to re-evaluate his past actions, recognize their limitations and urge the moving on past them to new possibilities. Mimi is the unapologetic one, seeing unchanged parallels between the distortions and corruptions of the 1960s and 1970s and those of the current America. The names might have changed, but the game remains the same. The super-super-super rich have always organized the play in order to reap the results, whether political power, oil wealth or any raft of equivalent

116

Robert Redford and American Cinema

rewards. This is the film’s most outspoken moment, and it is given to someone other than Redford’s character to proclaim. Not too surprisingly, counter to any ongoing accusation that he wanted to maintain his screen hero status, Redford adopts the persona of the guy who opted out, who didn’t run the course or fully commit to the agenda he and his fellow terrorists had designed. Of course, this might mean that he reclaimed his hero status – acting against the wrong to maintain the right. But, actually, it positions Redford firmly in the ‘grey zone’ – a politically active person who temporarily saw radical solutions to unacceptable social structures, but who then saw that radicalism was not the way (it is no accident that he has long been a small-town rights lawyer as the film opens). There is no easy right or wrong here. There is one more clarion call of integrity, however. In Truth (2017), which concerns itself with the CBS News coverage of George W. Bush’s fraudulent war record, Redford plays legendary TV newsman Dan Rather (Figure 3.5). Truth is Cate Blanchett’s film. She takes the main character role and dominates the narrative. Redford’s appearances as Rather are slightly disconcerting, having been made, by haircut and makeup, to look like Rather while still looking like Redford. He most looks like Rather during his TV appearances. ‘Off screen’, as it were, there is a softening of the hair and look which make him look more like Redford again. And although, as I have just said, it’s Blanchett’s film, it’s Redford’s, or rather, Rather’s, powerful final speech that gives the film its powerful integrity. Again, it’s worth quoting in full:

Figure 3.5  Redford as Rather in Truth.

Political Animal

117

Did you know that 60 Minutes was the first news programme to ever make money? Before that, all news divisions operated at a financial loss. You know, when the Government gave the networks the airwaves it was with the stipulation that they’d be used in some capacity for the public good. That was the news. They made their money elsewhere on the schedules. But reporting the news was a duty, and it was a trust. You know, when Don Hewitt started the 60 Minutes news, it was in 1968, it fell to enormous ratings. God … God, it was wonderful! I mean, people were really watching the news. I mean, they cared. And God, we figured out a way to give it to them. I was there Mary. I was there the day they figured out that news could make money. After a while, it dawned on them, how come the evening news isn’t a profit centre too? Why aren’t the morning shows earning more? Maybe if you interview the Survivor contestants, instead of the survivors of genocide, your ad rates go up. Pretty soon we won’t even run down our own stories, because it’s too expensive. We’ll just pay someone else to do it, then we’ll read them out on the air for show. It was a public trust once, I swear to you it was.

As it is given, Redford looks the most like himself that he does in the whole film, and so it is Redford delivering the speech’s scathing attack on the capitulation of modern news services. Every word of it is something Redford himself might say about the subject, and about the state of American politics. And so, throughout his long career, Redford can be seen never to have given up his commitment to questioning the moral integrity of American politics through a film-entertainment framework. Doing so ensures the reaching, and hopefully thoughtful engagement, of larger audiences than polemical documentaries ever could. Redford has used his industry reputation and status to make a series of political commentaries about then current states of American politics and society, sometimes appearing as focal characters, sometimes retreating behind his camera, but always with a determined commitment to the truth as he sees it.

118

4

An independent soul

The long history of independents From the most general historical point of view, the notion of ‘independent filmmaking’ has been central, not only to the American film industry, but globally. Indeed, at the very outset of cinema, in the early 1900s, all filmmaking, everywhere, was independent, in the sense that each film was made by a solo filmmaker (the Lumière Brothers, Georges Méliès, Edwin Porter, etc.), who financed, produced, filmed and distributed their own films. There was no frame of reference for their independence, in terms of a centralized ‘Big Production Machine’ or ‘Studio System’ against which they might be compared. They were all just separate filmmakers, inventing their own stories and fantasies, realizing them on celluloid, and getting them out into cinemas for audiences to enjoy. Once the American Studio System had manifested and coalesced itself towards the end of the 1910s, it became increasing possible to posit a central governing entity – economically, technically and aesthetically – against which any ‘independent’ filmmaker might be compared. To be an independent filmmaker then came to stand for someone who was unwilling to succumb to the financial and aesthetic controls exerted by any kind of central industrial filmmaking ‘system’. Plenty of filmmakers adopted this position, some maintaining it from their early pre-system days. One such, D.W. Griffith, continued to finance his own films independently up to the early 1920s. For example, in 1914/15, Griffith raised the money himself for the production of The Birth of a Nation, and then made and distributed the film under a company formed specifically for the film, the Epoch Production Company. A few years later, he formed United

120

Robert Redford and American Cinema

Artists with Charlie Chaplin, Douglas Fairbanks and Mary Pickford, a company designed to operate outside the emerging centralized studio structure which would soon become labelled as ‘Hollywood’. The four co-founders of United Artists each self-financed their films, and the company distributed them to cinemas. Although he would sometimes have to work with one of the studios to make his films through the 1920s, they were almost all still distributed through United Artists, through to his last, The Struggle, in 1931. This model – that of setting up a company formed around a filmmaker or filmmakers, with personally organized finance either out of personal funds or, more likely, arrangements with financial institutions, to make the film without any kind of studio interference, ensuring it is the filmmaker’s own vision, and then arrange distribution, with only the final part of the process, the distribution into cinemas, requiring studio assistance – was to become the standard for any ‘independent’ filmmaker wanting to create their own films. Skipping forward a few decades, more commonly, and certainly postParamount and the collapse of the traditional Hollywood Studio System, such independent filmmakers would approach the still existing studios, now more moneymen and distributors than ‘in-house’ production entities, for the initial financing and then the final distribution process. This remained the arrangement all the way from the first contemporary independent production companies – Burt Lancaster’s Norma Productions (with Ben Hecht) in 1948 and Kirk Douglas’s Bryna Productions in 1955 – through Fonda/Hopper’s Pando Productions for Easy Rider in 1969 to George Clooney’s Section Eight Productions (with Steven Soderbergh), whose first production was Confessions of a Dangerous Mind in 2002. The latter was made in association with, and distributed by, Miramax, the now-infamous mini-major which bludgeoned its way into the centre of the American film landscape in the late 1980s and through the 1990s. But while independent productions increasingly accounted for the larger number of films made in any one year during the 1970s, the profits to be made from them were still dwarfed by the mainstream films Hollywood produced alongside them: [I]n the twelve months between June 1975 and June 1976, 300 independent films were produced, representing an investment of $100 million outside the majors. Of these, some 80 percent were R- and PG-rated action-adventure or

An Independent Soul

121

exploitation dramas, 12 percent were G-rated, and 9 percent were X-rated. But, while they accounted for about two-thirds of all American production, these independent features generated only 10–15 percent of U.S. box-office rentals, and by the end of the decade they had been crowded off American screens by the majors’ saturation-booking tactics and by their invasion of the exploitation field itself.

(Cook, 2000:19)

Enter Robert Redford: Independent ‘saviour’ Two separate early initiatives perhaps sum up Redford’s position on independent film. The first, in 1962, as covered in Chapter 2 but worthy of refocused reiteration, was the low-budget War Hunt. Redford, still appearing in stage productions in New York, and with a TV career beginning to take off, was one of an ensemble cast in the small independent movie made by two brothers, Terry and Denis Sanders, both UCLA film graduates whose cinéma vérité short about the Civil War, A Time Out of War had won an Academy Award in 1955 as the Best Short Subject. Off the back of that success, United Artists gave the brothers’ independent company T-D Enterprises $250,000 to make their first feature. The crew included Francis Ford Coppola, also fresh out of UCLA film school, as gofer, and veteran cinematographer Ted McCord. John Saxon was the nominal star and it was the film on which Redford met then fellow actor Sydney Pollack, with whom he would make several significant films throughout the rest of his career. Redford assumed he’d play Ensore, the psychopathic private, off the back of his numerous psycho roles in TV series, but was actually chosen to play the sympathetic Loomis. Redford liked the low-budget rawness of the production. As he commented: ‘Sydney and I were the kind of actors who avoided seeing the big productions like Cleopatra in favour of the new stuff the Europeans were doing. So we were supporting all the edgy stuff ’ (Callan, 2010:85). Redford and Pollack were immediately concerned that the Sanders brothers were out of their depth making a feature-length production, creating new material even as the shooting proceeded. In turn, postproduction was commandeered by John Saxon, who worked with director Denis Sanders to edit the final version of the film.

122

Robert Redford and American Cinema

According to Saxon, War Hunt was a transition film, because the studio system had just shut down. Europe was happening and no one at the executive level knew where to go next. No decisions were being made in Hollywood, and this was the first moment that the independent stood out. In later life, Bob would become the patron saint of the independents with Sundance, and I choose to believe this was his baptism. Had he come to the movies at any other time, in any other way, he might not have found the inspiration. The Sanders brothers helped bring in a new era. We all benefitted. And I believe Bob intuited the significance of what we’d all done even if he failed to process it at the time.

(Callan, 2010:86) Against the objections of cast and crew, the finished film was recut on the orders of David Picker, the senior United Artists’ executive in charge of the production, dumped with little publicity into cinemas, and failed at the box office as just another low-budget, black-and-white war film, although it garnered good reviews from a number of publications. The War Hunt experience furnished Redford with several learning lessons. Firstly, the late interference by United Artists illustrated the potentially difficult and compromising relationship between an independent film company and the mainstream studio providing finance, whereby the latter often felt it had the right to interfere with the creation of the film, at any stage of the process, but especially during editing, when the final shape and vision of the film are either preserved or compromised. Secondly, the chaotic reality of the shoot itself showed the Sanders brothers – producer and director – to be underprepared, with a script that was not fully honed and designed to make shooting progress smoothly. For Redford, the ad hoc improvisation that took place did not constitute a professional level of filmmaking. The second initiative, as noted in the chapter on stardom, Redford was involved with was Education, Youth, Recreation (EYR), an attempt to get difficult-to-see American and European films out into the universities in an attempt to inspire young people to a greater appreciation of the potentials of cinema, other than the mainstream fare the cinema chains were offering them. A motley crew, comprising of Redford, Richard Friedberg (the husband of his agent), Mike Frankfurt (Redford’s lawyer), producer Gene Stavis and

An Independent Soul

123

business men Charles Saltman and Marty Keltz, set up and funded the new organization. Its purpose was to promote ‘alternative film’ through the university campuses of North America. (Redford loved European New Wave cinemas). ‘I wanted to encourage a comparable independent artistry in American film and started it there with EYR … We had two guiding principles: to promote a different type of cinema and also, as a sideline, to locate and sponsor new talent. I wanted to offer polemic in film in the most democratic, accessible way. What Peter Fonda and Nicholson and Hopper were doing was one way of changing the zeitgeist. I wanted another tack …. But in the end it didn’t work. …. The pendulum was swinging and the appetite for counterculture was uncertain. It surprised me, but the students didn’t want radical film. They wanted to see Doctor Zhivago like everyone else. They were conditioned to want Doctor Zhivago. EYR lasted seven months and lost $250,000 ….But it started something rolling.’

(Callan, 2010:150–2) European films such as Godard’s Le Gai Savoir were acquired and distributed, as was Scorsese’s NYU short The Big Shave. In addition to arranging film screenings, EYR also offered seed funding for a number of new directors, including Martin Scorsese and Sam Shepard. All came to nothing: Shepard absconded to Paris with his money, while, as the quote above shows, university students were showing a more conservative taste in films than Redford and his colleagues were anticipating. Again, as with War Hunt, Redford had received a reality check into the pragmatics of alternative cinema’s position in the American film landscape. The feature film showed the precarious status of independent productions when their financing is dependent upon a major studio’s money. EYR had demonstrated that the assumption that even the most potentially liberal and open of audiences, the young university student, was resistant to the demands posed by edgy, alternative cinema. Even when that cinema hit big in America the following year, with Easy Rider, it would prove to be short-lived and Hollywood would resume its mainstream juggernaut production ethos with mid- to late-seventies blockbusters such as Jaws (1975) and Star Wars (1977). But these would be lessons well learned by Redford, who was simultaneously developing his own independent identity.

124

Robert Redford and American Cinema

As covered in Chapter 2, Redford released six films between his sudden and meteoric rise to stardom with Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid in 1969 and his (temporary) surrender to mainstream, big-budget blockbusters with The Way We Were in 1973. The word ‘released’ is used advisedly, as two of the films (Tell Them Willie Boy Is Here and Downhill Racer) were made pre-Butch, but only released in the wake of that film’s phenomenal success. Willie Boy was a studio production for Universal. Downhill Racer was very much Redford’s ‘baby’, an independent film by most definitions of the word. It will be considered in more detail shortly. Of the other four, Little Fauss and Big Halsy (1970; Alfran for Paramount); The Hot Rock (1972; LandersRoberts Productions for 20th Century Fox); Jeremiah Johnson (1972; Sanford, for Warner Bros.) and The Candidate (1972; Redford-Ritchie Productions for Warner Bros.) were films a recently emergent film star might not be assumed to want to make, if cementing his glossy superstar image within the industry and onto the increasingly expectant market and its audiences was the overriding concern. All involved independent production units making the films with studio financing and distribution. As a previous chapter has detailed, all involved Redford playing variations of anti-hero: a self-absorbed and ambitious skier, narcissistic biker, curmudgeonly ex-con, loner mountain man and sellout politician. In making this string of films, Redford can, in effect, be seen to be thumbing his nose at the mainstream establishment: a quiet insistence on maintaining his independence in order to make the films he wanted to make, rather than what any centralized studio system was telling him he should make if he wanted to increase his star status. He was, in effect, refusing to play the mainstream Hollywood game by attempting to maintain an independent self. This duality – the independent Redford versus the mainstream superstar Redford, will be the central battleground upon which the terms of the coming chapter will be played out – moving through to a vision of how the industry within which he operated could be made more varied, interesting and productive. The six films Redford released between Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid in 1969 and The Way We Were in 1973 firmly established his credentials as, and preoccupation with remaining, both an independent spirit within the Hollywood machine, and an actor and filmmaker who would be able to make the films he wanted to make on the terms he wanted to make them. To do so,

An Independent Soul

125

he was willing to take cuts in his rising salary potential, or even no salary at all, and to take on a wide range of roles, from star actor and producer through to equipment handler and gofer – anything that would help get the film made for the often shoestring budget allotted to it. Under various kinds of pressure from a range of sources (many self-generated in order to preserve that fiercely held sense of independence in other shapes and forms), he would eventually make, as he saw it, a pact with the devil Hollywood. This tension in Redford, between maintaining his indie spirit and committing himself to attaining the furthest reaches of movie stardom, would become his narrative of the latter half of the 1970s and beyond. The result would be both that attainment AND the maintenance of a commitment to independent filmmaking, but a commitment that would take a very particular shape and eventually change the landscape of American filmmaking. As an antidote to the conformity of mainstream, star-driven filmmaking, Redford would establish his Sundance Institute in 1979 and then take over the running of an ailing independent American film festival in 1985, renaming it the Sundance Film Festival in 1991. The complex narrative of how both of these entities were born and developed to become the continuing expression and representation of Redford’s need for independence is detailed below.

Downhill Racer (1969) Redford’s interest in creating a non-heroic, difficult character in Downhill Racer has been explored in a previous chapter. Here, I want to chart Redford’s interest in making the film itself as an independent feature within the then confused and unstable remains of the studio system. In 1968, having made the film version of Barefoot in the Park for them the previous year, Redford was contractually liable to Paramount to supply two further films. The first of these was supposed to be a Western titled Blue, directed by Silvio Narizzano. Redford pulled out of the production at the last minute, dissatisfied with both the unfinished script and the vision of the director. Threatened litigation caused a delay in Redford’s dealings with Paramount, but matters were eventually settled and two other films identified as the ones to be made to fulfil Redford’s contract. The first of these was Tell Them Willie Boy Is Here, to be made by

126

Robert Redford and American Cinema

Universal with Redford on loan-out; the second, the then titled The Downhill Racers. The latter was to be directed by Roman Polanski until he ran into production problems on Rosemary’s Baby. When Polanski withdrew from the project, it was on the point of being dropped by producer Robert Evans and Paramount, until Redford personally met with Charles Bluhdorn, President of Gulf+Western, which had Paramount as part of its portfolio. Redford got Bluhdorn to agree to let him make the film himself, if he kept the budget below $2 million. (While Bludhorn was remarkably open and generous with Redford in giving him this deal, it didn’t prevent him from trying to later persuade his star actor to appear in a musical remake of Roman Holiday, to be directed by Franco Zeffirelli! Bluhdorn’s appreciation of his star’s key qualities was clearly limited [Callan, 2010:139–40].) This was the moment Redford decided to form his own independent film company. ‘If I could crack it with my own production company, I had choices beyond the studio or the agent ….I would, in principle, be in a situation where I could control the integrity of the production’ (Callan, 2010:134). To achieve this state of independence, Redford set up Wildwood Enterprises, his own production company, to develop Downhill Racer and future projects. Significantly, perhaps, at the same time as Redford was setting up his independent film production company, he was also setting in process of purchasing the canyon and mountain in which his family home was located. When the deal was completed and announced, on 5 August 1968, the Redford family estate came to 1,179, and the resort 2,200, acres. A little over a decade later, Redford was to decide to employ some of this acreage to establish a practical arts institute – exclusively film-related in its first incarnation, but later to spread to other arts such as music and dance. He would name it after his most famous character role. But to return to Downhill Racer. Redford was given carte blanche on the film if he kept the budget under $2 million, and with the title, now sacrosanct in the studio’s eyes, to be Downhill Racer. Redford hired a little-known writer, James Salter, because he liked his short fiction rather than because of his screenwriting prowess or experience (although he had just written The Appointment for Sidney Lumet and MGM). He also chose Michael Ritchie to direct. It was his first feature film, although he had had to date a track record of increasingly impressive TV work.

An Independent Soul

127

The film was shot in semi-documentary style, designed to incorporate real footage of Olympic skiers at the Genoble games, filmed by ski photographer Dick Barrymore. Barrymore secured the footage but then left for other projects, leaving Redford to edit the ‘test’ footage for presentation to Bluhdorn as proof of concept in order for the rest of the budget to be released. The ‘fictional’ shoot would then follow, slated to take up the majority of the budget – some $1.8 million. The tightness of this shoestring budget meant corners had to be cut in any way possible: Redford and his crew sleeping in corridors, actors providing their own clothing as costumes and so on – a truly independent production. As if symbolic of the film being a low-budget independent, Redford lost several crew members to the Bond film On Her Majesty’s Secret Service (1969), which was filming simultaneously on an adjoining mountain. The opposition in vision and ethos between the two productions could not have been starker, and neatly symbolized the mainstream-indie polarity that would become such a thorny issue as the independent sector of American filmmaking expanded across the coming decades. Having said that, the loss of the crew members, especially the experienced ski photographers, forced Redford and his team back on their own resourcefulness, increasing the physical demands of their work on the shoot, and asking them to find alternatives to the gaps created. One such was Joe Jay Jalbert, a skier from Washington University who worked on the Olympic B team contenders, who signed to shoot the ski action. With intense instruction and no small risk to his safety, Jalbert was asked to ski the runs while handholding an Arriflex camera. Although inviting serious accident, Jalbert emerged unscathed from the experience, and Redford and Ritchie had their visceral footage that would so significantly enhance the documentary-style ‘being-in-there-doing-it’ aesthetic that made the ski sequences of the final film so exciting. After previews went very badly, when it was shown before Midnight Cowboy to audiences in sun-drenched Santa Barbara, Ritchie and Redford recut the film, removing the traditional music track and substituting a mix of electronic music and effects and a ‘wild track’ of natural ambient sounds which boosted the experimental and documentary feel of the film. But Redford, particularly, felt the time lost in performing this rescue led to delay in distribution, which in turn irreparably harmed the film’s eventual chances of success. This is certainly

128

Robert Redford and American Cinema

confirmed by a story Redford has told in many an interview when asked about the film. Following Bluhdorn’s distancing of himself from Paramount operations, and the loss of his protective arm over the film and its creators, the Paramount distribution team used Downhill Racer as an ‘expenses dump’, meaning that it was used as a hook upon which to pin innumerable small expenses from other productions under the banner of Racer’s promotional budget. Consequently, the film itself never got the promotion it required, either in advertising or print numbers, and was allowed to quietly die at the box office. Redford has often cited the film as one of his favourites, indicating his continued interest in the integrity of small-scale film production. Another of his favourites, perhaps the number one, is Jeremiah Johnson.

Jeremiah Johnson Jeremiah Johnson was ‘at heart an independent film before there were independent films. We cut a lot of corners to try to make that film’ (Sydney Pollack interview, documentary extra, The Way We Were DVD). It might be hard to see how the film could be classified as independent, coming, as it did, with a $4 million budget from Warner Bros., although it was produced and made ‘independently’, through Sanford Productions as its production company. However, it was also substantially overseen throughout its production by studio executives: John Calley, head of production at Warners; Ted Ashley, Warner’s president; and legal executive Frank Wells. They would play major roles in the course of the production and, significantly, in the shift from the film being in their hands, financially and practically speaking, to being primarily in Redford’s and Pollack’s – the shift signifying the move to relatively true independence for the filmmakers. Redford and Pollack, however, immediately disagreed on the means of production. Redford was insistent on filming in the actual locations indicated by the story, that is, the mountains near his home in Utah. Pollack insisted this couldn’t be done within the $4 million budget, and that location filming would be done more cheaply in Spain (a ‘runaway production’: meaning cheaper crews, tax incentives and other benefits, including physical distance from potentially interfering studio executives), with interiors and pickups shot on studio lots in Hollywood. Redford won the initial argument, but this forced

An Independent Soul

129

the production to begin before it was ready, because of the seasonal conditions in the Utah mountains. The chaos that ensued forced Calley, Ashley and Wells to shut the production down while a rethink was undertaken. Finally, Warner’s green-lit the resumption of the production, with Redford, in Pollack’s absence, agreeing that any costs in excess of the $4 million budget would be met by Redford and Pollack from their fees and personal reserves. This move raises two important and interesting issues. The first was that of studio interference and control: seeing a production which was set up as independent but integrally tied to the studio financially, as something that needed intervention to prevent disaster. The second was that the deal that was struck – that the studio would adhere to its pledge of the $4 million basic budget but that anything in excess if this would be covered by the filmmakers themselves – effectively made Redford and Pollack responsible for the production itself and its eventual finished form. As Pollack commented, it sharpened their attention because ‘In the end, it was the greatest way to learn production, because I was playing with my own money’ (Callan, 2010:172). Although a difficult shoot, because of extreme weather vagaries, the film was actually brought in under budget ($3.1 million). Both Pollack and Redford received bonuses for the achievement, perhaps a result that would not have been the case on a ‘true’ independent production.

The Candidate Again, Redford’s development of the character of Bill McKay in The Candidate has been covered in an earlier chapter. Here I want to consider the film itself as an independent film, or as Gerald Perry describes it: ‘a freewheeling, irreverent, quasi-independent picture which Redford still likes. “It was done for $1.6 million in forty-one days,” he said’ (1981:49). The idea and focus were all Redford’s, born of a negative reaction to then-current American politics, which Redford saw as becoming increasingly image-controlled and, consequently, ideologically vacuous. It was also borne of a well documented, deep dislike of Richard Nixon, the result of a personal encounter with the then senator and future president back in Redford’s high school days, which would have further and larger repercussions in the actor’s career with a larger budget political film some four years later.

130

Robert Redford and American Cinema

The deal was struck with Richard Zanuck who, on the back of the success of Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, had moved to Warners. Redford (pre Downhill dump) was keen to make a deal on The Candidate ‘that was as lean as Downhill Racer ….The budget, drawn up by Ritchie and Production manager Walter Coblenz, was agreed to at a rock-bottom $1.5 million, with no off-thetop fee for Redford. “I accepted because I wanted to get on with it, and Mike and I decided we’d do it tight and documentary style, with the camera frame jumping around”’ (Callan, 2010:184). The Warner’s management was also seen as having to prove itself and therefore willing to take risks, as were Redford and Ritchie. ‘We had a lot in common; we were idealists and we made good partners at that time’ (Redford, quoted in Callan, 2010:184). The production itself was notably improvised. Ritchie recalls: We were constantly hustling for favours from department stores, cabs, everybody we crossed. Someone loaned a limo, someone else had a radio show crew who were willing to drop by. Our ticker tape parade was the classic example. There was no way we could fund a proper street parade. So we cashed in on the fact that there is a New Year’s Eve tradition in San Francisco where, at 1.00 p.m., office workers opened their windows and threw out the shreds of last year’s calendar. ‘Okay’, we said, ‘here’s our parade!’ So we staged McKay’s drive-through and everybody participated. They clustered at the windows to see the great Robert Redford! And that became a very expensive-looking campaign parade on film.

(Callan, 2010:186–7) The polarity in the two sides of Redford’s developing filmmaking identity could not be more marked. Running in parallel were two contrasting styles of filmmaking: the large budget mainstream model, which came complete with a certain comfortable, pampering level of experience, and the independent model, where everyone on the production was expected to rough it, and to do whatever had to be done to make the production work. While Redford pragmatically assigned himself to the former, his heart and soul could perhaps be argued to be aligned with the latter. Certainly, his negotiations between the two filmmaking worlds – insisting on maximum paychecks from the first to buy him freedom to pursue the second – would become the dominant strategy as Redford’s career continued to develop, and has become a common strategy for many film stars up to the current day (especially in franchise-dominated

An Independent Soul

131

contemporary Hollywood, where stars can return to a character in the next of a series of superhero movies for huge salaries, allowing them to fund involvement in smaller films in between). We see this most explicitly in Redford’s determination to promote independent cinema beyond his own personal actor-involvement: a growing and consuming interest that would result in the formation of important support structures – a creative institute and a film festival – to promote the transformation of American independent cinema in the years to come.

The US Film Festival The film festival that would eventually be relabelled the Sundance Film Festival began life in 1978 as the US Film Festival, set up by Redford’s brother-in-law, Sterling Van Wagenen, without, it appears, Redford’s explicit urging. Redford was, however, invited to become the chair of the board of directors. This was two years before Redford created his own independent film initiative, the Sundance Institute. The first festival was held in September 1978, and had a three-fold purpose: 1. To put on a national event to attract the film industry to Utah, and have support of John Earle, state film commissioner 2. Retrospective programmes of classic films built around themes 3. Start a competition for ‘small regional films being made outside the Hollywood system, mostly in 16mm’ (Smith, 1999:5–6). There were some strange notions involved in these three stated objectives: the definition of ‘classic’ in the retrospective strand seemed to have largely consisted of films from the New Hollywood of only ten years previous: Midnight Cowboy; McCabe and Mrs Miller; Mean Streets, although there were also a few classic films from further back into the Studio period, including A Streetcar Named Desire. Also, for a festival with a stated interest only in independent film, it had an eclectic mix of academics, critics and industry professionals on its panels and juries – including Andrew Sarris (curiously, given his damning review of The Candidate) and Verna Fields (editor of Jaws and vice-president of production at Universal by 1976; the highest paid female in Hollywood at

132

Robert Redford and American Cinema

the time). But as Lory Smith, one of the principal organizers of the festival at the time, has described it: The great hope of the inaugural festival was to be able to bring together these two camps: regional independent filmmakers, who often felt they worked in a vacuum without much of a support network of their peers, and the other side of the equation, the Hollywood contingent, who had money, clout, access, and, most of all, distribution outlets …. Each side could learn something from the other. For the independents, Hollywood could provide financing, technical, and marketing expertise, casting options, and worldwide distribution capabilities. The independents could teach Hollywood about passion, efficiency, cleverness, and how to open up a new world of film subjects, all the while absorbing most of the financial risk.

(1999:22–3) The second festival, renamed the Utah/US Film Festival to emphasize the regional input from the Film Commission as well as local filmmakers, ran in Autumn 1979. One of its real distinctions was the inclusion of the Independent Filmmakers’ Seminar, a kind of precursor to Sundance. ‘At this point, Sundance was only a figment of Redford’s and Sterling’s imaginations. The first planning conference for the Sundance Institute was still eight weeks away’ (Smith, 1999:33). The only problem was that the audience in 1979 for these seminars mostly consisted of local residents, none of whom were exactly on the verge of making a feature film themselves. ‘The supply of valuable information in the seminars really outstripped the demand and desire of the audience in attendance’ (Smith, 1999:35). By the time of the third festival in 1980, there were more LA/Hollywood contributors, including producer Walter Coblenz, Fred Roos of Zoetrope, Mark Rosenberg of Warner Bros. and Angela Shapiro of HBO. Sydney Pollack suggested moving the festival to January, enabling it to become the only festival in the world taking place at that time of year. Not incidentally, it would also make access and attendance, in the deep snows of winter, extremely difficult and cause a drop in attendance and consequent $100,000 debt by the end of the festival. Across the next two or three years, increasing debt and discord between organizers began to define the festival and threaten its continuance, to the point where another festival seemed impossible unless major changes were made. It was ‘Now or never for Sundance and the film festival’ (Smith, 1999:84). In

An Independent Soul

133

1984, the Festival organizers went to Van Wagenen and explicitly requested Sundance to take over the festival. Sterling seemed most sympathetic to the idea. The institute was attempting to provide a new forum for experimentation in the realm of independent films created out of a passion for story and character ….But if no one was paying attention to the marketing, distribution and exhibition of these specialised films and helping to develop an audience for them, then the entire exercise would be moot, and would not be able to sustain itself creatively or financially. It was incumbent on the institute to take on this part of the equation because without it, staff would be operating in a vacuum that disregarded the reality of the marketplace.

(Smith, 1999:85–6) The relationship between the two independent film entities became symbiotic: Without a doubt, it was the festival that provided the focus for the world’s entertainment press, which truly put Sundance on the map, and Sundance coming on board put the festival on the map. One without the other would not have created the same sense of success or notoriety or penetrated as deeply into the culture. In fact, the film festival has proven to be a greater asset than the institute ever hoped. By taking over the film festival, Sundance has been able to complete the circle and create a brand-name identity synonymous with independent film.

(Smith, 1999:86) The 1985 festival, with the security provided by alliance with the Sundance Institute, proved to be something of a golden year for American Independent film, with the Coens’ Blood Simple as well as Jarmusch’s Stranger Than Paradise and Sayles’s The Brother from Another Planet all featuring. Attendance doubled, a phenomenon possibly only partly to do with Sundance coming in to take over its running. More significantly, perhaps, it also had to do with a maturing of the indie scene, which had been developing over the previous several years. ‘[By] 1986, it seemed as though independents truly arrived at the table set by Hollywood. Independents had nibbled on the appetisers with films such as Stranger Than Paradise (1984), Blood Simple (1984), The Brother from Another Planet (1984), and She’s Gotta Have It (1986), but now everyone had his or her eyes set on the main course: the marketplace’ (Smith, 1999:113).

134

Robert Redford and American Cinema

The 1989 Festival ‘marked a turning point in the genesis of the festival. Perhaps the entire future of independent film was riding on the programme’ (Smith, 1999:137). This was the year of Sex, Lies, and Videotape (1989), Steven Soderbergh’s breakthrough feature, and a film destined to become the iconic poster-film for the festival and the independent film movement generally. Its phenomenal success changed the parameters of what an independent film might be expected to achieve. Thereafter, when the festival went commercial in 1990, it was increasingly criticized for selling out, by Soderbergh himself amongst countless others, even though the success of his Sex, Lies, and Videotape had established the redefinition of the ‘prize goal’ for independent success. At the 1994 festival – Go Fish (1994) became the first film to be sold during the festival itself, for $45,000 to Goldwyn. It marked a significant change of industry buying strategies and increased the buying frenzy of the festival period. Today, the Sundance Festival is recognized to be a wholly active auction environment, during which many new films are snapped up by mini and major distributors alike. ‘[E]verything Redford feared when he resisted taking over the U.S. Film Festival had come to pass. Not only were filmmakers pitted against one another in the competition, but “the competition was drawing Hollywood ….They liked to know that somebody was saying something’s best”’ (Biskind, 2004:166). The festival had come a long way from its humble and egalitarian beginnings. There were certainly discernible trends in specific years of the festival, although this was not necessarily premeditated in any explicit way. In 1991/92, for example, African-American cinema was foregrounded; while the following year, it would be New Queer Cinema’s turn in the spotlight. ‘Multiculturalism was meant to be Sundance’s raison d’être; the festival presented works by women, African Americans, and other ethnic minorities whose voices had been ignored in mainstream cinema’ (Levy, 1999:39–40). But by the time of the 1995 Festival, many of the films being shown were too violent for Redford, who saw them as pandering to the current taste for such an aesthetic in mainstream Hollywood (the irony being that this emphasis was probably started a few years earlier, with Tarantino’s Reservoir Dogs in 1992 and certainly by the same director’s Pulp Fiction in 1995). ‘Tarantino had been to the lab the previous year, and the script of Dogs was buzzing around

An Independent Soul

135

the community. Tarantino’s style was assured to offend Sundance sensibilities. “They flirted with sexism, racism, and homophobia, and as such were a slap in the face to everything Sundance stood for”’ (Biskind, 2004:119). Redford’s response was that he could barely eat for twenty-four hours afterward because they were so loaded with violence. I remember thinking, ‘Uh-oh, somebody’s got too keen an eye focused on what it is that works formula-wise in the mainstream. There are too many films here that have token violence that’s appealing to the commerciality of the marketplace. That’s when I said, “Let’s be aggressive about finding edgier, more experimental, riskier films that don’t depend on anything formulaic whatsoever.”’

(Fuller, 1997:40) The development and expansion of the festival therefore certainly posed a number of fundamental issues for Redford – a kind of clash between his proprietorial attitude towards the institute, festival and the key positivities of American independent cinema, which were, probably, more naturally organized around comfortable rural Americana rather than urban aggression and violence. It was a developing tension that would not be easily dissipated.

Slamdance and Slumdance In an unmistakable response to these tensions, which could be seen to stifle the more extreme voices in indie filmmaking, as well as, more practically, to the pragmatically restrictive selection processes the festival organizers practised each year (too many films, not enough cinemas), there grew up counter interests which aimed to cater for those types of independent production which were seen never to make the grade within the Sundance agenda. Slamdance, the first guerrilla festival, was born in January 1995, audaciously running head to head with Sundance …. In an era when critics fear Sundance might go too mainstream, Slamdance is a reminder that the indie spirit is still alive. … Slamdance was conceived in protest against Sundance, the ‘Good Housekeeping seal of approval for indies’. Created by frustrated filmmakers, the gathering was a tongue-in-cheek commentary on the bigger festival.

136

Robert Redford and American Cinema

Maureen Crowe, vice president of Arista, thinks the venerable organisation and the scrappy newcomer work in tandem.

(Levy, 1999:44–5) It is a healthy thing that any initiative generates alternative versions of itself. Not everything can be incorporated within the one setup; creative culture is always more diverse and productive than that. And so while Redford himself may not have too much vested interest in these nominal challenges to his central vision, I think he is happy that they exist, promoting their alternative agendas and visions.

The Sundance Institute A propos of the above, when he took over the US Film Festival, Redford said that he was ‘not interested in film festivals’: a typically blunt Redford statement which, when decoded, meant that he would only be interested in a festival devoted to independent cinema. According to him, the initial idea for the Institute came to him after having accepted the position of honorary chairman for his brother-in-law’s low-key United States Film and Video Festival, immediately after he had finished Ordinary People. Perhaps it was the reality of having been the director of a fairly significant studio film, but he was watching a 16-mm road movie called The Whole Shootin’ Match by Texan Eagle Pennell in a tiny movie theatre. As Redford describes it, he had an epiphany: ‘No one else is going to see this little gem. It seemed a crime to me … I decided. There is an iniquity. This guy needs some help’ (Callan, 2010:284). This was not about creating a space where filmmakers, having managed by whatever means to make their films, would be given a space to show them to a public, even though Redford’s experience with the Pennell film was largely about the film not having a larger exhibition arena in which to be seen. Redford’s epiphany was to do with providing the means and support for encouraging new filmmakers to shape their ideas into definite projects. To this end, in early 1979, Redford invited his brother-in-law, Van Wagenen, for a meeting to suggest a plan to merge the [US Film] festival

An Independent Soul

137

with his own half-defined ‘arts community’, at his Utah retreat. A $25,000 National Endowment for the Arts (NEA) grant was rapidly secured to fund an exploratory workshop in April 1979, only twelve weeks after the completion of Redford’s directorial debut, Ordinary People. Seminars were held in October and November, attended by, amongst others, William Wyler’s daughter Cathy (representing the NEA); Orion vice-president Mike Medavoy; United Artists vice-president Claire Townsend; filmmakers Frank Daniel (Czech), Larry Littlebird (a Native American), Annick Smith and Sydney Pollack. ‘The NEA was for artistic credibility, Medavoy and Townsend were business credibility. The filmmakers were the think tank’ (Callan, 2010:285). Further finance came from businessman Dan Lufkin, the Anheuser-Busch Brewery and Redford himself (he pledged $100,000 a year in the Institute’s first years). The three-day planning conference for the Sundance Institute was held in November of 1979, with the Board consisting of, among others, Redford as Chair; Christopher Dodd, later Chair of the Democratic Party and a US senator; Marjorie Benton of UNICEF and Save the Children; Bill Bradley; Frank Daniel; Saul Bass; and Reg Gipson. Together, they designed the school’s programme, to start in June 1981: a summer lab for aspirant filmmakers who might then take their work on to the US Film Festival and beyond. By the end of the planning committee, some sort of consensus had been reached, a convergence of ideas and insights, to form the nexus of what Sundance would be. It would emerge as a centre, a resource, bringing together talented aspiring filmmakers with collaborating skilled professionals in an extraordinarily supportive environment, which would allow greater experimentation with scripts, direction, and performance and also provide access to expertise in the areas of financing, marketing and distribution. Eight to ten scripts would be selected, and collaborative teams of writer, director, and producer would come to the Sundance resort in June 1981, live in the surrounding cabins, hold meetings outside on the picnic tables, by the river, work with an ensemble of professional actors, shoot selected scenes on videotape with a professional production crew, and spend the monthlong lab refining their material, so that when they left, with the imprimatur of Robert Redford and the Sundance Institute, they might have better opportunities to get the projects financed and made.

(Smith, 1999:37–8)

138

Robert Redford and American Cinema

Redford called on industry friends and contacts to act as mentors, including Morgan Freeman, Robert Duvall, Karl Malden and Sydney Pollack. The filmmakers’ labs, held once a year in June, were the heart of Sundance. The assumption governing the lab process was that indies have something to say, but lack the skills to say it, and that Hollywood has nothing to say, but says it with great skill. The lab was the place where the twain met. Indies would come with promising scripts that they would proceed to rewrite, direct, tape, and edit with the help of topflight Hollywood talent, known as ‘resource people’. Sundance was a fresh air camp for Hollywood’s deserving poor.

(Biskind, 2004:34) Redford’s independent spirit, having first manifested itself in his identity as a fine artist in early adult life, developed in his distrust of Hollywood and the stifling conventionality of the majority of its output. The result of that distrust was the handful of low-budget films he had made in his early film career, when surrendering to the more lucrative mainstream industry would have seemed the sensible way to cement his blooming stardom. However, from the very beginning, there were fears of the Hollywood mainstream exerting an influence over the developing independent integrity of the Institute: ‘Sundance sounds like heaven for independents, but sceptics are wondering if the very idea behind it – Hollywood professionals tutoring talented novices – combined with Redford’s call for quality and polish, might lead it down the primary path of big-budget, commercial production’ (Perry, 1981:49). Certainly, Biskind argues that the original, more radical, members of the Institute gradually got weeded out, leaving the more mainstream industry figures (2004:36). Redford’s own position in regard to both the Institute and the Festival was more ambivalent. According to Van Wagenen, ‘Bob would have liked nothing better than for the institute to have worked without him. Gradually, it became clear that he was the lynchpin. He realized he would have to get involved in a central role. He got a lot more than he bargained for’ (Biskind, 2004:85). His friend Sydney Pollack sees Redford’s position as not exactly ‘passive-aggressive – it was more healthy than that – it was an ambivalence about wanting to dominate it himself and wanting to let go and let someone [else] run it’ (Biskind, 2004:84).

An Independent Soul

139

Redford insists that Sundance was never anti-Hollywood. ‘It is not an antiHollywood position that I have. It is just simply that most of my life has been geared around the word independent. Which means you don’t have to be against something, it just means you prefer something else.’ And what was most important to him was giving the new filmmaker choice: the choice ‘to go to Paramount, or Universal, or Columbia or wherever they want to go. Or they can go to private financing. They have that option, that they’re not forced to go here or go there’ (Redford interview in Inside Sundance Institute with Robert Redford). In the event, the decision to take over the US Film Festival and rename it the Sundance Film Festival was seen to save the Institute which, though set up with laudable intentions, was always going to have difficulty sustaining itself financially, and was dependent upon a lot of goodwill and friends and associates willing to offer their time and services for free. Such a model could not have been sustained indefinitely. Ironically, it was the festival, into which Redford had to be dragged screaming and kicking, that became the tail that wagged the dog and changed the fortunes of the institute. As Sydney Pollack puts it, ‘It was initially almost impossible to support Sundance. The turning point came when it took over the U.S. Film Festival’ … it proved to be an effective counterweight to the conservatism of the lab selection committee.

(Biskind, 2004:105) The two enterprises – the institute and the festival – therefore became welded together as a twin-prong initiative to encourage independent filmmaking through mainstream support, with Redford as the somewhat reluctant figurehead. The spectre of expansion always hung over both enterprises, possibly moreso over the festival than the institute. The latter could conceivably remain a low-key and specialized operation. But the festival, by its very nature, attracted more attention by the year, especially when certain films, such as Sex, Lies, and Videotape and Pulp Fiction, attracted massive industry buzz before going on to significant commercial success. Inevitably, the festival came to be increasingly seen as a major marketplace for new releases, as well as for new and emerging talent to catch the eye of the big studios. Accusations of sell-out of its original ethos have dogged the festival for some years now, with figures

140

Robert Redford and American Cinema

such as Soderbergh and Tarantino, ironically, accusing it of losing its indie credibility. As Deborah Caulfield of The Los Angeles Times observed at the close of the 10th Festival in 1988: In this once-quaint ski town described recently by Robert Redford as ‘More city than park’, the 10th annual United States Film Festival concluded Sunday and signs that it too is undergoing a not-necessarily-for-the-better transformation. The exposure that Redford’s Sundance Institute-sponsored festival affords to independent filmmakers is widely regarded as beneficial, but the festival’s burgeoning size and popularity are threatening to erode the intimate, informal nature that has been the hallmark of the event. In addition, the festival, which used to be populated almost entirely by filmmakers, has taken on a much more commercial atmosphere with the presence of distributors, publicists, agents, managers, and studio development executives.

(quoted in Smith, 1999:135)

Dangerous ground: Production, exhibition, satellite More contentiously, and ultimately damagingly, Sundance attempted to also venture into production, cinema ownership and the setting up of a dedicated independent film satellite channel; the first as a means of attempting to ensure quality product from its Institute programmes while also using the latter two as a means of ensuring that finished films had exhibition outlets to allow them to be seen by audiences. Redford was reluctant and hesitant to venture into any of these initiatives, sensing the inherent risks involved, both financial and artistic. However, he was, throughout the 1980s, unhappy with the quality of projects coming to, and through, the Sundance labs. The lure of production might be first, a way of luring better projects into the labs, and second, of nudging them in a more commercial direction. But Redford feared that production would corrupt the Sundance process, turn it into a snakepit of competition and backbiting. Moreover, production is expensive. The institute would have to raise more money or involve itself in dicey alliances with the studios – or both.

(Biskind, 2004:73–4)

An Independent Soul

141

Redford was initially against the idea, seeing it as a kind of ‘pact with the devil’, probably necessitating deals with financial bodies and studios. But then he changed his mind, thinking that such a move would help to hone the filmmakers sense of viable projects and the commercial negotiations that such projects would require them to become conversant with. However, Redford’s awkward dance between stand-offishness and tight control (I’m trying to avoid use of the term ‘control-freakery’) meant that he often interfered with film projects during production, possibly with the best of intentions, because of his inherently superior industry experience. One such case took place in 1984, during the production of Desert Bloom, when Redford effectively took over production, locking the film’s director, Eugene Corr, out of the editing room so that the film could be edited in the way Redford felt to be aesthetically right. Redford might be able to stand back from controlling things in areas, such as exhibition, where he had very little experience. But standing back and allowing filmmakers to fail to achieve the best potential of a film production, as he saw it, was something else. There were also plans hatched to set up a chain of independent cinemas, which would guarantee outlets for product coming out of the Institute’s labs and the Festival. Allied to this was an initiative to join the new media revolution by setting up a cable film channel performing the same function as the cinemas, but directly into peoples’ homes. The new Sundance Channel was launched in February 1996, as a joint venture with Sundance Group, Showtime and Polygram. The idea was to bring foreign films to quality-starved audiences who were suffering from the prohibition on subtitles that radically limited foreign film distribution on cable and video, as well as expose indie films to viewers in small-town America who otherwise would never get a chance to see these films.

(Biskind, 2004:231) But development was too slow, and Sundance fell behind its rival IFC, a spinoff from the Bravo cable channel. An attempt at amalgamation failed and Sundance was forced to struggle along alone, with less, and inferior, product. The attempt to build a cinema chain suffered similar problems. In August 1997, Redford announced the venture in association with General Cinemas, the plan being to refurbish its run-down group of cinemas to high specification

142

Robert Redford and American Cinema

with bespoke features to lure in audiences. But the cinemas were in out of the way locations, and required more radical refurbishment than the financial plan had anticipated. An alternative company, Landmark, would have been a more sensible choice, with more accessible locations and cinemas that were in far better condition. Moreover, Landmark had a history of exhibiting art films, and consequently had a specialist management team in place. It was a substantial misjudgement on Sundance’s (and Redford’s) part. The scheme was doomed to failure, with only one or two cinemas partly restored before the scheme folded. As Gary Meyer of Landmark commented: ‘The stuff Redford wanted to do was fantastic. Anybody who loves movies would have said, “This is where I’m gonna spend as many nights a week as I can.” But unfortunately, he didn’t look at the bottom line. His scheme was too grand for the reality of the business world”’ (Biskind, 2004:291). To finance this portfolio of independent film initiatives, Sundance almost sealed a deal with Vulcan Ventures which would give Redford money for production, as well as set up the Sundance Film Channel and Sundance Cinemas. Under this deal, Sundance Productions envisioned a slate of twelve movies over four years. Some would be small, $1 to $2 million, and some might go as high as $20 or $30 million, but they would average out at $15 million. However, Redford, habitually cautious, displayed cold feet, and was inherently suspicious of Vulcan Ventures. Then, when Vivendi bought Universal (and its stake in Sundance Channel) Vulcan Ventures backed out of the whole deal. Perhaps this was a blessing in disguise. The scale of the planned operation, with its slate of multi-million dollar productions, chain of cinemas, cable channel, etc., skirted dangerously close to a monopoly structure that was explicitly outlawed in the contemporary American media industry. Moreover, it appeared to betray the fundamental ethos of the Sundance mission, to support and promote small-scale independent production. The fact that this vertically integrated behemoth totally contradicted the vision of the early Sundance, which was structured precisely to insulate novice filmmakers from the demands of the market, seems to have bothered only the dwindling number of purists in the Sundance ranks. As Sydney Pollack puts it, ‘Now you’re in the theatre business? Now you’ve got a TV station? Come on, the government broke up MCA for this reason!’

(Biskind, 2004:388–9)

An Independent Soul

143

By early 2002, with the collapse of the Vulcan Ventures deal and the bankruptcy of General Cinemas in the winter of 2001, ‘towards the end of March, just weeks after the cinemas had gone belly-up, Redford acquiesced to the inevitable and finally closed down the new Sundance productions, only a year old, and laid off the employees’ (Biskind, 2004:426). Redford got a lot of things right in his commitment to the independent scene. His heart and soul have always resided there, as the early sections of this chapter show. And his formation and development of the Institute and Festival also show his intentions to be honourable. But the miscalculations of the cinema chain and the cable channel are demonstrations of a certain naivety, in choice of partners and scale of vision. This latter is perhaps Redford’s Achilles heel: if he would like to watch films in opulent surroundings, why shouldn’t other people? It is his desire to make film, filmmaking and film-watching the best they could all possibly be that pushed him to initiate the projects in the first place, and to occasionally stumble along the way when his vision didn’t match the realities of the popular one.

144

5

Behind the camera

An irredeemably boring director (Patterson, 2011) These are harsh words. Is Robert Redford really that irredeemably boring as a director? Patterson’s condemnation of Redford’s directorial skills is focused on The Conspirator, although he also takes a side-swipe at Lions for Lambs. His main objection seems to be that ‘Redford has become the Stanley Kramer of our times: a style-free, signature-less auteur of respectable American liberalism, unimpeachably decent and motivated by the highest ideals’ (Patterson, 2011). Within this short condemnatory quote, we have the two main areas of concern for the chapter: the formal style of the films Redford has directed, and their subject matter which is often, but not always, political. In terms of film form, he is accused of doing nothing interesting with his camera; it is anonymous rather than flamboyant. The latter is now perhaps favoured, at least in the mainstream sector, in contemporary American cinema in terms of extravagant camera movements and foregrounded effects (CGI and otherwise) which draw attention to the filming/production process, which then becomes the principal pleasure of the text. It also refers to challenging fast-cutting editing patterns which might disorientate, or make uneasy, the viewer. In terms of subject matter, Redford stands accused of choosing safe, middleclass subjects, and a style of acting where characters blandly interrelate but don’t really push one another in extremis, that is, with any kind of histrionic drama that bespeaks ‘true acting’. In the contemporary cinema, as argued in the chapter on stardom, that has been the de Niro/Pacino style: emotionally

146

Robert Redford and American Cinema

explosive, every scene capable of unpredictability – immediate cinema; visceral cinema; the cinema of New Hollywood. While I hope that the coming chapter will refute these accusations of Redford’s limitations as a director, it does have to be acknowledged, up front, that Redford is a director of the muted not the explosive: interested more in characters and their small gestures and barely noticed, but telling, moments rather than huge, visceral effects. This may well make him ‘irredeemably boring’ in contrast to films made by directors more interested in using those effects for maximum ….well, effect. I hope to argue that Redford, while closely bound up within the values of the so-called New Hollywood revolution, as argued in an earlier chapter, has also been his own person in his pursuit of his directorial career. Leaving aside his television apprenticeship, when he had no opportunity to input his own thoughts regarding the development of scenes, from the outset of his feature filmmaking career, Redford was always interested in the production process itself. He began to be involved in the production side of his own films at an early date, executive producing The Candidate (1972) before moving to full producer credit on The Milagro Beanfield War (1988). He has since produced or executive produced all of his own films, and many by other filmmakers (some via his Sundance Institute), including a wide-ranging number of documentaries on subjects close to his heart: the environment and Old West and Native American history. He has also been integrally involved in the development of scripts for many of his films, though always in association with other writers, often with his contribution written out (pun probably intended) in the final writing credits. According to Sydney Pollack, Redford’s move into directing was ‘inevitable. He had to do it, because he had a visual sense all of his own.’ As Redford himself acknowledges, he had a long interest in directing: ‘I probably started as a director in the fifties. I was a magpie. I collected bits and pieces of life observations’ (both: Callan, 2010:269). The visual sense that Pollack refers to emanates from his early life as a fine artist, and he would carry this sensibility through to the films he was to direct throughout his career. In 1980, Robert Redford added a new hyphenate to his previous one of actor-producer: that of actor-director, when he directed his first feature film, Ordinary People, in 1980 (although he would not actually appear as an actor in

Behind the Camera

147

a film he directed for another eighteen years). At the following year’s Oscars, the film won Best Picture amongst illustrious company (the other nominees were The Coalminer’s Daughter, Raging Bull, Tess and The Elephant Man). Redford himself also won Best Director, beating Martin Scorsese (Raging Bull), Roman Polanski (Tess), David Lynch (The Elephant Man) and Richard Rush (The Stunt Man), while the film further won several other awards (principally, best supporting actor for Timothy Hutton and Best Adapted Screenplay). This, by any measure, was a notable achievement for a directorial debut. Some have contested its legitimacy – Scorsese’s Raging Bull being an especially aggrieved case in point. (Patterson makes a particular point of this: ‘the earnest bourgeois melodrama Ordinary People beat out Scorsese’s ferocious Raging Bull, one of the benchmark movies of the last half-century’.) Possibly, also, beating Polanski was a particularly poignant moment for Redford, given that, back in 1968, it was Polanski’s lack of availability, due to over run on Rosemary’s Baby, that gave Redford the chance to step in, to claim the flailing Downhill Racer project as his own, allowing him to set up his production company, Wildwood, and embark on a long career of controlling his own film projects. But we also need to situate Ordinary People within a more generalized shift towards a focus on the personal, familial and the fragility of human emotion that had been taking place in the years preceding Ordinary People’s success. Following the success of Star Wars, which won several technical Oscars in 1977, there was something of a reaction in subsequent years against fantasy escapism coming to seem to control Hollywood. Indeed, Star Wars had lost out to Rocky, Sylvester Stallone’s plucky underdog story, as the Best Picture at the 1977 Oscars. Further personal, psychologically weighted, dramas would dominate the 1978 Oscars: The Deer Hunter and Coming Home, which were obvious indications that Hollywood had finally decided to address the deep scars caused by the Vietnam War. The relatively sudden explosion of ‘difficult’ emotional films appearing at the end of the decade, countering the escapist fantasy of sci-fi-oriented fare, speaks volumes about the bifurcated market developing at this time. The year before Ordinary People’s win, the 1980 Oscar winners had been equally focused on intense human dramas: Kramer vs. Kramer (1979), in which an insensitive, workaholic husband is forced to take care of his son when his wife walks out on them; Being There (1979), in which Peter Sellers plays

148

Robert Redford and American Cinema

a simple but earnest man who, in that direct simplicity, honestly articulates many core human values; and Norma Rae (1979), where an embattled single mother passionately fights for worker’s rights. The year following Ordinary People’s success, screen legends Henry Fonda and Katherine Hepburn won the Best Actor and Actress Oscars for their performances in On Golden Pond (1981), and the Best Picture went to Chariots of Fire (1981), a British film which, although ostensibly about class and religious difference in Edwardian Britain, becomes a general homage to acceptance. Together, these films indicate that Redford was not alone in his interest in exploring the complexities of intimate human emotional relationships, acknowledging a sea-change in the emotional focus of the significant releases of the years in question. Sandwiched between the arrival of the Star Wars franchise just after the mid-1970s, and the onset of the CGI revolution of the late 1980s, Hollywood experienced a laudable return to the values of honest human emotions. Ordinary People, I would suggest, hit the beginnings of this zeitgeist at exactly the right moment to ensure its notable success. And while I am in no way suggesting that Redford was calculated in his choosing of Guest’s novel as his first directorial project, it is certainly also no accident that Redford, given his interest in character, chose an intimate family drama for his directorial debut, rather than a big action production. His preference for the small, the personal, the nuanced would have automatically led him there. He directed the actors in the same way he would want to be directed – focusing on character and on their small gestures, fleeting looks, minimal emotional revealings. Beginning with Ordinary People, Redford brought to his directorial career his own lengthily honed set of performance techniques for expressing character through the smallest of touches: gesture, whisper, silent interval. Perhaps this is what allowed him to win out ahead of de Niro’s and Scorsese’s overt histrionics in Raging Bull. At that precise time in American social and cultural life, the focus was less on the extreme violence of the last years of the Vietnam War, and ongoing civil discord and more on the intense emotional values of the individual seeking to make sense of an American way of life that seemed to have had the fundamental structure cut away from beneath it. In choosing to move from acting to directing, Redford was, of course, by no means innovatory. Actors wanting to take on the creative responsibility of film direction have been a presence in American (and indeed world) cinema since

Behind the Camera

149

its earliest days. George Méliès and D.W. Griffith both acted as well as directed, as did Charlie Chaplin, Orson Welles and many others. The breakdown of the classic studio system in the 1950s, and the rise of the package system, allowed leading actors, in partnership with directors, producers and scriptwriters, to have more say in the development of film projects. Although by no means automatic, it became increasingly possible for some actors to begin to suggest that they might take on the role of director too, especially if the studio to which the project was being pitched was keen to establish a good, lucrative, working relationship with that actor. In the contemporary period, a number of star actors have done exactly this. Famously (or more accurately, perhaps, infamously), after a long acting apprenticeship on innumerable TV series and some significant film roles, Dennis Hopper assumed director responsibilities on Easy Rider, as part of the package offered to Columbia in their hour of need. More significantly, Clint Eastwood, again after a long television apprenticeship (most notably in Rawhide), but also with several Spaghetti Westerns and Hollywood features to his name, was allowed to direct his first feature, Play Misty for Me, in 1971, in which he also starred. Thereafter, Eastwood has directed over forty feature films, in twenty-four of which he has also starred. Of the sixteen others he hasn’t chosen to star in, only three were made by him before the millennium. Since then, it is noticeable that he has eased back on acting in his films, to concentrate on the directing role. At a certain age, perhaps, even male stars realize their reduced box office appeal, and choose, if they can, to operate behind the camera instead. This subject of ageing stars will be explored further in the last chapter of this book. Other actors can contradict this generalized observation. Sylvester Stallone, for example, has directed nine feature films (the same number as Redford), but has starred in all but one of them (that half of them concern Stallone’s noted character creation/alter ego Rocky Balboa is, perhaps, not coincidental). That last comment reveals a great deal about the negotiations which allow a leading actor to take up the directorial role on a film: that he (or she, if you are Barbra Streisand) also agrees to be in front of the camera as well as behind it. For many leading actors, this was not a problem: what better for your own authored film than appearing in it as its visible face: more memorable, more control, more admiration.

150

Robert Redford and American Cinema

Redford experienced a version of this himself, when he approached studios to finance All the President’s Men, which he originally envisaged as a low-budget, black-and-white cinema verité work featuring unknown actors. In an example of the pragmatic politics that Hollywood is famed for, Redford was told that the production would only get backing if he agreed to star in it, which meant that low-budget and black-and-white were non-starters, and a leading actor of near to Redford’s box office potential would have to be found to play opposite him. In this case, it was Redford the producer and Redford the actor who were jostling with one another through the production, and Alan J. Pakula, the film’s director, would have many head-to-heads with his actor-producer, who had definite ideas about how the production should develop. Perhaps as a result of that experience on All the President’s Men, it is all the more commendable that, at the outset of his directorial career, Redford was adamant that he would not appear as the star in a film he also directed. He could conceivably have taken the father role, or even that of the psychiatrist, in Ordinary People, but wisely decided that, on his first directorial assignment, he should concentrate on directing the film as professionally as possible. This was in the face of considerable pressure from the studio financing the film. Michael Eisner, then President of Paramount Pictures, was particularly determined that Redford also star in the film, as an insurance policy against box office failure. But Redford was equally resistant and won the day: ‘They got me over the coals because they knew how badly I wanted to direct. But I refused point-blank to even consider acting in this film. I knew exactly what I wanted on-screen and told Gary [Hendler, Redford’s deal broker] to hold out’ (Callan, 2010:270). Thereafter, his next three directorial projects didn’t immediately offer up a starring role. He could possibly have been the newspaper man, played by John Heard in The Milagro Beanfield War, but this is hard to see: Heard’s character is rather washed up and directionless; while Redford might have been interested in him as a character, his star persona would have unbalanced the character’s role in the narrative. He could have ‘gone bad’, playing the property tycoon or even the ‘Mr Fixit’ character, played by Christopher Walken, brought in to ruthlessly bring an end to the dispute. But Redford’s interest in playing ‘bad guys’, although a hallmark of his earliest films (as detailed in previous chapters) would only begin to resurface when, to be brutal, his Golden Boy looks had

Behind the Camera

151

truly begun to fade, and his own life-wary, world-weariness would allow him to explore the dark side of the characters that, irrespective of the success of the movies (such as Indecent Proposal) in which they appear, make Redford’s late career film choices so interesting. This will be explored in the final chapter, on Redford as an ageing star. One character he might have been able to play was that of the father in A River Runs through It. It is an intriguing refusal on Redford’s part. Having directed two films, he may have felt the potential space open up for him to perform in front of, as well as behind, the camera in his next directorial effort. Certainly, doing so would have been credible in one very obvious way – that of Brad Pitt as a Redford lookalike, making the father-son relationship immediately believable. It was obvious that Pitt was functioning as a Redford surrogate. Perhaps, as with so many acting roles, Redford’s iconic star image immediately worked against any hope he had to make the father role his own; again, it would unbalance the depiction of the character, a rather quiet and unassuming preacher. Tom Skerritt’s somewhat lesser fame at the time (in spite of having played a lead role in Alien in 1979) allowed him to inhabit the character more seamlessly without threatening to make it a ‘star-performance’. Finally, in Quiz Show there are, again, no obvious characters Redford could have played at this stage in his career. The Ralph Fiennes character was obviously too young, his screen father far too old. He could have played one of the supporting characters – the TV studio head, for example, but again, this would not only have asked him to play a decidedly unattractive character, but also risk his star presence unbalancing the text (although him replacing Martin Scorsese as head of the studio in the film is a mouthwatering possibility!). Like Eastwood and Stallone, for better or worse, an actor directing a movie in which he is to appear has to ensure that he is one of the leading parts, not necessarily out of personal ego but also because, as a major star, Redford could not easily mix himself back in his own production. Even a limited appearance, beyond a tongue-in-cheek cameo, perhaps, would attract undue attention, forcing the audience to assume his character would have a major impact in the narrative outcome. Redford would have to appear ‘all-or-nothing’, a major character or not at all. In Quiz Show, because of its story and its variety of characters, it proved to be ‘not at all’. That moment would have to wait for a project, and a character, so much

152

Robert Redford and American Cinema

more personal to Redford that he would eventually, albeit still somewhat tentatively, venture out in front of his own camera.

Twin themes Redford’s directorial projects can, crudely, be separated into two strands: the natural/spiritual and the political, with Ordinary People separated out as neither of these, but as an intensely intimate study of a hermetically sealed family in meltdown. Ordinary People, therefore, forms Redford’s apprenticeship into directing – a film in which he is far more interested in the reality of his characters’ lives than he is about any wider dimensions, whether they be overtly political or more abstractly mystical. The first strand of Redford’s preoccupations focuses, somewhat awkwardly (not lost on the critics of the film), on the rural and natural, with mystical dimensions. The Milagro Beanfield War (1988) looks at dirt poor Latino farmworkers battling against corrupt white land developers. In A River Runs Through It (1992), a loving, but actually dysfunctional, family deflects its tensions by relating to one another through the pursuit of fly-fishing. In The Horse Whisperer (1998) an again dysfunctional New York family, traumatized by the horrific injuries to the daughter and her horse, are forced to confront their issues through the mysterious healing processes offered by an enigmatic cowboy, played by Redford himself. Finally, in The Legend of Bagger Vance (2000) a talented but, again, traumatized white golfer, who has, to quote the vernacular, ‘lost his mojo’, is ‘cured’ by a black caddy who appears out of nowhere to offer him sage advice. At the outset, therefore, we are dealing with a fairly heterogeneous group of films, struggling to be encompassed within a single categorization – a varied selection of films, both in style and time period. Within the second camp fit Quiz Show (1994), about the infamous fixing by a major American television network in the 1950s of a general knowledge TV quiz show to ensure continued ratings; Lions for Lambs (2007), a talky, debatecentred, meditation on the Iraq War; The Conspirator (2011), an historical account of the trial of a female co-conspirator in the death of Abraham Lincoln; and The Company You Keep (2012), in which Redford plays a former

Behind the Camera

153

member of a radical left militant organization, the Weathermen, whose hidden identity is threatened by a young and determined investigative journalist. Again, although this group of films obviously covers a great deal of ground, both historically and thematically, it reflects Redford’s continued interest and commitment to American politics, morality and personal integrity. The nine films, while nominally separable into two thematic strands, offer a difficult terrain overall. There is none of the obvious ploughing of the same field that Stallone indulges in (several Rocky reincarnations, amongst other limited visions). Redford comes closer to Eastwood in ambition, in that both attempt a relatively broad range of subject areas. Eastwood might share Stallone’s comfort in a repeating character (Harry Callaghan) but is also willing, perhaps more even than Redford, to explore new avenues: the broad comedy of the orangutan films, nostalgia in Bronco Billy and Honkytonk Man; redefinition of the Western in Pale Rider and Unforgiven; xenophobic contemporary characters in Gran Torino; and so on. In comparison to Eastwood, certainly, Redford has played it notably safe. But the efforts of these two directors shouldn’t be seen as a contest: with Eastwood besting Redford on range of subjects, while Redford’s interest stays more focused on the subtlety of personal emotion. Both actors have seized upon the possibilities that directing their own films have afforded them within their own careers and aspirations. One primarily forged his directorial career on his own star persona, appearing in the majority of his own films. The other fought shy of appearing in his own directorial efforts, until a part came along that was so obviously destined for him that it would be impossible to refuse playing it. To return to the beginning, and Ordinary People (1980). Having hawked it around the studios, there was only one interested taker for the project – Barry Diller, CEO at Paramount. But interest was certainly not widespread. Sydney Pollack, for example, ‘wasn’t crazy about Ordinary People. “I thought he chose a hard first subject, because it was entirely about emotion, so it was dependent on great directing of actors, of which he had no experience. Something more pictorially sumptuous, I thought, would have been right for his debut”’ (Callan, 2010:269). This quote reveals as much about Pollack as it does Redford, who always thought his friend and frequent collaborator fought shy of honest and powerful expressions of emotion between characters (c.f., Pollack’s interest in

154

Robert Redford and American Cinema

sweeping vistas of the country and flocks of flamingos taking flight, and his uncomfortable resistance to the now famously erotic hair washing scene, in Out of Africa). But the subtle, unspoken and nuanced emotions which circulate around the members of the Jarrett family in Ordinary People are exactly typical of Redford’s approach to character throughout his own acting career. Rather than the grand, overtly emotional, gesture or big speech, Redford has always been far more interested in conveying the maximum emotion with the minimum of emphasis. From very early in his acting career Redford, as has been described in earlier chapters, had acted through what might be termed a minimalized palette of gestures, looks, physical tics and underplayed delivery of dialogue. Pollack, amongst others, first noticed it when Redford and he resumed work on Jeremiah Johnson in January 1971, when Redford first interiorized his character’s thought processes and emotions, paring down the overt actorly touches, while insisting on a radical reduction of the amount of dialogue his character had to say throughout the film. Many of Redford’s critics have focused on this reduced emphasis of Redford’s acting style, seeing it as evidence of his limited acting range and onscreen blandness. But for Redford, the smallness and seeming casualness of gesture and physical action, and the quietness of vocal delivery, are very much what screen acting is all about. ‘What I wanted was to deal with people who have concerns they cannot handle because they cannot define them’, says Redford. ‘I was trying to say this is what happened, this is how it is, accept it. To achieve that, we tuned into the finest twitches of the performances. A face that reacts in a scene saying, “I know what this is about” is miles away from the look that ways, “I cannot comprehend this.” The actor’s gesture is minimal, but everything is in the tiniest inflection. That’s what we sought.’

(Callan, p. 276) The smallest of facial gestures, the quietest of dialogue deliveries, are imbued with massive significance when they are blown up to huge proportions on the largest cinema screens across the world. And certainly, a movie superstar such as Redford could guarantee that his film would be released on the biggest screens. He didn’t have to act large. By acting small, he drew the audience to

Behind the Camera

155

him, pulling them in to become concerned about everything his character was thinking and saying; to be intimately there in the moment, with him. This, in essence, is Redford’s approach as a director: he is an actor’s, not a technician’s, director, as I examine below, not a technician’s director. By that I mean that he is less interested in being visually flamboyant in terms of extravagant camerawork, flashy editing, striking lighting effects and so on (except, perhaps, in moments when such visual extremities are undeniably warranted by the drama of the story). Indeed, he professed himself ignorant of the technical dimensions of the directorial role: cinematographers would ask for specific technical requirements for a scene and Redford would be nonplussed (Clinch, 1989:180). For Redford, these would simply distract him from concentrating on the human story being told: a story which is fundamentally and principally articulated through the actors playing the characters who are relating in the complex emotional ways dictated by the narrative. Ordinary People might easily be seen as the product of a cautious first-time director, afraid to get anything wrong, erring on the side of caution by choosing to remain stylistically anonymous rather than announcing himself to the film world through flamboyant, look-at-me, camerawork. So far, so predictable. But a closer look at the film shows Redford attuned to the subtleties and nuances of the tensions between the various members of the Jarrett family as their narrative reveals their inhibiting trauma. And it should be argued that such emotional tensions can only be accurately and honestly filmed using an equivalent cinematic restraint: that is, largely immobile camera; or imprisoning, close framing; or camera movement which, if ever performed, is designed to signal a difficulty of moving from point-to-point in such a suffocating atmosphere. And then, strategically – sudden, explosive, action: flashbacks to the accident; or the son losing his self-control in his sessions with his therapist, or, more violently, shouting at his parents to ‘just take the goddam picture!’ during a Christmas gathering with grandparents. Such moments of tension release and punctuate the repressed narrative, forcing it to move to its devastating climax. Only when the needs of the narrative require it, such as the flashbacks to the boating accident that kills the older Jarrett son, and which provides the story with its traumatized family dynamic, do the camera and editing get more animated, flashing back and forth between the present and flash-memories of the origin event. Otherwise, formally, the film is as repressed as its subjects.

156

Robert Redford and American Cinema

Huge, unarticulated, wells of suppressed emotion are conveyed through how a character stands, tensed, in a doorway, or the slightly-too-long gap between a character not responding to something another has said, before the awkward edit to the next scene (Figure 5.1). It is a filming style that requires the absolute attention of its viewer if the full import of what is being observed between the dysfunctional family members is to be registered: the small look or gesture, the most softly, almost mumbled, delivery of a significant line of dialogue. Redford asks his actors, through their characters, to pull us in, to make us relate to them, to care, to hang onto every next revelation of the traumas ripping the family apart. This is what makes Pollack’s observation quoted above so wrong: Robert Redford came to Ordinary People absolutely primed, and to know how, through his own acting experience, to foreground the actor/characters with the minimum of technical intrusion. He certainly had to consult the technical crew on the film (c.f., Clinch reference above), but was fully aware of what he wanted his camera to do creatively, relative to the drama. If, by the end of the film, you, as a viewer, have performed this act of commitment to the characters, as Redford has intended, the effects are devastating. Having not heard a pin drop during the latter half of the film, you are left with only partial resolutions. Beth, the wife and mother, has realized her emotional limitations and has left the family, while father and son are united

Figure 5.1  Feel the tension: Breakfast with the Jarretts in Ordinary People.

Behind the Camera

157

in a shared moment of declared love for one another (the obvious core that has bound the film together). It is emotionally devastating, and a testament to ‘Robert the Bland’, supposedly all surface and vacuous image. Maybe it was the shockwaves that rippled throughout the industry following the film’s release, that Redford could make such a deep and honest film, that resulted in it giving him and his film the principal Oscars on Academy Awards night over such obvious worthies as Scorsese and Polanski. The realization that the film aesthetic chosen by Redford for Ordinary People was intimately suited to its subject matter should be an indication that his other directorial efforts might be better viewed in the same way. Generally speaking, this is true. Redford has approached each of his directorial projects as discrete entities, according to their own frame of reference and aesthetic needs. So, in The Milagro Beanfield War, the realist poverty of the villagers is set against the whimsical, Magic Realist component, shot with an airy lightness and accompanied by indigenous musical refrains. It could be argued that this might push a certain, rather uncomfortable, aesthetic onto the film, in that, for all his well-documented ethical and environmental support interests, Redford was, in this instance, somewhat untuned, too, from the specific qualities of the magic realist text. But again, and alternatively, in Quiz Show, Redford’s representation of materialistic post-war America, depicted in shiny surfaces and showy camerawork, might also not be seen to be his assumed ‘natural’ style: Filmed by cinematographer Michael Balhaus, Quiz Show has a glazed beauty of a fifties commercial, where mechanical objects and furniture – the sparkling Chrysler 300 the Goodwin character covets, the art deco architecture – vie to outshine the performers, and everyone (except Stempel) is immaculately tailored and coiffed. There is, too, a breathless Steadicam pace to the drama, that serves to replicate ‘live’ television. This was a style markedly different from the slow-resolving rhythms of A River Runs through It and bears witness to Redford’s range as a director.

(Callan, 2010:349) Furthermore, the colour palette throughout the film is super-saturated, reflecting the confident abundance of post-War American society. Faces are framed in extreme close-up, and at significant moments, Redford even

158

Robert Redford and American Cinema

attempts Scorsese-esque arabesque crane shots above and into the contestants as they battle for points. Again, this is markedly different from the assumption that Redford’s anonymous directorial style would feature such flourishes. Similarly, for Bagger Vance, Redford met with production designer Stuart Craig to agree ‘an exaggerated sense of reality. I want the golfing greens to be greener and the 1920s setting to be a fairy tale’ (Callan, 2010:367–8). The Conspirator, in contrast, is filmed in the muted browns and sepia tones of period photographs to give it the visual historical authenticity of period sepia photographs. Redford adjusts his stylistic decisions to suit his subjects; they are never consistently one-note. But it is perhaps in Redford’s two rural narratives, two of his more fully realized films, A River Runs through It and The Horse Whisperer, where his directorial integrity is most forcefully witnessed, and which, perhaps, admittedly come closest to confirming the ‘Redford aesthetic’. In both, he employs a soft rural palette of the greens and browns of open mid-Western landscapes, backlighting characters against verdant backdrops and using an editing style that emphasizes the gentle pace of life, contrasting these against the harsh shapes and colours of the cities. Here is where Redford’s heart truly is; here is where his touch and tone are at their surest (Figures 5.2 and 5.3)

Figure 5.2  The majesty of nature I: A River Runs through It.

Behind the Camera

159

Figure 5.3  The majesty of nature II: The Horse Whisperer.

Redford had been interested in making a film of the novel by Norman Maclean, A River Runs through It, for several years, since 1981, according to Callan (2010:333). He had even managed to meet and discuss the potential of making the film with the author in the mid-1980s, but, somewhat ironically, was beaten to the deal by Annick Smith, a student of the Sundance Lab, who bought the rights. It was only when she failed to get studio backing, and the option lapsed, that Redford was able to step in and buy the rights himself. But, again, the studios proved to be resistant to the idea of funding such a specialist film, and Redford had to fund initial development from his own pocket, until, finally, after the production started filming without a firm deal in place, Jake Eberts finally secured a distribution deal with Columbia. In A River Runs through It, his screen surrogate, the character played by Brad Pitt, while at ease fly fishing with his brother and father, is otherwise champing at the bit to experience a larger, fuller, more exciting life: a life of the city and modern temptations – temptations that will eventually lead to his violent death. Redford perhaps wove more of his younger self, desperate to flee the restrictions of little town America and explore Europe, art, and life, into River than into any of his other films. Pitt’s on-screen energy seems to represent this, being allowed, purposefully, to always be seeming to exceed the frame-edges of the screen, as if he can’t wait to leave – a contrast to the stately actions of his family, who are as content to remain trapped by the boundaries of the screen image as they are by the confines of their own domestic spaces.

160

Robert Redford and American Cinema

In The Horse Whisperer, Redford finally capitulated and appeared before his own camera, becoming fully the actor-director. And in this film, he seems most naturally at ease, both with his performance as a character that would be only too familiar to him from his own private ranch-based life, but also in terms of a director relating to the story and its characters. Not wishing to always be uneasily moving on to the next part of the story, but quite content to reside with the characters and their intimate actions and involvements, here is a film where Redford is demanding the viewer stay the course, and do so at his pace, for all three hours of its duration.

An actor’s director Something that clearly comes out of the making of Ordinary People, and is a marked feature of all of his future films, is the recognition of Redford as an actors’ director. By this is meant a director who fundamentally understands the processes and difficulties an actor faces in building a role through to successfully realizing it in the fragmented process of filming when on production. Redford had been there and done that for twenty years before he ventured the other side of the camera. He had seen directors handle actors badly, disregard their potential input, see them as little more than another element in the scene, equivalent to a prop or object to be employed for dramatic effect. Redford’s skill was his sensitivity to the actor’s experience on set, to what insights they might be able to provide into why characters and their actions are developing as they are. Redford’s assumption was that most actors were equally, if not more, intimate with their characters than the film’s director could ever hope to be, and that their input could only better the process of realizing the drama. Having studied so many directors up close, Redford knew that his point of entry to directing was to stay close to his actors. ‘I felt confident among actors. I felt I could relate in terms of reassurance and creating this positivity in the environment an actor needs’ (Callan, 2010:273). According to Donald Sutherland: ‘Bob totally handed trust to the actor. He’d learned that himself, the need for space for the actor to find the role. I knew what I wanted to do with Jarrett, which is not to say he didn’t. He did. But he gave me room.’ Mary Tyler Moore concurred, observing that: ‘He allowed

Behind the Camera

161

us to improvise whenever we wanted to. We knew what each scene was. His direction was, “Try what feels good.” And if I felt something was only so-so and wanted another shot at it, he’d say, “Try it whatever way”’ (both in Callan, 2010:273, 275). As a final observation on these assessments of Redford as a director, I think it is apposite to recognize Redford’s own desire, from the very start of his own acting career, to be allowed spontaneity as an actor, and his refusal to be locked down by a director’s controlling vision. As a director, he very much carried that through to his handling of actors on his own directed productions. Of his directing of his second directorial effort, The Milagro Beanfield War, one of its stars, Sonia Braga, echoed Sutherland and Tyler Moore when she recalled, ‘For us it’s very good to have director-actor who understands all the psychological problems that can happen with an actor. It seems to me he is very close to the problems that involve people. He is trying, it seems to me, to understand, to solve these problems. He is a thinker’ (Kearney, 1988:31). Similarly in Quiz Show, Ralph Fiennes, Rob Morrow and John Turturro all went on record praising what Morrow expressed as the ‘joy of working with a generous director who knows what you’re doing because he’s done it himself ’ (Callan, 2010:349). Not a director, then, primarily intent on stunning his audience with flamboyant camerawork and extreme ‘actorly’ performances. Redford’s style is altogether more collaborative, quieter, more restrained, more interested in the small nuances of human behaviour.

Redford directs Redford As argued briefly earlier, the actor-director hyphernate often comes with an assumption: that the actor-turned director will be directing himself, still as the star, in the chosen film. Looking to the actor-directors who come most immediately to mind – Eastwood, Stallone, Woody Allen – all have frequently star in the movies which they also direct. In part, at least in their first outings as director, this must be seen as an insurance policy against the risk of allowing them to be in control of even a modestly budgeted movie as an inexperienced director. Their star power would help to guarantee box office, even if the direction of the film was clumsy and flawed (shortcomings that can, in any

162

Robert Redford and American Cinema

case, be largely compensated for by an experienced cinematographer and/or by editors in post-production). And, indeed, as noted above, some pressure was put upon Redford to star in his first directorial effort, Ordinary People, by Michael Eisner, one of the studio heads of Paramount, which was considering financing the project. With Eisner adamant, Redford suggested, as an untried director, that he work for the guild minimum wage ($30,000) instead of the $750,000 his agent was trying to secure for him due to his star status, if he be allowed not to star in the film. Redford consciously resisted acting in the first few films he directed, arguing that doing so would distance himself from the immediacy of the acting experience, which is at the centre of the pleasure of acting for him: ‘the joy of acting is to block out all the distractions of the camera. I love losing myself in the acting. I don’t like to stop and go and look at myself in the monitor’ (Rynning, 1998:53). The first time he did so was on The Horse Whisperer, in a role so close to his own personality and image that it seems natural that it would attract him. Indeed, the role of Tom Booker is so close to Redford’s Western image of himself that it would have looked perverse had he not played the character. Even so, he ‘still [had] very mixed feelings about doing both’, he says. ‘I didn’t like the idea of directing myself because I didn’t think I could do it well. Only if you are a very calculating actor who stands outside yourself, watching yourself in relationship to things, you can do it’ (Rynning, 1998:53). Following this concession, however, Redford would intersperse starring in his further directorial projects with (literally) keeping out of the picture: not appearing in The Legend of Bagger Vance (2000) and The Conspirator (2010), but taking lead roles in Lions for Lambs (2007) and The Company You Keep (2012). No great mystery to solve here: the films either had no obvious role for him to play or had a subject that was so personal to him (the two contemporary political movies) that he wanted to be a physical presence in them: a verifiable voice in front of as well as behind the camera. So, the question stands: across the range of his self-directed films, is there a Redford directorial style, in the same way as a film can be identifiably a ‘Scorsese’ or a ‘Tarantino’: both directors being best (though not exclusively) noted for their hyper-realized, flamboyant, visceral styles of filmmaking? Or, to be a little more cautious, could Redford be, say, an American Bergman or Ozu: highly controlled, precise, formal styles where the slightest shift of perspective

Behind the Camera

163

or actor gesture is given huge significance? The suggestion (almost) sounds ridiculous: Redford, bland American movie star, an art film director? Really? And yet I am not suggesting the impossible. That could be Redford’s aspiration, certainly given his fine-art beginnings, interest in the European New Wave and admiration for directors such as Bergman, all converted into an American equivalent in the Sundance portfolio of initiatives. Why would Redford be assumed to sit more comfortably within traditional Hollywood (whatever that is, these days) than in the more adventurous, independent filmmaking arena? But again, is Redford, like his peer Clint Eastwood, perhaps, more interested in a transparent style which refuses to draw attention to itself and which thereby allows the drama, and the acting performances, to unfold as if unobserved? A functional filmmaking style that denies its own potentials in the service of a more important acted drama? Filmed theatre drama, or something very near to it. In terms of invisible filming technique, Redford has probably been influenced most by directors working by the same ethos, such as George Roy Hill, who saw himself as far more of a storyteller working within cinema, than a formal film aesthete, telling stories through cinematic means. For Redford, ‘George was chronically underrated on account of his eclecticism. He was not a “straight-line” director, in that he did not obsess about one style or one subject. When I see directors like Marty Scorsese being so celebrated for excellence and George so ignored, it upsets me. Marty is brilliant as a stylist, but George was an immense storyteller and he had the gift to jump genres and never let you down.’ ‘For Newman: “Hill’s speciality was his genius with actors … his deep respect for the art of acting …. He didn’t slow you down when you were hot; he rolled with it. On the other hand, when you stumbled, he stepped in to help in the blink of an eye. That’s a very rare attribute for a director: understanding acting.”’

(Callan, 2010:146–7) I would argue that, of all the directors Redford has worked with, George Roy Hill had the biggest influence on him. The only director who might come a close second is his long-time collaborator Sydney Pollack, whose film style was similarly unobtrusive, almost ‘anonymous’, in his focus on the drama being played out by the actors in the scenes of his movies (as noted earlier, however,

164

Robert Redford and American Cinema

one has to keep in mind the extravagant visual sequences in Out of Africa [1985]: biplanes flying over flocks of flamingos taking flight over translucent African lakes; tiny safari trucks dwarfed by massive rift valleys. Pollack could surrender to sweeping camera movement to capture the visually overpowering too, when circumstances demanded). My feeling is that Redford is a combination; a filming style which is most interested in not drawing attention to itself, but within which dramatic moments which have particular narrative significance and need to be noticed by an attentive audience are given more overt formal treatment. We should therefore not ignore Redford’s own, already noted, Scorsese-esque, stylistic flourishes in Quiz Show, where, in the opening scene, the camera glides seductively along the side of a new model Chrysler, and later cranes and dollies up-and-over the audience towards a candidate in the show, as he makes his crucial decision. Not too far removed from Scorsese’s Casino, perhaps? But these are isolated instances, chosen by Redford to represent a specific historical period and its dominant visual style. It is by no means at the heart of Redford’s longer-term, personal aesthetic. Redford does typically operate within a controlled formal framework of static camera framing, or slow camera movement following considered acting performances, augmented by carefully modulated lighting that makes each scene look exquisite, almost like a work of art. Works of art, however, are frozen in the moment of their completion, each line, colour, figure remaining that way forever more. The world of Redford’s characters allows greater, more fractured, change. His interest is in the small-scale human: the person trying to operate responsibly or, at the very least, in a way that won’t expose the depth of their troubled emotions to the outside world. In this reading, Redford could be said to be operating within a melodramatic framework: of dramas that describe characters who are in some form of crisis, but whose restrictive social context forbids them to ‘act out’ or reveal that inner turmoil. In this highly controlled formal structure, the smallest moments of extreme action or utterance carry huge significance. In Ordinary People, Beth’s control of the family is eventually shattered by her husband’s tearful breakdown and her own subsequent exit from the family by taxicab. And certainly, more generally, Redford’s controlled worlds are invaded by moments of kinetic action, of violence, trauma, flashback: the boating

Behind the Camera

165

accident and Buck slipping off the hull to his death in Ordinary People; Damon’s character remembering the horrors of the trenches in the First World War in The Legend of Bagger Vance; violent, close-up, flashbacks to the horse/truck accident in The Horse Whisperer. Even in Lions for Lambs, the hermetically sealed worlds of academia and politics, both abstractly debating the consequences of military action, are roughly intruded upon by juxtaposed editing, with footage of soldiers experiencing, and dying for, the consequences of those debates. Redford moves to frenetic action and short editing rates when the drama demands. Indeed, it is the holding out from this in the presenting of an overriding, stifling surrender to conformity and good manners, which seems to typify the ‘blandness’ and fragile safety of his narrative worlds, that makes the brutal intrusions, both formal and dramatic, all the more powerful. Sometimes, hiding before revealing the unbearably powerful behind the seemingly bland and ubiquitous is the most effective dramatic and emotional strategy. Just ask Douglas Sirk.

Slow cinema? One of the major criticisms of Redford’s directorial style, as typified by the Patterson quote which headlines this chapter, is that it is too slow, too pedantic, too earnest, especially in contrast, as I’ve argued, to the hyperactive style so prevalent in contemporary Hollywood. Certainly, Ordinary People is an extraordinarily measured work, meticulously unravelling the tensions within a respectable family. Similarly, The Horse Whisperer has been criticized in many reviews as being too long and too slow to retain the viewer’s interest. Most reviewers who take this position cite the repeated question asked within the narrative: ‘How much longer will this [the horse therapy] take?’, facetiously allowing the question to be asked by the imagined audience wondering how much longer the film is going to last. At a few minutes short of three hours, The Horse Whisperer is a long film. Intentionally so. The critics are right to equate the length of treatment with the length of the movie: both will take the time needed to achieve their goals. Form echoes content. In this way, although by no means the experimental art film usually referred to under the label of ‘Slow Cinema’, The Horse Whisperer might have more

166

Robert Redford and American Cinema

than a passing connection to its more austere and high-brow cinematic cousin. Take this perhaps surprising comparison: ‘[Kelly] Reichardt as a filmmaker is preoccupied with how environmental and economic crises affect those living on society’s fringes. Her spare plots and slow editing reveal an artist who recognizes that disasters are gradual, with effects experienced through duration rather than sudden shock’ (Reichardt Press Release, 2017). Almost in a mirror-reverse of Ordinary People, in which the long takes and sequences take place in claustrophobic rooms of the family house, there are sequences, and standout shots, in The Horse Whisperer, usually showing us Tom Booker and the horse, Phoenix, negotiating one another in the wide open field of the Booker farm in Montana, which also certainly take their time on screen. During these long takes, the viewer is invited to understand the drama taking place (family imperceptibly disintegrating; Horse Whisperer therapist establishing the beginnings of a healing relationship with damaged horse), while also being offered the chance to take in the beauty of Montana itself. Once the first objective has been achieved, space is left for the second to also be offered. But this is not simply excessive indulgence of direction or editing. It has a serious agenda, which is both to show us how long it takes for a family to heal, or to perform the bonding between man and horse that is essential for the latter’s recovery, and to ask us to also simply feel for the family and/or to fall in love with the simple, natural beauty of the land in which the Booker family lives. In the former construction, we are with the narrative, understanding the demands of the task asked of Tom Booker. In the latter, we are actually inside the head of Annie, who is, almost against her will, becoming seduced by the land, its values, the peaceful pace of life offered by the location and its inhabitants … and falling in love with Tom. This may very well be Slow Cinema, Hollywood style: tied to a concrete narrative which is describing a very real drama, but still a film which is resolutely insisting that it will elapse in its own good time, and the viewer will have to make the commitment to go with that agenda, its length and pace. When I came to watch the film again for this book, I did so with my thirteenyear-old daughter, who could, in her teen-drama, iPhone culture, short-focus attention be forgiven, perhaps, for agreeing with Patterson in finding the whole

Behind the Camera

167

thing irredeemably boring. The revelation was that she wasn’t bored at all, and didn’t reach for her iPhone once during the whole three hours it took to watch the film. On the contrary, she spent that time leaning forward in her chair to focus harder on the screen, curling up in an almost foetal position during the more difficult emotional sections – screaming out and turning away, afraid to watch, during the initial accident, but also, tellingly, during the difficult climax of the thwarted romance between Tom and Annie. This is slow cinema which engrossed a teenager for almost three hours. I will have more to say about the appeal of the narrative of The Horse Whisperer to multi-generations – young (my thirteen-year-old daughter) and old (me, as a 62-year-old academic) – in the last chapter. But Redford, as the director, must be doing something right if he captures and sustains the attention of such a wide demographic over such a long screen time.

Quiz Show (1994) But, as noted earlier, if any film pairing was to challenge the image of Redford as a one-trick pony director who was only interested in exploring the nuances of human interactions within specific, highly considered, usually exquisitely photographed environments, his follow-up to A River Runs through It, Quiz Show, would be that pairing. Where River, as with the later The Horse Whisperer, is certainly all of the above – quiet, elegiac, visually gorgeous – the second is brash, overt, highly stylized (although with a quiet, affluent ‘beautiful people’ upper-middle-class family at the centre of it). Quiz Show details the television game show scandals of the 1950s, when contestants were primed with the answers to pre-prepared sets of questions in order to guarantee the drama of the shows and consequently, most importantly, the maximizing of sponsorship deals for the advertisements which were shown during the programmes’ breaks to massive television audiences. Why would Redford, a person avowedly more comfortable with the natural world of Utah than the hustling world of either Los Angeles or New York, be interested in taking a year of more to make a film on such a crass, ugly subject? Partly, it was to do with his particular sense of morality, both private

168

Robert Redford and American Cinema

and individual and in terms of the bigger national institutions, whether media or central government. As he has commented on the scandal, ‘As a nation, we didn’t pay enough attention, and the fact was, we were experiencing a fundamental breach in morality’ (quoted in Callan, 2010:347). The notion of truth, subjective and empirical, had been an intellectual preoccupation for as long as Redford could remember, and it was the appeal that lay behind his pursuit of Quiz Show. ‘“Truth is his big hang-up in life,” Carol Rossen [lifelong friend, and daughter of Robert Rossen] says. Film after film of his reflected a pursuit of the question: “What is wrong with this picture?” Quiz Show would be his sharpest commentary so far on “the truth” of national values’ (Callan, 2010:347). All well and good, providing enough of a rationale for Redford to want to address the subject. But an ‘irredeemably boring director’ would have done so in an irredeemably boring way: full of static framings, stolidly composed scenes, muted colour schemes, etc. Redford almost revels in the freedom the film’s subject offered his visual style. It literally opens, as previously noted, on a slow, seductive camera dolly along the gleaming white body of the latest model of Chrysler car – the car fetishized cinematically because it is being emotionally fetishized by both the salesman and its potential buyer. The scene, coming off the back of a title sequence of brash, neon lettering which sums up the period in which the film is set, lets us know that here is a Robert Redford film quite unlike either the intense hermetically sealed emotional world of the Jarrett family or the reverential paeans to nature that have marked his previous directorial efforts. It is immediately noticeable that Redford’s camera and editing patterns are more frenetic, jumpier and restless, as he tries to depict an entertainment world that lives on its nerves: whether generally in terms of aspiration towards a better life (the promised American Dream offered by the jackpot on the quiz show at the heart of the drama) or, more immediately, in the nerve-shredding processes of live 1950s American television, where hugely complicated elements (announcers, presenters, contestants, audiences, adverts, etc.) had to be coordinated live, nightly, into smooth television programming. Redford knew this world only too well, as the first chapter of this book has detailed. His affection for it is tangible in the detail he brings to the scenes in which such complex television entertainments are ‘pulled off ’. His strategies worked:

Behind the Camera

169

Quiz Show was well received. Indeed, it is among Redford’s more respected directorial efforts.

Mystic Redford: The Horse Whisperer and The Legend of Bagger Vance The Horse Whisperer has been covered earlier in the chapter, and will be revisited in the last chapter to come. Here, it is only necessary to note the importance of mysticism to the film’s narrative. Tom Booker has a mysterious, unexplained ability to almost exorcise the demons in troubled and traumatized horses. Hence his ‘nickname’ and the film’s title: an almost pagan occultism, or, at least pantheistic, connection to the power of nature. Booker is needed by Grace and her mother to rescue them from the emotional and spiritual impasse they find themselves in following the riding accident which has so badly physically injured Grace, and psychologically traumatized them both. A similar dynamic forms the story of Redford’s next directorial effort: The Legend of Bagger Vance, made two years later. In this film, another mystical stranger/healer rescues a young golfer, a star in the game until becoming psychologically damaged in the First World War and losing his natural talent with a golf ball. The healer, a caddy played by Will Smith, is given to uttering elliptical, seemingly sage, comments at significant moments, which appear to work wonders in focusing the golfer, played by Matt Damon, who eventually triumphs over his mental ills and becomes again the golfer he once was. The two films therefore make a related, if otherwise incompatible, pair. Where The Horse Whisperer relays its mysticism through the natural beauty of Montana and the lengthy, unhurried, sequences of Booker with the horse, Bagger Vance relays its version of the ineffable through an intense golf competition, the Yoda-esque sayings of the mysterious caddy, and an artificially heightened colour palette which lends the film an air of unreality and fairytale. But again, importantly, the pair also show Redford adapting his directorial style to fit the content of each film and its narrative demands. Although, in the abstract, both films have mystical cures at the centre of their narratives, they are very different in tone and address: The Horse Whisperer gently romantic in its imagery and earnest in its concern for its characters, and The Legend of

170

Robert Redford and American Cinema

Bagger Vance altogether lighter, brighter and with a dangerously ‘Uncle Tom’ performance from Will Smith. By way of possible explanation, as Callan’s biography of Redford details, these years, between the end of the 1990s and beginnings of the 2000s, were a time when Redford was re-evaluating many of the elements making up his life: the scope and ambition of Sundance; his acting, and directing, aspirations; the parlous state that American politics was sliding into as George W. Bush took over the presidency. It is perhaps not too surprising, therefore, that this selfquestioning resulted in an interest to consider the more spiritual qualities of a life well lived.

Political Redford (revisited) That self-examination would certainly galvanize Redford to focus his next directorial efforts towards American politics. These three films – Lions for Lambs (2007), The Conspirator (2010) and The Company You Keep (2012) – would all, either directly or indirectly, address the pertinent political questions of the period. Again, these films have been discussed in the chapter on Redford and politics. But it is again worth noting the significant stylistic differences between the three films, as a means of illustrating Redford’s ability to adapt his directorial style to fit the narrative brief. Of the three, the most ‘radical’, formally, is Lions for Lambs. Even, though, perhaps wisely, the running length is kept short (around ninety minutes), the three-strand structure of the film has only one that contains action of any significant kind. The first two strands involve two characters simply sitting and talking. In the first of these, Redford’s university professor and one of his students (Andrew Garfield) face one another across his desk in Redford’s office, debating a range of issues from the student’s sudden disinterest in intellectual pursuits to the ethics of the Iraq War. In the second, two heavyweights of modern film superstardom, Meryl Streep and Tom Cruise, sit facing one another across his desk, debating the complexities of that same war. The third strand shows the ambushing and killing of two university students who have enlisted as a way of demonstrating their patriotism (they are also ex-students of Redford’s professor). Therefore, in the course of a ninety-minute film, over an hour is spent with characters virtually immobile in their chairs, volunteering wordy and complex intellectual

Behind the Camera

171

arguments. Even though these talk-fests are periodically interrupted, quite strategically, by segments of the action, as the enemy moves in on the trapped soldiers, this is a film which has notably long sections of pure dialogue, and dialogue which is dense with political and ideological detail. There are a number of, I think, quite important issues that come out of this brief description of the film. Firstly, I cannot think of too many ‘mainstream’ American films that offer their audience such a Spartan experience, especially in the contemporary action-oriented, superherofranchise marketplace. Even moving to the art cinema arena we have works such as My Dinner with Andre (1981) and Swimming to Cambodia (1987), but very few others. What was Redford thinking? How did he expect such an austere work to hit it big in the multiplexes, even with stellar cast members such as Streep and Cruise? Perhaps the reference towards art cinema is telling here. Perhaps Redford was saying that the importance of properly considering the issues involved in what America was getting up to in the Middle East required, not any kind of a shoot-’em-up format (even if some of these – Zero Dark Thirty, Redacted, etc. – had important critiques to offer), but a responsible, mature, fully informed one. Admittedly, the film hedges its bets by including the action strand of the soldiers on the mountain. But this was a film which, having captured its audience in the cinema, forced it to interact with the ideas being expressed on screen. For Redford, that austere form was the only responsible way to represent and consider the important issues. With his interest in European Art Cinema movements and championing of the American equivalent with Sundance, why should we expect anything different? As many times previously, Redford was using all of his still considerable industry weight to insist that a film be made that unflinchingly aired the debates and the complexities of what was happening in the wake of 9/11 and the War on Terror. Secondly, as has been flagged several times already, Redford is an actor’s director. Lions for Lambs is an actor’s film: Streep and Cruise ‘going at it’ head to head is a masterclass in film acting. Redford doing likewise with the younger Garfield shows the latter’s great potential to become a lasting movie star. The sequences are pleasures to watch. It is not just that the film is trying to say important things in as direct a way as possible. It is also saying that one of the vital functions of cinema is, through compelling performances, to make audiences sit up and think for themselves – radical cinema (Figure 5.4).

172

Robert Redford and American Cinema

Figure 5.4  Acting masterclass: Lions for Lambs.

The second film of the triumvirate – The Conspirator (2010) – is quite another beast: a period piece, with full and authentic period detail, which explores how the mother of a son involved in the assassination of Abraham Lincoln was herself convicted of conspiracy and hanged. Unlike Lions for Lambs, it does not feature major star actors: James McAvoy, a Scottish actor who plays the young attorney, reluctantly persuaded to represent the mother; Robin Wright, the mother (perhaps best known as Forrest Gump’s love interest); Tom Wilkinson, an English character actor known, at the time, for independent films such as In the Bedroom (2001): these were actors who could disappear behind their characters rather than offering a masterclass in diva acting. The tone and style Redford adopted for the production were dark, if not monochrome, with an impressive and nuanced range of browns and beige. Muted solemnity would perhaps be the best description of the mise-en-scene and production design, and perhaps of the performances. It is this film that compelled Patterson to come up with the less than flattering assessment of Redford’s directorial skills that opened this chapter. We should consider it as a text. Why choose it? Hardly major box office potential, especially given the lack of marquee names. A year later, Steven Spielberg and Daniel Day-Lewis would offer their Lincoln, a big-profile, starridden version of Lincoln’s life and death. Huge box office success, Oscars aplenty.

Behind the Camera

173

Except Redford’s film wasn’t about Lincoln. It was about his death, and the consequences of the fallout of that death on those centrally and, more pertinently, only tangentially involved. It was a film about the consequences of involvement and the price paid for that. And it was about certain values – a mother’s love for her son – so intense that she was ready to die so that he would live. Although set in the mid-1860s, Redford’s film was absolutely designed to speak to contemporary America, to all the families who had lost loved ones to the latest in a long line of hate-filled, nonsensical wars, waged for spurious and invalid reasons. And how, rising above that madness, the love of a parent for a child could still be seen as sacrosanct. Redford’s film was ultimately about these core values. But he was astute enough to set it within a context in which a nation was grieving for a lost leader and also for the loss of a potentially great future that he promised (cf. Kennedy, Luther King Jr, etc.) and also of an innocence: what we are left with are the grubby compromises of a set of ‘leaders’ who have no central ideals but have replaced them with a shifting set of pragmatic options. Again, not a film that might have wide appeal in a country then trying to come to terms with its recent history and compromises, and perhaps, also, not fully able to realize the metaphor being played out in the story of innocent people being convicted and executed/murdered to satisfy the need for national revenge. The muted control of The Conspirator is, as so often with Redford, its very point. The third film – The Company You Keep (2012) – has, again, been covered in the chapter on Redford’s politics, and will be again in the final chapter to come, on late-age Redford. But within the context of the current chapter, he adapts his style to fit the brief: that of a former homeland terrorist (a member of the so-called Weatherman Group of the 1970s) who is exposed by a persistent young reporter on a local paper, and who has to go on the run to prove his innocence of a specific crime he had no part of. Again, a touchy subject, because of both relatively recent atrocities, such as the McVeigh bombing massacre in Oklahoma in 1995, and many subsequent America-generated terrorist activities in following years. The Weathermen might not have been a particularly comfortable subject for Americans to revisit at that moment in the new millennium. Another brave move on Redford’s part?

174

Robert Redford and American Cinema

The film is shot largely like a fast-paced thriller: cops and intelligence agents out to get the ‘bad guy’ who has to use all of his terrorist-trained guile to evade them. So far, so Hollywood. And again, Redford’s image in this film is part of the last-phase career issues that will be explored in the final chapter. All I want to flag here is that the film is shot in thriller-mode: fast action, with sharp editing and sudden plot twists. Redford recognizes the demands of the format, and obliges. Except, not quite. While there are young and energetic bucks in the story (principally, the ambitious investigative journalist: who is he most reminiscent of: Bob Woodward or Carl Bernstein?), most of the characters are over seventy years old: Redford, Nolte, Christie. Of course they are: they were young back in the heyday of the Weathermen, but fifty years have transpired since then. So the formal style of the film takes into account the advanced years of the main characters. In amongst the expected gung-ho action sequences are moments of quiet reflection, of characters thinking over and discussing their actions ‘back then’. It affords the film a very particular shape and formal dynamic: as with other Redford films, of a carefully balance of action interspersed with introspection. An older-and-wiser terrorist’s film; a very peculiar beast; not bland and boring, but constantly surprising, deeply considered, as an experienced and nuanced director might be expected to produce. Continuing this thought, therefore, the theme that holds together Redford’s three last directorial works is his concern for the moral, ethical and emotional complexities of American political life to be properly, maturely, represented and explored. The format within which this is done is different in all three cases: dialogue-dense, head-shot, talk-fest; historical re-enactment; terrorist thriller. In all three, he moulds his directing style to the demands of the story, while retaining his central interest in the truth of the characters (and, thereby, his focus upon what the actors may, or have to, bring to their roles in order to fully cover the subject. In an era dominated by superhero franchises, where the ridiculous antics of over-costumed and CGI-distorted actors play characters in films that are over-valorized as metaphors for real-world political crises, Redford made films that directly confronted those issues. In this, at least, he was true to himself, but also to the industry that, in the 1970s, did so too, before escapist fantasy established its stranglehold.

Behind the Camera

175

This constitutes a more heterogeneous collection of films than one might have assumed. Without doubt, Redford naturally gravitates towards the rural, beautiful, measured, controlled; it is his comfort zone and he operates exceptionally well within it (c.f., the significant successes of River and Whisperer). But he has also been driven to make films on quite different subjects, in quite different styles. His interest is always in the human story, and he has always been willing to adapt and change his directorial and visual style to respond to the demands of different stories, set in quite different contexts. To end this chapter, somewhat conjecturally, a propos of the above: a question that hangs in the air is whether Redford can be considered an auteur or simply a metteur en scène? While the auteur theory is generally devalued in current film studies thinking, it still has some currency in identifying directors who have a degree of consistency across their film output and those who are more workmanlike and, while professional, are more concerned to efficiently get the production completed than to express a personal vision or style. According to Andrew Sarris, in his reinterpretation of the French La Politique des Auteurs for American cinema, a film auteur (author) must have the following qualities: 1. Technical competence 2. A discernible style – ‘Over a group of films, a director must exhibit certain recurrent characteristics of style, which serve as his signature. The way a film looks and moves should have some relationship to the way a director thinks and feels.’ 3. Interior meaning – which ‘is extrapolated from the tension between a director’s personality and his material … It is not quite the vision of the world a director projects nor quite his attitude toward life … Truffaut has called it the temperature of the director on the set, and that is a close approximation of its professional aspect. Dare I come out and say what I think it to be is an élan of the soul?’ (2009:563) Alternatively, according to Peter Wollen, ‘the work of the metteur en scène, on the other hand, does not go beyond the realm of performance, of transposing into the special complex of cinematic codes and channels a pre-existing text: a scenario, a book or a play’ (1972:78).

176

Robert Redford and American Cinema

Where do we place Redford within this binary opposition? While my analyses of his films throughout this chapter have repeatedly stressed his preference for ruthlessly controlled camerawork, slow pacing and a fondness for the natural world as location for his stories, several of his films have displayed an altogether different aesthetic: one of brashness and heightened colour. Thematically, as I have argued, he has favoured two different rationales: the spiritual/natural and the political. Within each of these, he has demonstrated a consistency of intellectual position while still adapting the style of his filmmaking to the specific demands of each narrative. So, by no means an impersonal metteur-en-scène. His personal and emotional involvement in each of his directed films is too great. But also, perhaps, not quite a single-visioned auteur, reworking the same themes, concerns and formal constructs in film after film. Having said that, at a certain level his personal vision does unite all of his films, whatever their formal variations. His is a world of moral integrity, where people are to be respected for defending truth and honesty. This is the imprimatur of Redford as director, and what makes him, ultimately, qualify for the status of auteur.

6

Proud member of the ‘Over the Hill’ gang

In the year 2000, Robert Redford turned sixty-four: near to the traditional retirement age for a working man and certainly a mature age for a leading star in modern Hollywood. Across the following two decades, he made eleven feature films (not including his cameo in Captain America: Winter Soldier in 2014) plus two TV movies made for Netflix. In them, he played a series of increasingly mature characters, some of which acknowledged his actual age, some of which seemed intent to deny it by having him play characters who are demonstrably younger than Redford’s actual age at the time of production. These can be seen to have offered him opportunities to begin to shift his screen image into its final phase of late-age maturity. Perhaps in this play with age, Redford was hoping to make some kind of personal/political point: that it is too easy to pigeonhole and stereotype actors, assuming that only a narrow type of role is possible for them because of their looks or, in the current context, because of their stage in life. This chapter is concerned to examine Redford’s final phase as an actor, the kind of roles he chose to play and their possible wider significance within changes in Hollywood and ageing audience demographics.

Ageing: Problems of definition and classification What is ‘old age’? At what age can one be said to ‘be old’? Definitions have, of course, shifted as the past century progressed – life expectancies lengthening in accordance to improved social conditions, diet, medical care and so on. A retirement age of, roughly, the mid-1960s, as noted above, is often used as a convenient marker: before that, a person is active and useful to society;

178

Robert Redford and American Cinema

afterwards, claimed to be productively useless and of little importance to it, and certainly, it has been assumed, to the box office calculations of the movie industry. More on that last point a little later. Recent theorists have identified a range of categories for the phases of human life, from the first age of childhood and youth, through the second age of adulthood and working maturity, the third age of still-active retirement and, finally, the fourth age of physical and/or mental decline and death. A further term ‘successful ageing’ has been added to the lexicon of critical terms to further analyse the meaning of moving from one to another age-phase, by emphasizing the quality of life and the grace and dignity with which the final years of one’s life are negotiated and conducted. [C]ontemporary formations of old age should not be reduced or confined to the dominant narrative of decline, vulnerability and dependency since equal weight needs to be accorded to a counter-narrative of successful or active ageing. Emerging in the late 1980s as the ageing demographic was first identified and constituted as a ‘problem’, successful ageing promises to prevent, or at least forestall, the onset of decline in old age (Rowe and Kahn 1997, 1998) ….Picking up on this discursively produced split between successful ageing and its ostensibly burdensome other, Gilleard and Higgs [2005] mobilise ideas of third and fourth age imaginaries that they suggest are new cultural fields which can be crudely mapped as an extended middle or third age that prefigures an inevitable decline into the abjected frailties of the fourth age.

(Dolan, 2017:4) It is the work of this chapter to explore these definitions of life phases, and their significance to changes in the movie industry and, more specifically, Redford’s negotiation of his star status and continued ability to work productively within that industry.

Ageing stardom Redford here is in good company. In recent years, many of the stars who formed the centre of the Hollywood star system have grown old. In the year 2000, apart from Redford turning sixty-four, his peers were of similar, if not

Proud Member of the ‘Over the Hill’ Gang

179

greater, age. Paul Newman was 75; Clint Eastwood 70; Christopher Plummer 71; Shirley MacLaine 66; Burt Reynolds 64; Dustin Hoffman 63; Jane Fonda 63; Morgan Freeman 63; Jon Voight 62; Sylvester Stallone 54; Susan Sarandon 54; Meryl Streep 51. Almost all of these (Newman passing away in 2008 at the age of eighty-three; Reynolds in 2018 at the age of eighty-two) are still acting, if not in films then in television series. Declining the option to retire and quietly slip away, most of them have chosen to remain active and in search of new roles to play. The consequence has been a noticeable increase in elderly character narratives for these still-bankable stars to appear in. Older roles, therefore, were, of necessity, to be found or created for them, as well as believable and interesting stories to form the narratives of the films in which they might star.

Silver audiences Since the advent of New Hollywood at the end of the 1960s, and in some ways for some time before, the audience for American movies has seen to have been increasingly youth-oriented, with the predominant age group for the majority of American films, whether mainstream or independent, being in the 18–24 range. Many commentators still argue this to be the case, contrasting it against the invisibility of those in older age bands, who either have less disposable income to spend on an evening at the movies, refusing the over-priced concessions and being content with watching the often superior product being offered by television in all its mix of terrestrial and satellite options: Hollywood … unlike the youth audience, tends to largely ignore the interests of the older audience. After all, as people age, they attend movies at theatres in decreasing numbers, because most older people have diminishing disposable incomes and tend to spend less on media-based products, and thus they become a less valuable portion of the consumer audience that media industries rely on for consumption.

(Shary and McVittie, 2016:3) While this is still undeniably a dominant picture, the last several (actually, now some twenty or so) years have seen a significant shift in this simple model. Other writers, therefore, have noted a significant expansion in older audiences

180

Robert Redford and American Cinema

over these past two decades, resulting in the ageing demographic now forming a significant portion of audiences and box office receipts: Since circa 2000, headlines such as ‘Graying Audience Returns to Movies’ (Barnes and Cieply 2011) and ‘How older viewers are rescuing cinema’ (Cox, 2012) have proclaimed the ‘greying’ or silver audience as the salvation of the film exhibition sector as its profit margins are increasingly threatened by new media consumption and a declining young demographic … it should not be reduced to a cause and effect dynamic nor to the identificatory attractions of the ageing stars and actors that populate their narratives. Rather, a reverse flow of influence needs to be recognised in that film makers are responding to a notable demographic shift in the composition of cinema audiences which are increasingly composed of older people who are defined as such by their 60 plus chronological age in some sections of the press, and as being over 25 within the framework of film industry targets.

(Dolan, 2017:31–2) Indeed, the Barnes and Cieply report, noted in the quote above, cites figures for this increase: ‘[T]he actual number of older moviegoers has grown enormously since 1995, the year before boomers started hitting the midcentury mark. Then about 26.8 million people over the age of 50 went to the movies, according to GfK MRI. That number grew to 44.9 million in 2010’ (Barnes and Cieply, 2011). Importantly, this older audience demographic has been identified as a primary cause in the creation of a distinct strand of filmmaking, centred around older characters and relationships that feature the industry’s more mature actors and stars. Picking up on the ageing stars just listed earlier, even a cursory look at film listings from the past fifteen years reveals a startling number of such films: Calendar Girls (2003), starring Helen Mirren and Julie Walters; Ladies in Lavender (2004), starring Judy Dench and Maggie Smith; Is Anybody There? (2008), with Michael Caine, whose character forms a friendship with a ten-year-old boy fascinated with death; The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel (2011) and The Second Best Exotic Marigold Hotel (2015), with Dench, Tom Wilkinson, Bill Nighy and many others; The Face of Love (2013), starring Diane Keaton, Ed Harris and Robin Williams; Last Love (2013), with Michael Caine; Ruth and Alex (2014), starring Diane Keaton and Morgan Freeman; And So It Goes (2014) again, with Keaton and Michael Douglas; Elsa

Proud Member of the ‘Over the Hill’ Gang

181

and Fred (2014), with Shirley MacLaine and Christopher Plummer; I’ll See You in my Dreams (2015), with Blythe Danner and Sam Elliott; The Lady in the Van (2015), with Maggie Smith; Wild Oats (2016), again with MacLaine, Jessica Lange and Demi Moore; Hampstead (2017), with Diane Keaton (cornering the market in female ageing romance roles) and Brendan Gleeson; and Book Club (2018), starring Keaton, Jane Fonda, Candice Bergen, and Mary Steenburgen. It would be easy to go on, but I won’t. But as can easily be seen from this far from comprehensive list, in the last ten to twenty years, a vibrant older audience demographic has demanded films which address their specific concerns and interests, and which have thereby helped to maintain the careers of certain older actors. Many of them (both stars and audience members) are female, testifying to the dominant flavour of the narratives being told, which either feature elderly romance or groups of female friends in supportive networks. But amongst the chiffon and lavender lace are some notable male stars, some giants in their heydays: Douglas, Plummer, Freeman, Caine. All, both female and male, are very firmly allied to this genre of feature film, centred around issues of loss of life partners, loneliness, the need for supportive friendship, and questions involving the quality of life in the face of approaching death. It is a dynamic which some have anticipated and predicted for years: Nancy Perry Graham, editor of AARP [American Association of Retired Persons] The Magazine, says it’s about time. ‘There is a huge demand that needs to be satisfied, and we’ve been trying to make that point to Hollywood for years’, she said. ‘I truly believe that Hollywood is finally listening.’

(Barnes and Cieply, 2011) What this seems to suggest is that if the stars were ageing, so were their audience – their loyal fan bases who had grown older alongside their idols. It was shortsighted on Hollywood’s part to assume that these fans would abandon their favourite stars as they grew older. And Redford, with old friend Jane Fonda, will indeed make an ‘elderly romance’ film – Our Souls at Night, 2017) – as one of his very last, that fits very much into this phenomenon of elderly cinema. The film will be analysed at the end of this chapter. It is within this context that the last several of Robert Redford’s films need to be framed. I am not at all sure how much this has been a conscious choice

182

Robert Redford and American Cinema

on Redford’s part – a personal recognition that he has reached the end of his own third age. It may be more about an instinctive attraction to roles that chime more with how he experientially felt at the time of taking them on. Perhaps the two are not that far apart. But it is certain that, whether or not his choice of older roles has been a pragmatic recognition of his advancing years and accompanying physical limitations, he has, characteristically, used the roles to give a particular spin on the realities of being an older person in contemporary society. The 2010s see Redford moving through the final phase of his acting career with typically wry and ironic distance. Therefore, there has arisen an interesting confluence of ageing stars, a newly identifiable ageing audience who are not to be expected to be interested in the mainstream CGI franchises which now dominate the market (Redford’s appearance in Captain America: Winter Soldier notwithstanding), a ‘Mature Independent’ production field – interested in human stories and capable of looking at older-character stories, notable for their small-budget but with big names willing to work for reduced fees, and a plethora of subscription channels, such as Netflix, which allow elderly viewers the comfort of watching the films at home.

The ageing of Robert Redford When did Robert Redford get old? It’s a good question, the answer to which varies according to one’s chosen frame of reference. Old relative to what age? In connection to what story, and what relationships, his character in a film is involved with? According to what potential audience (and therefore box office) demographic? For some it was in The Natural (1984). ‘The good looks were intact, but the lines in the face grew more prevalent by “The Natural”’ (Fleishman, 2104). Redford had been away from the screen for four years since his appearance as kick-ass prison reformer in Brubaker, made in 1980, a year after his turn as ageing cowboy Sonny in The Electric Horseman (1979), alongside Jane Fonda. In the latter film, both actors, obviously, had personal history: two previous films, co-starring in The Chase (1966) and Barefoot in the Park (1967), in both of which they had been youthfully ‘hot’ and demonstrably sexually attracted

Proud Member of the ‘Over the Hill’ Gang

183

to one another. Twenty-two years later, in The Electric Horseman, the now not-so-young lovers were approaching early middle-age (Redford was fortythree in 1979, Fonda, a year younger at forty-two). They both played the film as characters who were life-experienced grown-ups, becoming romantically involved only in a tentatively gradual and level-headed way. Redford began the film playing a washed-out alcoholic, reduced to advertising cereal, looking the worse for his substance abuse, though sporting his old Sundance Kid moustache to help him retain his (diegetic and realworld) audience appeal. Fonda, playing a cynical and ambitious news journo, was initially hard-faced ruthless, dressed austerely and lit harshly. As the film progresses, and both characters shed their institutionalized looks, the lighting softens, and Fonda begins to be dressed in delicate wools to make her look soft and vulnerable and what her character now is: a woman in love. (It should also be noted that at the end of the seventies, perhaps in an attempt to offset her increasing years, Fonda was also heavily involved in developing a range of fitness books and videos; which might substantially explain her final youthful appearance in the film.) Therefore, the modulations of actor image in relation to character development in The Electric Horseman speak to the awkward age both Redford and Fonda were then at: neither youthful nor old, but with gestures back and forward to earlier, younger incarnations of themselves together and to the potentials of what a mature romance might actually mean and how it might be represented. The latter is left unexplored, as Sonny and Ellie part at the end of the film. But the gestures back to the younger Redford and Fonda in their earlier films go some way to ‘rescuing’ both actors from the accusations of being ‘past it’ in contemporary Hollywood terms. It is as if the film had been made sometime in 1968, between Barefoot in the Park (1967) and Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid (1969) but with added maturity – a clever sleight of hand that works, almost perfectly. We ignore or forgive the few wrinkles on Redford’s, and Fonda’s, faces in order to believe the fantasy on screen. Four years later, when Redford resurfaced in The Natural, reactions to his reappearance on screen framed him as in transition between youthful and older actor; but instead of the negotiation being from older to younger, as in The Electric Horseman, it went the other way. The narrative divides itself between the initial, brief, exposition of his youthful (around twenty years old)

184

Robert Redford and American Cinema

promise as a baseball prodigy and the majority of the film, which focuses on his return to the game as an over-the-hill rookie (around thirty-five years old). As with The Electric Horseman, lighting plays a significant role in the attempt to convince the audience of the character’s two ages – whether playing twenty or thirty-five, the forth-eight-year-old Redford clearly had his work cut out for him. The Natural is filmed with one prime purpose in mind: making Robert Redford look thirty – or nineteen – instead of forty-six [sic]. ‘He’s photographed looking like a wary, modest god’, wrote Pauline Kael who, as usual, wasn’t fooled, ‘with enough back lighting and soft focus to make him incandescent even when he isn’t doing a thing’.

(Clinch, 1989:194) In this respect, the story helps. The emphasis, on his reappearance in the baseball world, is on the ridiculousness of such an old player starting from scratch as a rookie in the sport. His coach (Wilford Brimley) makes pointed references to this absurdity and refuses to play him. Furthermore, the mythological dimension of the film (Arthurian legends et al.) allows for some unspoken magical rejuvenation of the character as his ‘quest for redemption’ progresses. In such a fantasy world (heavily criticized as overblown by many of the film’s critics), such miracles of rejuvenation are not only permissible, but expected. The choice of film for his return to the screen, after his earlyeighties sabbatical, was therefore astutely done, offering a space in which the changes in his physical appearance, while noted and commented upon, would be justified within the terms of the story being told. In this context, what are we to make of Out of Africa the following year? In it, Redford plays Denys Finch Hatton. The Honorable Denys Finch Hatton was six feet four inches tall, a bald old Etonian and the younger son of an earl. … In Kenya, he was a mythic being, an athlete and an aviator, a First World War hero who became a legendary white hunter. Though capable of great wit and charm, he was an elusive character who prized independence above the security of marriage. In other words, it is hard to think of anyone with less in common with a smallish tow-headed middle-class Californian family man.

(Clinch, 1989:196)

Proud Member of the ‘Over the Hill’ Gang

185

Well, in terms of physical appearance, yes – I will concede to Clinch, as well as her final comment on the Californian family man. But the details in between? ‘mythic being,’ ‘athlete,’ ‘hero,’ ‘legendary,’ ‘great wit and charm,’ ‘elusive,’ ‘prizing independence’? These terms and descriptors could all easily be applied to Redford, in both his star image and his personal qualities. It would even be possible to imaginatively add ‘aviator’ to that list (perhaps: if his friend Sydney Pollack, a keen aviator, had taught him how to fly). So, there was much there for Redford to identify with and to latch onto in order for him to build his performance. He even went some way towards perfecting an English accent before the film’s producers and its director all laid down the law and banished the idea as something Redford’s star image in the marketplace wouldn’t be able to pull off. (This may well have been astute, but it would have been fascinating to have seen, or rather heard, it.) In terms of Redford’s ageing image, Out of Africa was another sensibly chosen role, in which Redford could play a fantastical creature who was radically ‘other’ than his standard screen persona in many values. As with The Natural, and even, though less so, with The Electric Horseman, these years should be seen as the beginning of Redford’s transition period, between youth and middle age (second and third age, in theorist’s terms). In them, he was able to start the process of renegotiating, maturing, his screen image. Alongside Out of Africa, The Natural represents the last significant entries in Robert Redford’s career as a top movie star. Later to reinvent himself as a guru of indie-film-making via Sundance, Redford was smart enough to forge a career when audiences were no longer blown away by his golden boy looks. But in his heyday, he was happy to trade on them, and this adaptation of Bernard Malamud’s novel is a serious-minded baseball story that elevates Roy Hobbs (Redford) to near Messianic-levels.

(Anon, 2017) In most respects, the reactions to his mid-1980s films were just a continuation of the obsession with Redford’s physical perfection that had dogged him throughout his acting career: being seen simply as a set of glorious physical attributes rather than as a talented actor. William Goldman notes how a studio executive had early commented that Redford was ‘just another California blond – throw a stick at Malibu, you’ll hit six of them’ (1996:13).

186

Robert Redford and American Cinema

Redford had always been dismissive of this sexualized positioning of him within the marketplace, and it is possible to see his choices in the mid-1980s as a stubborn response to that ongoing stereotyping. As we will see, in various ways, many of his films from this point on make passing, or explicit, reference to his physical looks and prowess. Legal Eagles (1996), a slight comedy about art theft and murder (which Redford made as an antidote to the heavy emotional values of his preceding two films), sees him, at 50, as capable of bedding the 26-year-old Daryl Hannah and falling in love with the 31-year-old Debra Winger. His direct comparison, Clint Eastwood, though as a man of action has not appeared in many romantic liaisons in his many films, has been involved in somewhat similar age gaps in those films where he has done so: The Dead Pool (1988), in which, as a 58-year-old, he was up against Patricia Clarkson at 29, and most memorably, perhaps, The Bridges of Madison Country (1995) where, at 65, be became romantically involved with Meryl Streep, twenty years his junior at 46. Otherwise, where significant female others are involved in his narratives, they tend to be daughters (Laura Linney in Absolute Power, 1997) or surrogate daughters (Hilary Swank in Million Dollar Baby, 2004). Maybe Eastwood is just cannier than Redford in avoiding the age-gap romance. Or maybe he just never had the matinee-idol looks. In any case, in this ageist coupling, Redford and Eastwood were following in a time-honoured tradition of old actor-young actress pairings that had been a staple of Hollywood for decades. Humphrey Bogart, at 45, was over twice the age of Lauren Bacall (20) when they made To Have and Have Not in 1944. James Stewart, at 50, was twice the age of Kim Novak (25) in Vertigo (1958). Plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose. The ‘excuse’ for Redford in Legal Eagles is that it is a piece of fluff, an unbelievable fiction, and therefore offering the space for unbelievable romances to occur within it. Daryl Hannah’s character is an unpredictable, sexual loose cannon who seduces Redford, rather than the other way around. And although his character has a bitter estranged wife, he also has a wisebefore-her-years daughter, with whom he clearly has a good relationship. Redford’s performance throughout the film, full of comedic touches such as tap-dancing to Singin’ in the Rain in middle-of-the-night viewings induced by

Proud Member of the ‘Over the Hill’ Gang

187

insomnia, is, indeed, light and winning, making him look and act (in all senses of the word) as younger than his middle-aged self. I am not suggesting that this is in any way a calculated arresting by Redford of the onset of old age. It is more a refusal to accede to one or the other stereotype associated with actor ageing: either the mature, world-weary figure or the ‘in-denial’ youth-seeker, desperate to maintain his younger allure. Havana (1990) further pursues this renegotiation in ageing screen image. Here, Redford plays a cynical, middle-aged gambler heading to Cuba, desperate for one last big game, where he falls for a much younger woman, who happens to be married to a freedom fighter. Many reviews disparaged the film for its relatively blatant rehashing of Casablanca (in which Ingrid Bergman at 31 was not that much younger than Bogart, at 43). The gap between Redford, at 54 at the time of making Havana, and Lena Olin, the love interest, 34, was doubled. Interestingly, the disparity between their ages is emphasized in the film: Redford being made, through lighting and makeup, to look more than his mid-fifties age; Olin, through the same techniques, younger than her midthirties. This enhanced discrepancy, I think, is intentional, and one sanctioned by Redford, who was interested in exploring the ageing, slightly seedy, ‘lastchance’ persona of his high-stakes, poker playing character (Figure 6.1). Again, it feels as if Redford is commenting upon his own ageing, positioning himself to play the older man who loses out to the younger (the rebel leader reappears and reclaims his wife). According to a staff writer for the Washington Post, Redford, ‘reteaming with Pollack … is a veteran leading man and he delivers accordingly, his advancing years giving his features added potency. He achieves much through small gestures; there’s an efficient clip to his performance’ (Howe, 1990), while for Michael Walsh, JACK WEIL (ROBERT REDFORD) is no Kid. The Sundance Kid remains forever young, by virtue of having died young. One of the last of the frontier badmen, he was Butch Cassidy’s best buddy and actor Redford’s defining role. Jack Weil is the maturing performer’s attempt at redefinition. ‘A funny thing happened to me last week’, Weil confides to a friend during a stroll through downtown Havana. ‘I realized that I wasn’t going to die young.’

(2014)

188

Robert Redford and American Cinema

Figure 6.1  Has-been card sharp: Havana.

A particularly interesting choice for Redford, and in some ways a companion piece to Havana, was Indecent Proposal (1993), in which Redford plays an ambiguously menacing millionaire who offers a suspect proposition to a vulnerable, newly married couple, who have just lost all their savings at the roulette wheels of Las Vegas: that, in return for a night of sex with the wife, he will give the couple $1 million. This is a step up from the semi-sleazy character in Havana who, although self-protective and self-interested, is capable of profound involvement with the young woman. In Indecent Proposal, Redford plays someone who is only partly capable of dropping his guard to imagine significant involvement with the young wife. Redford here is pushing forward the boundaries of the possibilities for playing different characters. It is only partial – he is still a sexy and attractive male, such that it is not inconceivable that Demi Moore’s character would become fatally attracted to him (to paraphrase another film in this cycle). Indeed, the imbalance, and flaw, in the film is that it is hard to see why she would return to Woody Harrelson rather than stay with Redford. True love is truly blind! He was to continue this into the 1990s and 2000s, in appearances in films where he alternated roles as mentors to younger characters (male and female) with altogether more shadowy figures, such as The Last Castle (2001) and The Clearing (2004), always with reference to his advancing years. One of his more positive roles was in Sneakers (1992), for example, where he played

Proud Member of the ‘Over the Hill’ Gang

189

the manager of a team of security experts who become involved in a global cyber threat. In an early scene, his character fails to vault a desk and stumbles and falls to the ground. ‘I’ve got to give up this shit’, he comments. He has a contentious relationship with the token female of the narrative (played by Mary McDonnell), which is largely ‘ex-’ but is always hovering on becoming ‘rekindled’. The possibility of rekindling is always her explicit choice, so although Redford might still ‘have it’, it is not automatically guaranteed. Maturity brings its more considered judgement calls. We must see the films that Redford made across the 1980s and 1990s as mechanisms, whether consciously or unconsciously (or both), for repositioning him within the stardom section of the industry. In between these roles, he had been more focused on spearheading the independent filmmaking sector through the formation of the Sundance Institute and Festival, as noted in an earlier chapter. This involvement necessarily resulted in his longer absences from the screen as an actor, resulting, in turn, in a more noticeable ageing upon his periodic returns. While this was first, and most immediately, noticeable in The Natural in 1984, similar four to five year gaps between Legal Eagles (1986) and Havana (1990) and Indecent Proposal (1993) and The Horse Whisperer (1998) compounded the effect. Audiences were not allowed to see Redford incrementally ageing in a film or two a year. They saw his ageing process advance as a series of startling jumps. Interestingly, into the 2000s, the gaps got smaller – three years between Spy Game and The Last Castle (both 2001) and The Clearing (2004), followed by two between An Unfinished Life (2005) and the self-directed Lions for Lambs in 2007. This sequence (separate from any judgements about need for money to finance Sundance or negotiating room for directing) can be seen as a late flourish of middle-age actor Redford. In all of the films, his man-in-control is being severely tested. In Spy Game, he is on his last day of service before retirement until realization that a former protégé is hours away from death spurs him to use his career skills as a spy to rescue him. In The Last Castle, he plays a disgraced senior military figure sentenced to a term in a maximum security prison where, finding an intolerably repressive regime in operation, he marshals his career experience to motivate the inmates towards rebellion. In The Clearing, he is nominally a successful businessman and loving husband, but is revealed, through being kidnapped by a disgruntled employee, to be a

190

Robert Redford and American Cinema

ruthless manager and a lying spouse (he has a mistress). In Lions for Lambs, his erudite university professor can expound the complex moral arguments for political engagement with a favoured, checked-out student, but he cannot prevent the war or the deaths of two of his students who have enlisted in it. In all of these roles, Redford is finally able to substantially explore the ‘grey zone’ he had always favoured, where characters (with the possible exception of his Professor in Lions for Lambs) are neither hero nor villain, always right or always wrong. They are flawed humans, guilty of being both. His middle-aged years allowed him the space to explore such characters: sometimes successfully, sometimes less so. The most surprising addition to this group of films is An Unfinished Life. Made two years before his more youthful appearance in his own film Lions for Lambs, An Unfinished Life stands out as a marker towards Redford’s last-phase career as a recognizably ‘old man’. In this film, he plays a true curmudgeon – a grizzled and isolationist farmer, seemingly shunning the world and yet caring for an old friend who has been severely injured in a bear attack. Into this closed world intrudes Jennifer Lopez’s daughter-in-law, married to his son who was killed in a car crash when she was driving, and their daughter, Redford’s character’s granddaughter. The film becomes about healing in a range of senses, with Redford’s character learning how to live again through forgiving the person who killed his son. The revelation is not the redemption plot, which is a variation of a number of others Redford had appeared in recent years. It is Redford’s appearance itself, coupled with the degree of unpleasantness that

Figure 6.2  Old and grizzled: An Unfinished Life.

Proud Member of the ‘Over the Hill’ Gang

191

his character exhibits towards his in-laws (at least until they predictably melt his heart by the film’s conclusion) that shocks us. Redford here is unshaven, stooped, slovenly: unafraid to show the world the underbelly of even the middle-aged star actor he was on the verge of no-longer-being. It is one of his most striking performances in a film that deserved more attention when it was released (critics perhaps focusing unfairly on Lopez’s acting shortfalls) (Figure 6.2).

Image is (still) everything A propos of his physically honest appearance in An Unfinished Life, one interesting aspect of this elderly actor phenomenon is how some of them have been subjected to scrutiny in terms of their physical appearance, but framed as ‘still looking good’ rather than ‘having lost their appeal’. Even Redford has allowed himself to undergo this, negotiating the minefields of ageing celebrity image in all of its obsessions with wrinkles, physique, hair density and ageappropriate fashion. For example, in a fairly extensive photoshoot supporting an article on Redford in the magazine section of The Wall Street Journal (of all places!) in 2015, he is presented in a range of stylish outfits accompanying an article which focuses relentlessly on how he is holding up physically – the emphasis being on his face, but his whole body getting a thorough appraisal across the lengthy article. GREAT MOVIE STARS age differently from the rest of us. Robert Redford turned 79 last month. Those burning blue eyes have melted back a little into the hollows, and the famous Redford mane, once so blond that Pauline Kael said it wasn’t platinum but plutonium, has lost some of its sheen. But he remains a remarkably handsome and youthful-seeming man, not greatly altered from the one who imprinted himself on our collective imagination back in 1969, when he emerged in Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid as the very embodiment of what it means to be a star: dazzling but also a little remote and unreachable.

(McGrath, 2015) Admittedly, most of the images have him sporting the denim-cowboy look that he has always been most comfortable with. But one or two images are more

192

Robert Redford and American Cinema

startling, particularly one in which he is wearing a Melet Mercantile Vintage fur and leather coat (which retails at $1,498) and $200 Ray Ban sunglasses. This is a different, fashion- and image-conscious, Redford, though one gets the feeling the experience was forced on him for PR purposes. Redford is certainly not alone amongst the ageing male movie stars to get this sort of ‘men’s style’ makeover treatment. Dolan analyses the way Clint Eastwood’s image has been presented in a range of different manifestations. As illuminated by Esquire’s October 2012 cover depicting a suit-wearing Eastwood accompanied by the strapline ‘Things are getting really exciting: Clint Eastwood’ (Esquire 2012a), neither the style nor Eastwood has dated, and despite the passage of years and the embodied signs of age inscribed by his thinning hair and wrinkled face, ‘at 81, he is as smart, tough and cool as ever’ (Laverty 2012). While we might see this ‘cool as ever’ (and its implicit alignment to formations of successful ageing) as an especial characteristic of Eastwood’s and as being derived from some combination of genetics, wealth, great health care and good luck, we need also to see how the alignment of maturity with men’s style that follows the great masculine renunciation totally favours ageing masculinity.

(Dolan, 2017:86) Such presentations testify to the popular and cultural interest that exists for movie stars, although in Redford and Eastwood’s cases, that interest is being generated from an increasingly enlarging elderly readership. In terms of celebrity image, and in the context of this present study, a gendered difference has been identified and critiqued. Females have a more complex negotiation between their image and the expectations of their society, conducted through nuances of fashion choice, cosmetics, including age-defying creams, and so on. Males escape this multi-phase tyranny by being allowed to move from ‘youth’ (up to their mid-twenties) to ‘maturity’ (thereafter) – signalled in the decision to ditch youth apparel for more sombre and respectable suits and ‘grown-up’ fashion wear. Although celebrity males have increasingly endorsed an ever-expanding number of ranges of male cosmetics in recent years, this is still far behind the industry devoted to their female counterparts.

Proud Member of the ‘Over the Hill’ Gang

193

Basically, because hegemonic masculine style is aligned with maturity, there is no such thing as late-style, there is just young, sub-cultural style and style. Unlike feminine style that privileges youth and the effacement of ageing through ‘girling’ (Wearing 2007) and is organised through the avoidance of frumpy or ‘mutton dressed as lamb’ adjudications, masculine style is predicated on the avoidance of youth and its associated ornamentation and adornment in favour of a mature adherence to the understatements of the great masculine renunciation.

(Dolan, 2017:86–7) Therefore, male film stars have a far greater latitude to advance in years without opprobrium being levelled at them in the way it habitually is for female stars. There is no in-their-forties, ‘early-menopause’ cut-off point for male stars as there is for female stars. The brutal decision point for males happens much later, and even then is relatively indeterminate. Essentially, it comes down to being a case of ‘as long as they can carry it off ’, which, traditionally, has been ‘for quite some considerable time’. Latterly, this has been aided by the celebrity fashion circuit of style magazines, shows, etc, highlighting the enduring physical appeal of certain movie stars. Redford and Eastwood, among a select band of others, have been featured this way, as we have just seen. Importantly, this has allowed them to appear in films as mature characters without substantial criticism of their physical appearance. The crucial boundary shift for the focus of the present chapter is that between the second and third ages identified above. Put bluntly, this comes when male movie stars recognize (or are forced to recognize) that they are at the end of the late-maturity phase of their believability and are on the verge of moving to the retirement/old age phase. This is the crucial shift, because virtually no movie star wants to negotiate the final one: that between thirdphase retirement/old age and fourth phase abject decline/death (although some of the titles listed a few pages ago do address this issue). That is a step too far for most film stars, at least in their American incarnation. It is very much at this boundary line that I will argue Redford was operating in his final handful of films. In them, he is quite explicitly exploring the meaning of this boundary marker, in privately personal, professional and character terms. It is this nexus that makes his final films so poignant and significant.

194

Robert Redford and American Cinema

As an initial observation, it is quite interesting to reflect how often Redford has, throughout his career, taken himself out of his then contemporary framework to allow his ageing process to operate in a period, distanced sphere. This was particularly the case, strangely, even at the height of his 1970s superstardom, when he often framed himself in terms of period nostalgia (Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid; The Sting; The Way We Were; The Great Gatsby; The Great Waldo Pepper; The Natural; Out of Africa) and/or foreign contexts (Out of Africa; Havana). Certainly, he did also locate himself within the ‘now’ in a fair number of his other films (Three Days of the Condor, All the President’s Men, even The Electric Horseman and Brubaker), and this became more fully the case as he aged through the 1990s and 2000s: Legal Eagles; Sneakers; The Horse Whisperer; Spy Game; The Clearing, etc. This is quite a perverse move on Redford’s part, though it could easily be a coincidental dynamic that signifies nothing intentional. In the practice of it, however, it does represent a topsyturvy relationship between role and ageing actor. Period contexts, with their antique clothes and stylized lighting and look, can more easily camouflage the signs of ageing than the direct comparison to the ‘real world’ that films set in the contemporary moment can. By the time of Indecent Proposal (1993) and Up Close and Personal (1996), Spy Game (2001) and The Last Castle (2001) we also see Redford moving towards the third age of late maturity and near retirement, or at least wanting something more from his character’s current stage of life: an affair with a beautiful young woman; a last shot at journalistic glory; a retiring CIA agent reviewing his professional life; a disgraced military general, with seemingly nothing left to prove, galvanizing himself and his lifetime of experience to inspire a prison full of downtrodden inmates. These are characters with mature, late-age goals fuelled by a lifetime of experience.

Acting with kids Another interesting development that has come out of the recognition of both an ageing generation of film stars and an expanding elderly audience ready to watch their movies is that of the multi-generational narrative. Films are being developed with multiple narrative strands which focus on older characters and

Proud Member of the ‘Over the Hill’ Gang

195

younger characters. As Robert C. Allen has observed, ‘the 1983 introduction of the PG-13 rating [has forced] the film industry to make films with multiple age appeal positively encourage[ing] inter-generational viewing alliances, including those between older people and their grandchildren’ (quoted in Dolan, 2017:33). Shary and McVittee note the same phenomenon, ‘[M]ovie studios by the mid-2000s were making few films about older characters without younger stars to support their stories and their marketing campaigns’ (2016:159). Three of Redford’s later films feature this dynamic. The first, made in 1988, is The Horse Whisperer, in which the narrative is split, and intimately entwined, between a thirteen-year-old girl and her horse, both physically injured and psychologically traumatized in a truck accident, and a mature cowboy – The Horse Whisperer – who cures them and (almost) wins the love of the girl’s mother. The second, An Unfinished Life (2004) sees Redford as a grisled grandfather resisting a relationship with a granddaughter and her mother. The third, The Company You Keep (2012) has him playing a respected lawyer with an eleven-year-old daughter, who is revealed to have been one of the Weathermen terrorists of the 1960s. Having seldom, if ever, made films in which he appeared as a character with any kind of relationship to children, the concentration of these three films at the end of his career speaks volumes about the value Redford saw in developing multigenerational stories, not only to capitalize upon the phenomenon noted above, but also to allow him to play characters capable, despite their age, to form meaningful relationships with young people. In doing so, he was allowed to appear as younger than his actual age: a strategy that was most clearly in evidence in The Company You Keep, where Redford, at seventy-five, was supposed to have a screen daughter of only eleven. As referred to earlier, in the process of researching this book, I decided to conduct an experiment: watching The Horse Whisperer, as a 62-year-old academic with my thirteen-year-old daughter Olivia. The purpose was to see if the two strands of the plot – the girl, Grace, and her horse’s recovery and the romance between Tom Booker, the Whisperer, and the girl’s mother Annie – would separately align with the two viewers, markedly separated in age. More accurately, while I expected to be interested in both, I wondered whether Olivia would only be engaged with Grace’s story and become bored with the

196

Robert Redford and American Cinema

adult theme of middle-age romance, especially as the film progressed across its daunting three-hour length. The results were surprising. Olivia was certainly gripped and appalled by the originating accident, and remained interested as Grace and her horse were taken to Montana. But as the film went on, she became involved also in the blossoming romance between Tom and Annie. Indeed, as soon as Redford as Tom appears, she immediately projected ahead, anticipating that there would be some kind of romance between them. She later found the reappearance of Annie’s husband excruciating, as it threatened the Tom-Annie romance, and was exasperated when Tom and Annie finally parted, with Annie, it is presumed, returning to her husband and their New York life, and Tom to his quiet Montana world. It is also easy to read the film as a final, vainglorious, self-paean by Redford to Redford: nature superman and movie star; a last hurrah of looking this good on camera, and of being able to potentially win the heart of a sexy younger woman. Hence, the overt, glowing, backlighting on his golden hair in certain scenes: which would not be out of place in The Natural, made some fourteen years earlier. That’s the cynical, brutal reading. A more sensitive one allows Redford (having reluctantly stepped in front of his own camera to take on the role), to be more committed as a director and screen presence than that. And what supports this alternative reading is that, overt backlighting accepted, this technique gradually recedes as the film progresses. The haloed image of the idealized cowboy is intentional, a fantasy, which diminishes in potency as Annie is forced to realize that, as much as she desires Booker, she doesn’t ultimately desire his lifestyle (she shares this realization with Booker’s ex-wife, who left him because of it). And so, Redford is actively using his screen image, past and present, to make the narrative dynamic work: drawing upon his Sundance myth and early good looks, his mid-career elisions of the commencement of the passing of that early potency, and his comfort with his current status: director and star of a major motion picture. As he says in character, within the film, in dialogue that resonates: he is content, sometimes more, sometimes less. But he is as he is in the moment of his being. But the issue of age is central to the film: the question of whether it is right for the late middle-aged Tom Booker to attempt to win the love of a married,

Proud Member of the ‘Over the Hill’ Gang

197

middle-aged mother, or whether that liaison would prove ultimately doomed. This is a mature, ‘grown-up’ story. It depends upon deep character layers, moral quandaries, ultimately unresolvable paradoxes. This is no teenage romance of temporary love. The decisions needing to be made to resolve the dilemma are heartrending. Hence, the filmic re-writing of the ending of the book. In the novel, Tom dies, sacrificing himself in the act of rescuing Grace’s horse from a pack of wild stallions. While shocking, this is also convenient, as it instantly solves the complications of his and Annie’s mutual love. In the film, it forms the crux of the dilemma of Annie’s ‘will-she-won’t-she’ decision whether to stay with Tom or go back to her husband and family life. A choice needs to be made. The climax of the film shows Annie driving away from Tom’s world, with Tom, on horseback, turning to ride away, back to his traditional Montana life; the question of Annie’s marriage very much left unresolved. While easily read as a Hollywood end (Redford, astride horse, on hilltop looking down over the open expanse of Montana as Annie’s car recedes into the distance, down the landscape’s only road; camera soaring away to frame the full picture), the scene is emotionally deeper than that. Both characters are fundamentally emotionally moved by the separation and by what it signifies: a repeat of Tom’s marriage breakdown, as another city-girl leaves him to go back to the metropolis, and Annie’s discombobulation at finding his rural values an almost convincing replacement for her deeply entrenched urban identity. They both need space, but it may well not be over. (And by this, I am in no way suggesting that the ending was staged to allow a sequel. Such an idea would be counter to every true value the film supports.) Redford has explained his decisions regarding these changes to the original story, the film downplaying both the sexual relationship between Annie and Tom, and Tom’s death. As Redford rationalized it, ‘Subtlety isn’t a virtue in our culture, but it appeals to me and always has … The movie became more about making the right choice against all impulses, against all desire; to make that higher choice and face the sacrifice that would come with it’ (Rynning, 1998:53). In An Unfinished Life, Redford appears as an embittered old man, complete with unattractive stoop, permanent scowl and bristly stubble, who is forced to take in his estranged daughter-in-law and granddaughter, when the former has

198

Robert Redford and American Cinema

fled her abusive partner. Redford’s character has rejected the daughter-in-law, because he blames her for the death of his son, her husband, in a car accident that’s deemed her fault, as she was driving. The granddaughter, significantly, he has never seen. This provides the underlying set of emotional and dramatic dynamics within the film. Cautious emotional negotiations between these principal characters are the crux of both narratives, with both the daughter-in-law and granddaughter providing the fulcrum for the healing processes. There are even repeated scenes, for example, where Redford’s grandfather forces his granddaughter to drive his pick-up truck, thereby teaching her how to drive, a direct mirror of his Tom Booker doing the same to Grace in The Horse Whisperer. The significant difference between the two films lies in Redford’s characters: in The Horse Whisperer, as just noted, he plays a cowboy in some ways in the prime of his life, at ease with his world. In contrast, An Unfinished Life shows his character to be visibly aged, by his both grizzly stubble and glowering anger. He plays a man who cannot come to terms with the loss of his son: the sadness and grief almost tangibly eating him away. Only seven years separate the two films, and yet Redford looks palpably older in the later film. While this is, obviously, partly due to makeup, it is also, I believe, a statement on Redford’s part that he has moved to another phase of his life, one that brooks no apologies. That Redford chose the Western genre as the context in which to flag this shift is also significant, referencing back, as it does, to the Sundance Kid, and even earlier TV cowboys. The difference in physical look is compounded by Redford’s extraordinary performance, whereby he begins the film, almost shockingly, as visibly gnarled and consumed by disillusionment and anger and then, through the subtlety of his physical and facial gestures, imperceptibly lightens as his emotional redemption progresses. It is impossible to read this little seen performance of Redford’s as anything other than his second transitional film, paired with The Horse Whisperer, in negotiating his move from still virile, albeit middle-aged, characters to older, aging, ones who are disillusioned by life’s battles. In An Unfinished Life, Redford bares himself in an almost painfully endearing way: physically reduced, emotionally traumatized by the loss of his son. Perhaps the nearest comparison was his four-year absence in the first half of the 1980s, and then the comments on his aging when he returned in

Proud Member of the ‘Over the Hill’ Gang

199

The Natural and Out of Africa. And, like those films, in An Unfinished Life, Redford’s image is used to represent character. He is not a screen icon looking for the best angle; he is an actor in character striving for the best representation of that character. His rendering of the traumatized and difficult character of Einar Gilkyson is one of Redford’s most committed performances, within an underrated and certainly ignored film; a neglect all the more outrageous, given the people he was working with: director Lasse Hallstrom, and actors Morgan Freeman and, perhaps surprisingly good, pop star Jennifer Lopez. The Horse Whisperer and An Unfinished Life form a strange pair. The first enabling Redford, significantly directing himself, to finally move towards late-age roles with his character’s age left uncertain as anywhere from midforties to late-fifties. An Unfinished Life, made in 2005, offers no such illusion or slippage, and propels him firmly, and literally, into grandfather territory. The two films have significant things in common (apart from the truck driving scenes noted above). Most importantly, an urbanized mother and her young daughter seek help from a rancher/farmer and together work through the life difficulties that have stunted their emotional growth. The two narratives, and the two characters Redford plays, the one perhaps the older version of the other, mark the actor as becoming identified with age, declining physical facilities and impending mortality. It is an identity that he will maintain in his final few films. This is confirmed by the third of the multigenerational films Redford made – his self-directed The Company You Keep (2012). In this film, Redford’s character, Nick Sloan (the alias of Jim Grant, former terrorist), is certainly of very mature but indeterminate age, a small-town lawyer who has obviously had a settled life in his community for some years, but has lost an apparently younger wife a year before the story starts. Interestingly, some commentators have remarked that Redford was in good enough shape in the film to convince us that he was young enough to have an eleven-year-old daughter: ‘His age as a director of an action film that traverses the entire country would be astonishing enough, yet Redford is so well preserved that he convincingly portrays a former college activist from the Vietnam War era who has become a middle-aged lawyer with an eleven-year-old daughter’ (Shary and McVittie, 2016:132). I’m afraid I have to disagree: in this film, he looks every day of his then seventy-six years. The issue of his having an eleven-year-old daughter in the film, when, in reality,

200

Robert Redford and American Cinema

Redford, at the age of seventy-six, places him towards the assumed upper limit of the third age of life, and therefore unlikely to have such a young daughter, effectively makes his daughter become, more credibly, his granddaughter. The age-relationship issue becomes more complicated as the film progresses, as Redford’s character has to arrange for his brother to collect and take care of his young daughter while he embarks on his mission to clear his name of a terrorist event back in the 1960s. And another of the Weathermen – played by Brendan Gleeson – is revealed later in the story to have adopted Grant’s other, older daughter, born after an affair with a fellow terrorist, Mimi Leder, who will figure large in the later stages of the film. This slippage, between the twenty-something older daughter and the elevenyear-old younger daughter, allows Grant’s, and therefore Redford’s, age in the film be remain somewhat ill-defined. In the novel from which the film came, Grant is in his mid-forties, so there is a substantial age difference between the Grant of film and novel. It is interesting, because it is Redford’s decision as director to have made his character substantially older, in order for him to be able to play the part. What is most significant about the film, therefore, is the way in which the narrative forces Redford’s older Nick Sloan to revisit his terrorist past and former identity as Jim Grant, represented in the film by images of Redford as a moustachioed younger self (The Sundance Kid or, perhaps, Sonny Steele). The film is full of such references back to more youthful, naïve selves. At one point, as Nick/Jim argues about commitment to the cause with fellow Weatherman Mimi Lurie (played by 71-year-old Julie Christie), he comments that he didn’t get tired of it [the struggle], he just grew up. Most of the main characters in the film have lived their best years. They are fully aware of that they are facing their final years. Indeed, this is the emotional crux of the film: that all of them need to ‘come clean’, and to face the consequences of the extreme acts they committed as young people in order to progress, conscience-free, to their ends.

Proud Member of the ‘Over the Hill’ Gang

201

The Search Plot Shary and McVittie have identified a small number of archetypal plots operating in terms of the elderly narrative. The first sub-genre is the search plot, in which characters close to, or at, retirement age perform one last job because of a personal obligation. Spy Game (2001) is one such example, an early one for Redford in which he plays a CIA agent on his last day of work before retirement, who is morally impelled to stop the execution of his protégé in China, strategically played by Brad Pitt for youth appeal. While the agent’s pursuit rapidly moves forward, the film presents a survey of his past, resulting in a travel through time and around the globe as he questions his beliefs in a career filled with massive deceptions.

(Shary and McVittie, 2016:124) In this, Redford is joining his most significant peers, Jack Nicholson and Clint Eastwood, who both starred in equivalent films based on search plots. Nicholson appeared in The Pledge (2001), in which he played a detective who, on the night of his retirement, pledges to find the killer of a young girl. In Blood Work (2002), Eastwood plays an FBI agent who comes out of retirement to track down the serial killer, one of whose victims gave her heart to Eastwood in a transplant operation. In all of these films, the near- or at-retirement operatives draw on their lifetime of experience to rescue their protégé (Redford) or solve the crime (Nicholson and Eastwood) by being demonstrably better at their job than the ineffectual younger colleagues. The Company You Keep (2012) is a variation on this genre, with Redford still working, this time as a small-town lawyer, even though demonstrably (visibly, in his looks and demeanour) past retirement age. Therefore, Redford’s character is ambiguously ’twixt and between. But once the narrative, in which a young journalist is doggedly uncovering Redford’s past as a domestic terrorist with the Weathermen group of the late 1960s and early 1970s, begins in earnest, Redford is both part of a pursuit plot (in addition to the journo, he is being pursued by the FBI for his terrorist past) and a search plot, in that he has to find the members of his former cell of operatives in order to clear his name of a terrorist crime he was never part of.

202

Robert Redford and American Cinema

The Adventure Odyssey The Adventure Odyssey is a genre in which characters are propelled to push themselves towards adventure through a sense of release triggered by loss of a spouse or terminal diagnosis. The genre is therefore capable of being played either way, as comedy or drama, although neither is ever far away from poignant reflections on old age. Jack Nicholson, in About Schmidt (2002), after a lifetime of being nagged by his wife, embarks on a freewheeling journey in a Winnebago, encountering a myriad of eccentric characters and upsets on the way. Nicholson, again, and Morgan Freeman, in The Bucket List (2007), having met in a cancer ward where both receive news of their terminal conditions, agree to indulge in a series of extraordinary experiences (skydiving, etc), largely funded by Nicholson’s wealthy (and, by implication, unscrupulous) business fortune. While the events (including the aforementioned skydiving) are played for humour, the underlying pathos of their condition is clear.

A Walk in the Woods (2013) Bill Bryson was forty-six years old when his personal account of his attempt to walk the Appalachian Trail, A Walk in the Woods, was published; only fortyfour when he had actually attempted the feat. When Robert Redford became interested in developing a screen version of the book in 2005, he was sixty-nine; when the film finally appeared in cinemas, he was seventy-nine, over thirty years older than the Bill Bryson that he portrayed on screen. According to Bryson: Redford is mad about wild America and is a serious voice in conservation. It was natural then, that he should want to make a film based on A Walk in the Woods, the book Bryson wrote about his long trek. And it was also natural that he should want to take the role of Bryson himself. ‘It was surreal’, says the real Bryson, ‘for about 60 seconds. In terms of vanity, it was terrific. But then I began to feel quite differently. It was now his project.’ ‘I’d met him, we’d talked about it, and I respect the fact that he doesn’t make dumb films. But to make the book into a film they made a number of changes. There was one really trivial thing: my wife’s name is Cynthia, but in

Proud Member of the ‘Over the Hill’ Gang

203

the film her name is Catherine. It was clear from that point that this was no longer my life. It was a film about a character named Bill Bryson.’

(Bryson, 2015) What are we to make of this fairly terse commentary on the translation of book to screen and the relatively novel (no pun intended) parallel translation of reclusive writer to world-famous movie star that took place when Robert Redford pretended to become Bill Bryson for the duration? An immediate reaction is that Bryson was flattered that he was to be made to look like Robert Redford (even if only an older model). Indeed, the Radio Times article begins in this vein: ‘When they make the film of your life, who can you hope will get the inestimable honour of playing you? For an entire generation of white males, there can be only one answer. Robert Redford. The handsomest man in the history of the western world. It actually happened to Bill Bryson’ (Bryson, 2015). But clearly, references to Redford’s past god-like physical perfection or his present, still-pretty-goddam-good reality aside, a series of negotiations needed to be performed. Even an out-of-condition 44-year-old writer was some distance away from a 77-year-old movie star, even if the latter had always been careful to keep himself in good physical condition. Old age, at base level, is still old age, and Redford was at that marker-point (his brief and laboured jogging in The Company You Keep, for example, had not been especially convincing). All of this is to say that Redford taking on the (not quite vanity) project of a film version of A Walk in the Woods required, at his age, some significant alterations to the script, moulding it towards issues related to older age rather than younger unfitness. And doing this framed the film as being targeted towards both the older actor and the presumed older audience. This shift is immediately figured: in Bryson’s book, he ‘happened upon a path that vanished into a wood on the edge of town’ (Bryson, 1998:11), which is where he first saw the signposts for the Trail. It is a casual account, conjuring up a man in everyday clothes with no particular rationale for his encounter. In the film, this moment is preceded by a sequence describing the funeral of an associate of Bryson and his wife. They go to the funeral, where Bryson both makes clumsy and tactless remarks and has a fellow mourner comment that their mutual contact’s death makes one think of slowing down. When Bryson

204

Robert Redford and American Cinema

and his wife return from the funeral, he, seemingly spontaneously, decides to go for a walk. In full funeral garb – black suit, full-length black overcoat – he wanders into the local wood, where he comes across the signposts for the Trail. A couple of double-takes back and forth along the path, and a sudden, lightbulb moment of realization later, his plan for walking the Trail is hatched. Therefore, the invention of the funeral sequence is set up to frame Bryson’s decision to go on the Trail, putting it into the context of late-life issues: of life running out, of there being a need to do something significant with whatever remains of it. This pushes the agenda of the original story further than its potential as a mid-life crisis of a forty-something writer wanting to perform something significant, to shake off his physical apathy and possible writer’s block. This is a movie adaptation that is explicitly directed towards elder-life issues and contexts, featuring elder-statesmen actors (Nolte, admittedly, a little less stellar than Redford) who are fully equipped to represent those concerns to an appreciative audience. Mid-life crisis unhealthiness and temporary lack of professional focus become transmuted into late-life recognition of permanent physical limitation but also of a lifetime of lived experience, for all of its better (more Bryson) and worse (more Katz) dimensions. As Redford himself has commented, You could say, I guess, that it would be a mid-life crisis but this would be, maybe, a later life crisis. And he can’t explain it. It’s just that the way he’s been doing things, the way he’s been living his life, professionally, doesn’t make any sense to him anymore, but he doesn’t know what to do about it. So he decides he needs to get away, on his own, and try something that’s really extreme. And he needs to do that, or at least attempt to do that, to shock himself into living the rest of his life.

(Redford interview extra, A Walk in the Woods DVD)

All Is Lost (2013) Redford’s late-career string of isolationist, emotionally shut-down, characters reaches its apotheosis, perhaps, in his notable solo performance as a beleaguered sailor on a sinking boat in All Is Lost. For Shary and McVittie, this film is ‘exceptional’ in the elder odyssey genre,

Proud Member of the ‘Over the Hill’ Gang

205

in which Robert Redford plays an unnamed man adrift at sea on a damaged sailboat with a depleting amount of supplies and time. As the only character in a film with virtually no dialogue, Redford withstands the entire gruelling expedition to nowhere in particular until he is saved by unseen rescuers at the end. His lack of background and destination unfortunately vitiates the importance of his endurance.

(2016:133) Shally and McVittie are being somewhat grudging here, and, I feel, fundamentally misread the film. The sparsely sketched-out background – universal regrets, lack of personal detail – converts Redford’s character into some sort of, albeit privileged (he does own a luxury yacht, after all!) Everyman. His battle and will to survive become, increasingly, reduced to its essential forces: to do whatever it takes, to adjust to deteriorating circumstances and find any other way forward. His character’s very lack of context makes it all the easier for us, as viewer’s to relate to him. We will him to survive, and are temporarily appalled, after all of our commitment, that he appears to have failed, as he sinks down towards the depth of the ocean. The cursory rescue moment, when a team sent from a passing ship motivate him towards a last, desperate swim towards the light, and pull him out of the water, is an extraordinary, brutal, affirmation of life; one responded to and confirmed by the film’s audience: we absolutely need Redford to survive and are overjoyed when he suddenly does. The energy of the suddenness is that affirmation. Maybe we can all cheat death after all. Perhaps most notably, Redford performed most of the stunts himself: extraordinarily demanding for an actor of seventy-seven. Redford reportedly threw himself into the task, performing the elaborate stunts both on the open sea and in the simulation tanks. One result of this, reputedly, was that he has now lost 60 per cent hearing in one of his ears. He has also gone on record as saying that, even knowing this, he would be willing to do it again. In a radio interview, he made this clear: First of all, it was a real storm because the – yes, as you said, a lot of it was on the open water. But when we had to get into the really tough stuff, went into a giant tank where they have these big wave machines, these big cylinders that can quirk up the waves to six, seven feet, that will swamp the boat and maybe turn it over. You had rain, violent rain machines; then you had wind machines. And you had crewmembers with fire hoses hitting you

206

Robert Redford and American Cinema

Figure 6.3  Ageing stunt man: All Is Lost.

with water, heavy streams of water, so when all those things are cooking at once, you really are in a storm. So I really did feel, while I was doing this, that I was actually in a storm and I had to feel like I needed to feel, like I’m really in a storm. What am I going to do? How am I going … And it became very physical. I also went into this, I guess, at my age wondering what I can still do.

(Daza, 2013) A telling last comment: ‘I also went into this, I guess, at my age wondering what I can still do.’ Redford here is explicitly rehearsing in dramatic mode what he would express in serio-comedic mode a couple of years later in A Walk in the Woods: the complex network of emotions and capabilities involved in the impending transition between third age and fourth age life. Even more than the assumed quite gentle physical demands of appearing to walk the Appalachian Trail, the actual rigor of his experiences in the wave-simulation tank on All Is Lost is, for Redford, and thereby, through him, for all people of his age, a real declaration of what more elderly people might be capable of.

Elderly Romance: Our Souls at Night As mentioned at the front of this chapter, Our Souls at Night fits into the burgeoning genre of Elderly Romance that has been in evidence since the turn of the millennium, if not some time before. Shary and McVittie (2016)

Proud Member of the ‘Over the Hill’ Gang

207

identify On Golden Pond (1981) as perhaps the first contemporary American film to address the reality of ageing love, in the marriage, enduring affection and pragmatic mutual dependency between Henry Fonda and Katherine Hepburn. Thereafter, there were few representations of ageing romance, due, it has been argued, to a certain, perhaps misplaced, delicacy surrounding Ronald Reagan’s suitability for the job as president of the United States, given his age and, largely in retrospect, his encroaching debilitating Alzheimer’s. He and his wife Nancy were depicted as a loving ageing couple, and that was sufficient for the American public. As Shary and McVittee note: ‘The stifling of concerns about aging during the Reagan years may also explain Hollywood’s parallel detachment from the older population during this decade. After On Golden Pond, the industry produced a mere handful of films focused on elder characters during the rest of the Reagan era, of which the only box-office hit was Cocoon (1985)’ (2016:152). Into the new century, as noted earlier, an increasing number of elderly romances have been produced and gratefully received by the silver audience. Our Souls at Night contributes to that sub-genre. In it, Jane Fonda’s character, Addie, presents her neighbour Louis (Redford) with a simple proposition: that they spend nights together, not for the sex but for the company. Both are lonely, and it seems a sensible solution. Louis agrees. So far, so no great love affair. But the film gently, if perhaps a little predictably, charts their developing relationship, deepening into honest love. And they do eventually have sex, in a hotel during a romantic getaway organized by Louis. The film, as suggested by its originating premise, is far more about companionship than tumultuous romance. Elderly people, while certainly not immune to the pleasures of the flesh, are more interested, because of physical issues, but moreso because of a lifetime of maturing emotional depth and experience, in recognizing that the most important thing in the last phase of their lives is meaningful contact. Addie and Louis’s relationship is far more about the simple fact that they love being with one another than it is about whether their sleeping together at nights is about ‘sleeping together’. This is made explicit when Bruce Dern’s character, during the ritual weekly gathering of Louis’s ‘Old Men’ in the local café, ribs Louis about his liaison with Addie, emphasizing the assumed sexual implications of the arrangement. Louis gets up, pays his share and cuts the group off in an instant. For him, it is not (at

208

Robert Redford and American Cinema

that point at least) about physical kicks; it is about two souls in sympathy with one another and the possibility of having a true companion going into his twilight years. [He is also a gentleman, and reacts to a woman being talked of in this way.]

The Sundance Kid rides again: The Old Man and the Gun Redford’s swansong as an actor before he announced his retirement (third age life in action) was The Old Man and the Gun (2018), in which he played an inveterate bank robber who lives for the thrill his line of work gives him: it literally makes life worth living for him. As with some of the other characters he played in this final section of his career, Forrest Tucker is an elderly man for whom the concept of retirement and a gradual decline towards death is nonsensical. Why carry on living if you can no longer do what you love doing? Tucker, in the bank holdups and frenetic getaways shown in the film, is doing what he has always done: his inveterate, incurable, need to rob banks is stressed throughout the film. And in this continuity, the film both challenges the four ages definition of a human life, and redefines the negotiation between the third and fourth. Tucker will go on doing what he does best until he drops down and dies. There is very little fourth age planned in his vision of his own life (Figure 6.4).

Figure 6.4  Going out in style: The Old Man and the Gun.

Proud Member of the ‘Over the Hill’ Gang

209

But The Old Man and the Gun does fit, in some respects, into the category of the elderly Pursuit Plot: And emerging in recent decades with striking popularity has been the ‘pursuit plot’, in which an aged protagonist (again usually male and often criminal) is chased by the authorities or tries to solve some kind of mystery. There are exceptions and variations in these approaches, yet all have as their central narrative device the journey that brings an elder from apparent discontent to determination, and almost all of them celebrate the process of traveling or searching as a redemptive experience for their older heroes and heroines.

(Shary and McVittie, 2016:107–8) Tucker is certainly aged, male and criminal, but is not discontent (unless being prevented from doing what he loves to do: rob banks). Whether his final heist and its consequences fit the searching and redemptive definition, however, is debatable. It is a very interesting choice for Redford in ending his acting career. In many ways, fairly obviously, it harks back to his star-making role as the Sundance Kid, almost fifty years before – a neat bookending. Tucker is more affable and outgoing than Sundance, but he has his gang (sans Butch; though, in fact, he now is Butch, leader of the gang at last). He also has a woman he can visit for romance, Sissy Spacek an admirable replacement for Katherine Ross; perhaps, with a bit of a stretch of the imagination, Ross grown older and wiser. The echoes between the two films, faint yet still discernible, give The Old Man and the Gun an elegiac quality beyond the terms of its internal, fictional narrative. This is Robert Redford saying goodbye to the movies, fifty years after that industry first made him a star and a future powerhouse for change within it. POSTSCRIPT: The Discovery One of Redford’s strangest, and most unsatisfying, works of his last phase was a TV movie made for Netflix: The Discovery (2017), the same year as Our Souls at Night. If Our Souls was a film in which its two characters honestly faced up to their loneliness and impending mortality, The Discovery was the nominal answer to their fears. In it, Redford plays a scientist who claims to

210

Robert Redford and American Cinema

have determined that the afterlife is real, and that it is a benign and beautiful place. This results in a rash of suicides by people more anxious to experience this paradise than their compromised lives on Earth. Redford seems to sleepwalk through the film, as if he had realized how weak it was after having signed on to make it. But its theme of addressing the abstract fears of the elderly about reaching the end of their lives with scientific proof that an afterlife exists for them to move onto is a perverse and, to be honest, clumsy answer to the questions Redford had been posing in his various elderly characterizations. That he finally chose to answer this question, so to speak, with the life affirming The Old Man and the Gun, and its theme of ‘live life now by enjoying what you do’ is a testament to the ethos by which he has lived his life, and certainly conducted his professional career: choose what seems interesting, do it as well as you can, fail sometimes but never look back.

Conclusion Robert Redford has been a massively influential figure in contemporary American cinema since his meteoric ascendancy to superstardom following Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid in 1969. Since that moment, a half-century ago, he has stubbornly insisted on developing his career according to his own set of personal values, the principal driving force seeming to be to always find something interesting and important to say in a story or a role, something the actor (and latterly the director) in him could latch onto and believe in. Some of his choices have been massively successful blockbusters, others small, intimate, independent films. While a movie star of widely acknowledged good looks and charisma, he has not shirked from portraying thoroughly dislikeable characters when the occasion demanded, his concern being how they work within the films in which they appear rather than how good they make him look to a mass movie audience. Stardom and fame have always seemed to have sat uneasily with him, a by-product of his interest in developing character through his acting. Redford has been part of the American moviemaking scene for so long now that he has become part of its architecture, featuring in countless magazine profiles, even after his 1970s/1980s heyday, when he continued to notch up yet

Proud Member of the ‘Over the Hill’ Gang

211

another solid performance in a decently performing film. The consequence of this is that everyone thinks they know everything about him, while knowing virtually nothing. He has kept his private life admirably private, giving to the media only the aspects of himself and his work that would be useful for the success of his current project. In a career of over half a century, there have inevitably been significant highs and lows, from the superstardom of the 1970s to the relative inactivity of the 1990s. There have been reasons for this, most notably the diverting of his interest and energy from mainstream moviemaking to the support of independent cinema, an interest which resulted in the establishment of the Sundance Institute and Festival that has been so instrumental in building and supporting independent cinema in America, even if this activity has brought its fair share of failures in the Sundance portfolio. As a committed environmentalist and campaigner, Redford has also used his fame and position in the industry to make films which unflinchingly examine the state of American politics across the decades of his career. From The Candidate to All the President’s Men, all the way through to Lions for Lambs, The Company You Keep and Truth, politics has always been a serious business for Redford. He has consistently seen the making of political films, large or small, as the best way of commenting truthfully upon the state of America to the largest possible audience, to get the message out there in the most powerful and influential way, to make people realize the truth and do something about it. There are two areas of his life and career that have been particularly revelatory to me in researching and working on this book. The first was his long apprenticeship in television, during which he appeared in some truly remarkable works (‘The Iceman Cometh’ and ‘In the Presence of Mine Enemies’) as well as a lot of more standard fare. But even in the latter, his commitment to his role and to the work as a whole was obvious. It was also eyeopening to see how many unhinged psychopaths he played in either Westerns or urban crime thrillers. To have the later matinee idol Redford in one’s mind while watching these performances was an often extremely unsettling, but also fascinating, experience. The second revelatory area of his career, as indicated in the introduction, has been his later years, in which he negotiated the move from mature to old

212

Robert Redford and American Cinema

actor with grace and humour, not seeming to mind how it made him look on screen if looking so served the part, and the film, best. It is easy to overlook some of these films in favour of those made in his heyday of the 1970s, when he was young, handsome and idolized by millions. To do so would be an injustice to their integrity and honesty. They include some of his most impressive work. Robert Redford has been in my life for over fifty years too, since I saw Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, if not on its first release, then very soon afterwards on one of its re-releases. Thereafter, The Sting and The Way We Were sealed the deal. The Electric Horseman, with the unbeatable combo of Redford and Fonda in their screen-idol prime, has always been a personal favourite, for all its potentially schmaltzy romance. And I remember being blown away by Out of Africa (admittedly, for the production qualities of the film itself, including the sumptuous John Barry score, as well as Redford’s performance), wandering out of the cinema in a state of beguiled shock. In later years, All Is Lost (which I saw with a seasoned sailor, who was similarly impressed) stunned me in Redford’s ability to hold one’s attention through a ninety-minute film in which he barely said a word. His whole lifetime arsenal of looks, glances, clenched jaws and other physical mannerisms were on full display in that film. All of this gushing prose is to say that over those decades, he has brought me a great deal of pleasure – both in the entertainment value of the films in which he appeared and, I feel, in the sheer quality of his own work within them. Unlike many critics, I have always found Redford to be one of the greatest contemporary American film actors, not through his showy bravado, but through its polar opposite: subtlety, expressing a great deal behind the smallest of gestures. What has always struck me is that, in order to pick up on the meaning of those nuanced gestures, one really had to concentrate on his performance. Often this seemed to be contradictory to the light, throwaway, entertainment value of some of the films themselves, which never took themselves seriously and would seem to spurn any accusation of intensity. But watching a Redford performance has always been, to me, a commitment, to the effortless artistry in his acting, hiding so much work behind such an easy exterior. We are worked upon as viewers without even noticing it – made to think, politically, socially, emotionally, and to believe the reality of the artificially constructed world taking place up there on the screen. This is an extraordinary sleight of hand by Redford. Unlike his peers – Nicholson, Pacino, de Niro, et al. – who

Proud Member of the ‘Over the Hill’ Gang

213

we can never quite forget are demonstrably ‘acting’ in their roles, Redford, despite being a massive star, manages to make us forget he is that star, in the utter natural believability of his performance. He was adamant about doing so from the very start of his acting career, in theatre and then in TV, but then throughout his film-acting years, where he eschewed over-elaborate discussion of motivation and rehearsal in favour of natural spontaneity, sensing that what the character would feel at any moment might be reached more believably through that route rather than the one of pre-determination which, for him, knocked all the life out of both performance and the reality of the character. With Redford’s retirement, American cinema has lost a major figure of influence and consequence, someone who has helped change the direction, composition and influence of an industry. I don’t doubt that he will continue to operate behind the scenes, where he was often happier anyway. (Indeed, since his retirement, he has reprised his Alexander Pierce character in a cameo in Avengers: Endgame (2019) and has executive produced several documentaries.) It has always felt as if acting was the least of Robert Redford’s interests, often a means to an end for doing what he loved to do more: producing, directing, organizing change. The American film industry, in its mainstream and independent manifestations, will be all the poorer for his chosen withdrawal, at least from acting. Let us hope that he continues in his other identities for some time to come.

Filmography Television ‘Black Monday’ (CBS: Play of the Week, 1961) ‘Burning Sky, The’ (NBC/MGM TV: Dr Kildare, 1962) ‘Captain Brassbound’s Conversion’ (NBC: Hallmark Hall of Fame, 1960) ‘Comanche Scalps’ and The Bounty Hunter’ (NBC/Roncom Film: Tate, 1960) ‘Covering Darkness, The’ (20th Century Fox TV: Bus Stop, 1961) ‘Evil That Men Do, The’ (NBC: The Virginian, 1963) ‘Golden Deed, The’ (NBC/Revue Studios: Moment of Fear, 1960) ‘Iceman Cometh, The’ (CBS: Play of the Week, 1960) ‘In the Presence of Mine Enemies’ (CBS: Playhouse 90, 1960) ‘Iron Hand’ (Warner Bros. TV: Maverick, 1960) ‘Lady Killer’ (ABC: The New Breed, 1961) ‘Last Gunfight’ (Top Gun Prod./NBC: The Deputy, 1960) ‘Last of the Big Spenders, The’ (Dick Powell Theatre, 1963) ‘Nothing in the Dark’ (CBS: Cayuga Prods, The Twilight Zone, 1962) ‘Right Kind of Medicine, The’ (NBC: Alfred Hitchcock Presents, 1961) ‘Tangled Web, A’ and ‘Piece of the Action, A’ (NBC: The Alfred Hitchcock Hour, 1962/63) ‘Thunder over Berlin’ (CBS: Armstrong Circle TheatreI, 1959) ‘Tombstone for a Derelict’ (Screen Gems TV: Naked City, 1960) Twilight Zone, The (CBS: Cayuga Prods., 1962) ‘Voice of Charlie Pont, The’ (ABC: Alcoa Premiere, 1962)

Films About Schmidt (New Line Cinema, 2002) Absolute Power (Malpaso Prods./Castle Rock, 1997) Advise and Consent (Otto Preminger Films/Columbia Pictures, 1962) Agatha (Sweetwall/First Artists/Warner Bros., 1979) All Is Lost (Roadside Attractions/Before the Door Pictures, 2013) All the President’s Men (Wildwood Enterprises/Warner Bros., 1976)

Filmography And So It Goes (Castle Rock, 2014) Any Which Way You Can (Malpaso Co./Warner Bros., 1980) Apocalypse Now (American Zoetrope/United Artists, 1980) Appointment, The (Martin Poll Prods., 1969) Avengers: Endgame (Marvel Studios/Walt Disney Pictures, 2019) Barefoot in the Park (Wallis-Hazen/Paramount Pictures, 1967) Being There (Lorimar/United Artists, 1979) Best Man, The (Miller/Turman Prods./United Artists, 1964) Best Exotic Marigold Hotel, The (Blueprint Pictures/20th Century Fox, 2011) Big Shave, The (Scorsese, 1967) Birth of a Nation, The (Epoch Producing Corp., 1915) Blood Simple (River Road/Foxton, 1984) Blood Work (Malpaso/Warner Bros, 2002) Blue (Kettledrum Prods./Paramount Pictures, 1968) Bonnie and Clyde (Warner Bros.-Seven Arts, 1967) Book Club (Apartment Story/Endeavor/June Pics., 2018) Bridge Too Far, A (Joseph E. Levine Prods./United Artists, 1977) Bridges of Madison County, The (Malpaso/Amblin/Warner Bros., 1995) Bronco Billy (Second Street Films/Warner Bros., 1980) Brother from Another Planet, The (Anarchist’s Convention Films/UCLA Film & TV Archive/A-Train Film, 1984) Brubaker (20th Century Fox, 1980) Bucket List, The (Zadan/Meron Prods./Warner Bros., 2007) Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid (Campanile Prods/20th Century Fox, 1969) Calendar Girls (Touchstone Pics/Buena Vista Int., 2003) Candidate, The (Wildwood/Warner Bros, 1972) Captain America: The Winter Soldier (Marvel Studios/Walt Disney Pictures, 2014) Carnal Knowledge (AVCO Embassy Pictures, 1971) Casino (Universal Pictures, 1995) between Carnal Knowledge and Chariots of Fire Chariots of Fire (Enigma Prods./Allied Stars, 1981) Chase, The (Horizon Pictures/Columbia Pictures, 1966) Cheyenne Autumn (Ford-Smith Prods./Warner Bros., 1964) China Syndrome, The (IPC Film/Columbia Pictures, 1979) Chinatown (Paramount Pictures, 1974) Clearing, The (Fox Searchlight/Wildwood/20th Century Fox, 2004) Coalminer’s Daughter, The (Universal Pictures, 1980) Cocoon (Zanuck/Brown Prods./20th Century Fox, 1985) Coma (MGM, 1978) Coming Home (Jerome Helman Prods./United Artists, 1978)

215

216

Filmography

Company You Keep, The (Voltage Pictures/Wildwood/Brightlight Pictures, 2012) Confessions of a Dangerous Mind (Mad Chance/Section Eight/Miramax, 2002) Conspirator, The (The American Film Co./Wildwood Enterprises, 2011) Conversation, The (Director’s Co./American Zoetrope/Paramount Pictures, 1974) Dead Pool, The (Malpaso/Warner Bros., 1988) Deer Hunter, The (EMI Films/Universal Pictures, 1978) Defiant Ones, The (Curtleigh Prods./Stenley Kramer Prods., 1958) Discovery, The (Endgame Ent./Protagonist Pictures/Netflix, 2017) Doctor Doolittle (APJAC Prods./20th Century Fox, 1967) Downhill Racer (Wildwood Enterprises/Paramount Pictures, 1969) Easy Rider (Pando Company/Columbia Pictures, 1969) Electric Horseman, The (Wildwood Enterprises/Universal Pictures/Columbia Pictures, 1979) Elephant Man, The (Brooksfilms/Paramount Pictures, 1980) Elsa and Fred (Cuatro Plus/Defiant/Creative Andina/Rio Negro/Riverside/Media House, 2014) Every Which Way but Loose (Malpaso/Warner Bros, 1978) Face of Love, The (Mockingbird Pictures, 2013) Fail Safe (Columbia Pictures, 1964) Five Easy Pieces (BBS Prods./Columbia Pictures, 1970) Fortune, The (Columbia Pictures/Vista, 1975) Gai Savoir, Le (ORTF/Anouchka Films/Bavaria Atelier, 1969) Go Fish (Can I Watch/Islet/KPVI/Killer/Samuel Goldwyn Co., 1994) Godfather, The (Alfran Prods./Paramount Pictures, 1972) Godfather Part II, The (American Zoetrope/Paramount Pictures, 1974) Graduate, The (Lawrence Truman Prods./Embassy/United Artists, 1967) Gran Torino (Double Nickel/Gerber/Malpaso/Village Roadshow/Warners, 2008) Great Gatsby, The (Newdon Prods./Paramount Pictures, 1974) Great Waldo Pepper, The (Universal Pictures, 1975) Green Berets, The (Batjac Prods./Warner Bros.-Seven Arts, 1968) Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner (Columbia Pictures, 1967) Guys, The (ContentFilms/Open City Films, 2002) between Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner and Hampstead Hampstead (Ecosse Films/Motion Picture Capital/Scope Pictures, 2017) Havana (Mirage Enterprises/Universal Pictures, 1990) Heartburn (Paramount Pictures, 1986) Heaven Guys, The Can Wait (Paramount Pictures, 1978) Hello Dolly! (Chenault Prods./20th Century Fox, 1969)

Filmography Hercules (Embassy Pics./Galatea Film/O.S.C.A.R./Urania Film, 1958) High Noon (Stanley Kramer Prods./United Artists, 1952) High Plains Drifter (Malpaso Co./Universal Pictures, 1973) Honkytonk Man (Malpaso Co./Warner Bros., 1982) Horse Whisperer, The (Wildwood/Touchstone Pictures, 1998) Hot Rock, The (Landers-Roberts Prod./20th Century Fox, 1972) Hurt Locker, The (First Light Prod./Kingsgate Films, 2008) I’ll See You in My Dreams (Two Flints/Jeff Rice Films/Northern Lights, 2015) Indecent Proposal (Paramount Pictures, 1993) In the Bedroom (Good Machine/Standard Film Co./GreeneStreet Films, 2001) In the Heat of the Night (The Mirisch Corp./United Artists, 1967) Inside Daisy Clover (Warner Bros., 1965) Is Anybody There? (BBC Films/Big Beach Films/Heyday Films, 2008) It Came from Outer Space (Universal international Pictures, 1953) Jaws (Zanuck/Brown Prods./Universal Pictures, 1975) Jeremiah Johnson (Sanford Prods./Warner Bros., 1972) King of Marvin Gardens, The (BBS Prods./Columbia Pictures, 1972) Klute (Gus Prods./Warner Bros., 1971) Kramer vs. Kramer (Stanley Jaffe Prod./Columbia Pictures, 1979) Ladies in Lavender (Scala Productions, 2004) Lady in the Van, The (BBC Films/Dream Cars/TriStar Prods., 2015) Last Castle, The (Dreamworks/Robert Lawrence Prods./UIP, 2001) Last Detail, The (Bright-Persky Ass./Acrobat Prods./Columbia Pictures, 1973) Last Love (Kaminski/Bavaria/Senator Film/Scope/Sidney Kimmel/Elevir/SCOPE, 2013) Last Tycoon, The (Academy Pictures Corp./Paramount Pictures, 1976) Legal Eagles (Mirage/Northern Lights/Universal Pictures, 1986) Legend of Bagger Vance, The (Wildwood/Allied Filmmakers/20th Century Fox/ Dreamworks, 2000) Lenny (Martin Worth Prods./United Artists, 1974) Lilies of the Field (Rainbow Prods./United Artists, 1963) Lincoln (Amblin/Walt Disney/Touchstone/Dreamworks/20th Century Fox, 2012) Lions for Lambs (Wildwood/MGM/United Artists, 2007) Little Big Man (Cinema Center Films/Stockbridge-Hiller Prods., 1970) Little Fauss and Big Halsy (Alfran Prods./Furie Prods./Paramount Pictures, 1970) Manchurian Candidate, The (M.C. Prods/United Artists, 1962) Marathon Man (Robert Evans Co./Paramount Pictures, 1976) M*A*S*H (Aspen Prods./Ingo Preminger Prods./20th Century Fox, 1970)

217

218

Filmography

McCabe and Mrs Miller (David Foster Prods./Warner Bros., 1971) Mean Streets (Taplin-Perry-Scorsese Prods./Warner Bros., 1973) Midnight Cowboy (Jerome Hellman Prods./Florin Prods./United Artists, 1969) Milagro Beanfield War, The (Wildwood/Esparza/Universal Pictures, 1988) Million Dollar Baby (Malpaso/Albert S. Ruddy Prods./Warner Bros., 2004) My Dinner with Andre (Saga Prods./The Andre Company, 1981) Natural, The (TriStar Pictures/Delphi II Prods., 1984) Network (MGM, 1976) Norma Rae (20th Century Fox, 1979) Oh Dad, Poor Dad, Mama’s Hung You in the Closet and I’m Feeling So Sad (Seven Arts Prods./Paramount Pictures, 1967) Old Man and the Gun, The (Wildwood/Identity Films/Fox Searchlight, 2018) On Golden Pond (IPC Films/ITC/Universal Pictures, 1981) On Her Majesty’s Secret Service (Eon Prods./United Artists, 1969) One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest (Fantasy Films/United Artists, 1975) Our Souls at Night (Wildgaze Films/Netflix, 2017) Out of Africa (Mirage Enterprises/Universal Pictures, 1985) Outlaw Josey Wales, The (Malpaso Co./Warner Bros., 1976) Pale Rider (Malpaso Co./Warner Bros., 1985) Papillon (Les Films Corona/General Prod Co./Solar Prods., 1973) Parallax View, The (Doubleday Prods./Gus/Harbor Prods./CIC, 1974) Passenger, The (Comp.Cinematografica Champion/Les Films Concordia/||CIPI/ MGM, 1975) Play Misty for Me (Malpaso Co./Jennings Lang/Universal Pictures, 1971) Pledge, The (Pledge Prods./Epsilon Motion Pics/Warner Bros., 2001) Primary (Drew Associates/Time, 1960) Professionals, The (Pax Enterprises/Columbia Pictures, 1966) Pulp Fiction (A Band Apart/Jersey Films/Miramax, 1994) Quiz Show (Wildwood/Hollywood Pictures/Baltimore Pictures, 1994) Raging Bull (Chartoff-Winkler Prods./United Artists, 1980) Redacted (HDNet Films/The Film Farm, 2007) Rendition (Anonymous Content/MID Foundation/New Line Cinema, 2007) Reservoir Dogs (Live Entertainment/Dog Eat Dog Prods./Miramax, 1992) River Runs through It, A (Wildwood/Allied Filmmakers/Columbia Pictures, 1992) Rocky (Chartoff-Winkler Prods./United Artists, 1976) Rosemary’s Baby (William Castle Prods./Paramount Pictures, 1968) Ruth and Alex (Lascaux Films/Latitude Prods./Revelations Ent., 2014) Ryan’s Daughter (Faraway Prods./MGM, 1970)

Filmography

219

Second Best Exotic Marigold Hotel, The (Blueprint Pictures/20th Century Fox, 2015) Seven Days in May (Joel Prods./Seven Arts Prods./Paramount Pictures, 1964) Sex, Lies, and Videotape (Outlaw Prods./Virgin/Cannon, 1989) Shampoo (Persky-Bright/Vista/Columbia Pictures, 1975) She’s Gotta Have It (40 Acres & a Mule/NYSCA/Jerome Foundation/BACA/Black Filmmakers Foundation, 1986) Silkwood (ABC Motion Pictures/20th Century Fox, 1983) Situation Hopeless – But Not Serious (Paramount Pictures, 1965) Sneakers (Parkes/Lasker Prods./Universal Pictures, 1992) Soldier Blue (Embassy Pics./Katzka-Loeb, 1970) Sound of Music, The (Robert Wise Productions/Argyle Enterprises/20th Century Fox, 1965) Spy Game (Red Wagon Ent./|Universal Pictures, 2001) Star! (Robert Wise Prods./20th Century Fox, 1968) Star Wars (Lucasfilm/20th Century Fox, 1977) Sting, The (Zanuck/Brown Prods./Universal Pictures, 1973) Straight Time (First Artists/Sweetwall/Warner Bros., 1978) Stranger Than Paradise (Cinesthesia Prods./Grokenberger Film Prod./Aweites Deutsches Fernsehen, 1984) Struggle, The (D.W. Griffith Prods./United Artists, 1931) Stunt Man, The (Melvin Simon Productions/20th Century Fox, 1980) Swimming to Cambodia (The Swimming Company/Cinecom Pictures, 1987) Syriana (4M/Participant/Section Eight/FilmWorks/MID Foundation/Warner Bros., 2005) Tell Them Willie Boy Is Here (Universal Pictures, 1969) Terms of Endearment (Paramount Pictures, 1983) Tess (Renn Prods./Timothy Burrill Prods./Societe Francaise de Production/Columbia Pictures, 1979) This Property Is Condemned (Seven Arts Productions/Paramount Pictures, 1966) Three Days of the Condor (Wildwood Enterprises/Dino De Laurentis Co., 1975) To Have and Have Not (Warner Bros., 1944) To Kill a Mockingbird (Pakula-Mulligan/Brentwood Productions/Universal Pictures, 1962) Truth (Echo Lake Entertainment/Sony Pictures, 2015) Ulzana’s Raid (De Haven Prods./The Associates & Aldrich Co./Universal Pictures, 1972) Unfinished Life, An (The Ladd Company/Miramax, 2005) Unforgiven (Malpaso Productions./Warner Bros., 1992)

220

Filmography

Up Close & Personal (Touchstone Pictures/Cinergi Pictures/Avnet/Kerner Prods., 1996) Vertigo (Alfred J. Hitchcock Prods./Paramount Pictures, 1958) Walk in the Woods, A (Route One Entertainment/Wildwood Enterprises, 2015) War Hunt (T-D Enterprises/United Artists, 1962) Way We Were, The (Rastar Productions/Columbia Pictures, 1973) Whole Shootin’ Match, The (Watchmaker Films, 1978) Wild Bunch, The (Warner Bros./Seven Arts, 1969) Wild Oats (Wild Pics./Defiant Pics./Alliance Cinema/Mountaintop Prods., 2016) Winchester ’73 (Universal International Pictures, 1955) World Trade Center, The (Double Feature Films/Intermedia Films/Ixtlan/Paramount Pictures, 2006) Zero Dark Thirty (Annapurna Pictures/First Light/Columbia Pictures, 2012)

Bibliography ‘Alan J. Pakula: Leaving Room for Life’, Films Illustrated, vol.5, no.58, June 1976. Anderson, Christopher. Hollywood TV: The Studio System in the Fifties (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1994). Archibald, Lewis. ‘With Jeremiah Johnson and The Candidate Now in Release, Robert Redford Still Prefers His Privacy’, Show, vol.2, no.6, September 1972. Banka, Mike. ‘Robert Redford Revisits All the President’s Men’ AARP, April 2013. https://www.aarp.org/entertainment/movies-for-grownups/info-04-2013/robertredford-presidents-men-revisited.html. Barnes, Brookes and Michael Cielpy. ‘Greying Audience Returns to Movies’, New York Times, 25 February 2011. https://www.nytimes.com/2011/02/26/business/ media/26moviegoers.html?pagewanted=all. Barnicle, Mike. ‘All Robert Redford Wants to Be is Paul Newman: The Kid Revealed’, Esquire, 1 March 1988. https://classic.esquire.com/article/1988/3/1/all-robertredford-wants-to-be-is-paul-newman. Bart, Peter. ‘Act Their Age or Age Their Act? Stars Strive to Keep Reinventing’, Variety, 18 April 2013. https://variety.com/2013/film/news/aging-stars-robert-redfordcaptain-america-1200376247/. Base, Ron. Starring Roles: How Movie Stardom in Hollywood Is Won and Lost (London: Little, Brown and Co., 1994). Belton, John. American Cinema/American Culture (Boston & New York: McGraw Hill, 2005). Bernstein, Carl and Bob Woodward. All the President’s Men (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1974). Biskind, Peter. Easy Riders and Raging Bulls (London: Bloomsbury, 1999). Biskind, Peter. Down and Dirty Pictures (London: Bloomsbury, 2004). Bruck, Connie. When Hollywood Had a King: The Reign of Lew Wasserman, Who Leveraged Talent Into Power and Influence (New York: Random House, 2003). Bryson, Bill. A Walk in the Woods (London: Black Swan, 1998). Bryson, Bill. ‘Bill Bryson on What Happened When Robert Redford Demanded to Play Him in A Walk in the Woods’, Radio Times, 18 September 2015. https://www. radiotimes.com/travel/2015-09-18/bill-bryson-on-what-happened-when-robertredford-demanded-to-play-him-in-a-walk-in-the-woods/.

222

Bibliography

Bussell, Jan. The Art of Television (London: Faber & Faber, 1952). Cagle, Chris. ‘Robert Redford and Warren Beatty: Consensus Stars for a PostConsensus Age’, in James Morrison (ed.), Hollywood Reborn: Movie Stars of the 1970s (New Brunswick, NJ, & London: Rutgers University Press, 2010). Callan, Michael Feeney. Robert Redford: The Biography (London & New York: Simon & Schuster, 2010). Callow, Simon. Charles Laughton: A Difficult Actor (London: Vintage Books, 2012; first published by Methuen, 1987). Castell, David. ‘Redford: I Rebel against Any Force That Threatens to Overwhelm the Individual’, Films Illustrated, vol.5, no.59, July 1976. Castleman, Harry and Walter J. Podrazik, The TV Schedule Book: Four Decades of Network Programming from Sign On to Sign Off (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1984). Christensen, Terry. Reel Politics: American Political Movies from Birth of a Nation to Platoon (New York & Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1987). Clinch, Minty. Robert Redford (London: New English Library, 1989). Cook, David A. Lost Illusions: American Cinema in the Shadow of Watergate and Vietnam, 1970–1979 (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 2000). Cosandaey, Mikelle. ‘Combining Education with Education: An Interview with Robert Redford’, Cineaste, vol.16, no.1–2, 1987–8. Cox, David. ‘How Older Viewers Are Rescuing Cinema’, The Guardian, 8 March 2012. https://www.theguardian.com/film/2012/mar/08/older-viewers-rescuing-cinema. Coyne, Michael. Hollywood Goes to Washington (London: Reaktion, 2008). D’Arcy, Susan. ‘Attitudes to Stardom’, Films Illustrated, vol.3, no.29, November 1973. Davies, Philip and Brian Neve. Cinema, Politics and Society in America (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1981). Daza, Daniel. ‘At 77, Robert Redford Goes Back to His Roots’, Fresh Air radio broadcast, 12 December 2013. Transciption: https://www.npr. org/2014/02/14/276479817/at-77-robert-redford-goes-back-to-his-roots. Dexter, Steve. ‘Grin and Bear It’, Film Review, no.671, Summer 2006. Dolan, Josephine. Contemporary Cinema and ‘Old Age’: Gender and the Silvering of Stardom (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2017). Downing, David. Robert Redford (London: W.H. Allen, 1982). Dwyer, Michael. ‘Sundance Kid: Interview with Robert Redford’, Film Ireland, vol.124, September/October 2008. Elsaesser, Thomas, Alexander Horwath and Noel King. The Last Great American Picture Show: New Hollywood in the 1970s (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2004). Erens, Patricia. ‘Sydney Pollack: The Way We Were’, Film Comment, vol.11, no.5, September/October 1975.

Bibliography

223

Esquire. ‘Cover Image: Clint Eastwood’, Esquire, October 2012a. http://www.esquire. com/news-politics/a15766/october-2012/. Fadiman, William. Hollywood Now (London: Thames and Hudson, 1972). 50+ World. ‘Celebrating Seniors: Robert Redford Turns 80, parts 1–3’, https://50plusworld.com/celebrating-seniors-robert-redford-turns-80-part-1/. Fleishman, Jeffrey. ‘Robert Redford, a Face for the Ages’, LA Times, 24 January 2014. https://www.latimes.com/entertainment/envelope/la-xpm-2014-jan-25-la-et-mnrobert-redford-face-20140126-story.html. Friedman, Lester D. American Cinema of the 1970s: Themes and Variations (Oxford: Berg, 2007). Fuller, Graham. ‘Redford’s Resolve: Can Sundance Help Keep Independence Movies from Going Soft?’ Interview, January 1997. Gilleard, C. and P. Higgs. Contexts of Ageing: Class Cohort and Community (Cambridge and Malden: Polity Press, 2005). Gledhill, Christine. Stardom: Industry of Desire (London & New York: Routledge, 1991). Gleiberman, Owen. ‘The Conspirator Is a Post-9/11 Message Movie. Are You as Tired of Post-9/11 Message Movies as I Am?’ Entertainment Weekly online, 23 April 2011. https://ew.com/article/2011/04/23/are-you-tired-of-9-11-message-movies/. Gleiberman, Owen. ‘Yes, Robert Redford Is Great in All Is Lost. But He Was Always Great’, Entertainment Weekly, 30 November 2013. https://ew.com/ article/2013/11/30/robert-redford-is-an-underrated-actor/. Godfrey, Nicholas. The Limits of Auteurism (New Brunswick, Newark & London: Rutgers University Press, 2018). Goldman, William. Adventures in the Screen Trade: A Personal View of Hollywood (London: Abacus, 1996). Gordon, Neil. The Company You Keep (London: Penguin Books, 2004). Gross, Terry. ‘At 77, Robert Redford Goes Back to His Roots’, St Louis Radio Fresh Air interview. https://news.stlpublicradio.org/post/77-robert-redford-goes-back-hisroots#stream/0. Hainey, Michael. ‘Robert Redford on Trump: “He’s Our Fault”’, Esquire, 13 September 2017. https://www.esquire.com/entertainment/movies/a12184470/robert-redford2017-interview/. Hanna, David. Robert Redford: The Superstar Nobody Knows (New York: Nordon Publications, 1975). Hansen, Steve, Patricia King Hansen and Pat H. Broeske. ‘Ruling Stars’, Stills, June/ July 1985. Harris, Mark. Pictures at a Revolution: Five Movies and the Birth of the New Hollywood (New York: Penguin Press, 2008).

224

Bibliography

Haskell, Molly. ‘Gould vs. Redford vs. Nicholson: The Absurdist as Box-Office Draw’, in Elizabeth Weis, The Movie Star (New York: The Viking Press, 1981). Hibbert, Tom. ‘Casual but Smart’, Empire, no.45, March 1993. Hibbin, Sally. ‘Star Profile: Robert Redford’, Films and Filming, no.378, March 1986. Hillier, Jim. The New Hollywood (London: Studio Vista, 1993). Hilmes, Michele. Hollywood and Broadcasting (Urbana & Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1990). Hirshberg, Jack. A Portrait of All the President’s Men: The Story Behind the Filming of the Most Devastating Detective Story of the Century (New York: Warner Books, 1976). Hofstadter, Richard. The Paranoid Style in American Politics and Other Essays (London: Jonathan Cape, 1966). Hornaday, Ann. ‘Robert Redford’s The Conspirator and the Lost Union Cause’, Washington Post, 14 April 2011. https://www.washingtonpost.com/lifestyle/style/ the-conspirator-and-the-lost-union-cause/2011/04/14/AFhcYjeD_story.html. Howe, Desson. ‘Havana’, Washington Post, 14 December 1990. http://www. washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/style/longterm/movies/videos/havanarhowe_a0b2c4. htm. Hunter, Allan. ‘Field of Honour’, Films and Filming, no.406, July 1988. ‘IMDB Trivia Entry for Doctor Doolittle’. https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0061584/ trivia?ref_=tt_trv_trv. Jacobs, Diane. Hollywood Renaissance: The New Generation of Filmmakers and Their Works (New York: Dell Publishing, 1980). Jacobs, Jason. The Intimate Screen (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2000). Jameson, Richard T. ‘The Pakula Parallax’, Film Comment, vol.12, no.5, September/ October 1976. Kearney, Jill. ‘The Old Gringo’, American Film, vol.9, no.5, March 1988. King, Barry. ‘Stardom as an Occupation’, in Paul Kerr (ed.), The Hollywood Film Industry (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1986). King, Barry. ‘Articulating Stardom’, in Christine Gledhill (ed.), Stardom: Industry and Desire (London: Routledge, 1991). King, Geoff. New Hollywood Cinema: An Introduction (New York: Columbia University Press, 2002). King, Geoff. American Independent Cinema (London: I.B. Tauris, 2005). Landau, Jon. ‘Robert Redford: Ballad of a Cool Man’, Rolling Stone, 6 November 1975. https://www.rollingstone.com/movies/movie-news/robert-redford-ballad-of-acool-man-75809/. Laurents, Arthur. Original Story By: A Memoir of Broadway and Hollywood (New York & London: Applause, 2000).

Bibliography

225

Laverty, C. ‘Style icon: Mr Clint Eastwood’, Mr. Porter, 24 January 2012. https://www. mrporter.com/journal/journal_issue48/4#1. Lev, Peter. American Films of the 70s: Conflicting Visions (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2000). Levy, Emanuel. Cinema of Outsiders: The Rise of American Independent Film (New York & London: New York University Press, 1999). Lewis, Jon (ed.). The New American Cinema (Durham & London: Duke University Press, 1998). Litwak, Mark. Reel Power: The Struggle for Influence and Success in the New Hollywood (London: Sidgwick & Jackson, 1987). Madsen, Axel. The New Hollywood: American Movies in the ’70s (New York: Thomas T. Crowell Co., 1975). Maltby, Richard. ‘Film Noir: The Politics of the Maladjusted Text’, Journal of American Studies, vol.18, no.1, 1984. McDonald, Paul. The Star System: Hollywood’s Production of Popular Identities (London: Wallflower Press, 2000). McDonald, Paul. ‘The Star System: The Production of Hollywood Stardom in the Post-Studio Era’, in Paul McDonald and Janet Wasko (eds.), The Contemporary Hollywood Film Industry (Malden, MA, & Oxford: Blackwell, 2008). McDougall, Dennis. The Last Mogul: Lew Wasserman, MCA, and the Hidden History of Hollywood (Boston, MA: De Capo Press, 2001). McGrath, Charles. ‘Robert Redford: From Sundance Kid to Hollywood Legend’, Wall Street Journal, 2 September 2015. https://www.wsj.com/articles/robert-redfordfrom-sundance-kid-to-hollywood-legend-1441201870. McNair, Brian. Journalists in Film: Heroes and Villains (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2010). Merritt, Greg. Celluloid Mavericks: A History of American Independent Film (New York: Thunder’s Mouth Press, 2000). Monaco, Paul. American Film Now (New York: Zoetrope, 1984). Monaco, Paul. The Sixties, 1960–1969 (New York & Detroit: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 2001). Morrison, James (ed.). Hollywood Reborn: Movie Stars of the 1970s (New Brunswick & London: Rutgers University Press, 2010). Mottram, James. The Sundance Kids: How the Mavericks Took Back Hollywood (New York: Faber, 2006). Neve, Brian. Film and Politics in America: A Social Tradition (London: Routledge, 1992). Palmer, William J. The Films of the Eighties: A Social History (Carbondale & Edwardsville: Southern Illinois University Press, 1993).

226

Bibliography

Patterson, James T. Grand Expectations: The United States, 1945–1974 (New York & Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996). Patterson, John. ‘The Conspirator Proves That Robert Redford Should Stick to Sundance’, The Guardian, 25 June 2011. https://www.theguardian.com/film/2011/ jun/25/robert-redford-the-conspirator. Pearce, Garth. ‘Robert Redford: I’m Happy to Let Others Play the Heart-throb These Days’, The Daily Express, 23 April 2013. https://www.express.co.uk/celebritynews/395092/Robert-Redford-I-m-happy-to-let-others-play-the-heart-throbthese-days. Perry, Gerald. ‘Sundance: What Happened When Robert Redford Brought the Hollywood Cattlemen and Independent Sheepherders Together’, American Film, vol.7, no.1, October 1981. Petersen, Anne Helen. ‘Scandals of Classic Hollywood: Robert Redford, Golden Boy’, The Hairpin. https://www.thehairpin.com/2013/05/scandals-of-classic-hollywoodrobert-redford-golden-boy/. Prince, Stephen (ed.). American Cinema of the 1980s: Themes and Variations (Oxford: Berg, 2007). Prince, Stephen. A New Pot of Gold: Hollywood under the Electronic Rainbow, 1980–1989 (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 2000). Puttnam, David. Movies and Money (New York: Vintage Books, 1999). Pye, Michael and Lynda Myles. The Movie Brats: How the Film Generation Took Over Hollywood (New York: Holt, Rinehart & Winston, 1979). Quart, Leonard and Albert Auster. American Film and Society since 1945 (London & Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1984). Queenan, Joe. ‘Dan Rather on Truth, Robert Redford and Taking on George Bush’, The Guardian, 19 December 2017. https://www.theguardian.com/film/2016/ mar/03/dan-rather-robert-redford-made-me-look-better-in-truth. Quirk, Laurence J. and Schoell, William. The Sundance Kid: An Unauthorised Biography of Robert Redford (New York & Oxford: Taylor Trade Publishing, 2006). Redford, Robert. ‘Robert Redford: Why We Must Defend Our Democracy – And Not by Impeachment’, Washington Post, 24 January 2019. https://www.washingtonpost. com/pb/opinions/our-democracy-is-in-crisis-we-must-focus-on-2020–notimpeachment/2019/01/24/b51f1268-1ff6-11e9-9145-3f74070bbdb9_story.html?co mmentID=&outputType=comment. Reed, Dr. Donald A. Robert Redford: A Photographic Portrayal of the Man and His Films (Los Angeles: Sherbourne Press, 1975).

Bibliography

227

Reichardt Press Release, University of Illinois Press, December 2017. https://www. press.uillinois.edu/books/catalog/23xbe2zy9780252041242.html. Reinstein, Mara. ‘Robert Redford and Sissy Spacek Reflect on 100 Years of Movie Memories’, Parade, 2 November 2018. https://parade.com/712693/maramovies/ robert-redford-and-sissy-spacek-reflect-on-100-years-of-movie-memories/. Rissik, Andrew. ‘Star Light’, Films Illustrated, vol.9, no.104, April 1980. ‘Robert Redford: On Privacy in Public Life’, Films Illustrated, vol.3, no.30, December 1973. Rose, Frank. The Agency: William Morris and the Hidden History of Show Business (New York: HarperCollins, 1995). Rowe, J. W., and R. L. Kahn. ‘Successful Aging’, The Gerontologist, vol.37 (1997), 433–41. Rowe, J. W., and R. L. Kahn. Successful aging (New York: Pantheon Books, 1998). Rubenstein, Hal. ‘Redford: It’s a Long Trail from the Sundance Kid to the Sundance Institute’, Interview, vol.24, no.9, September 1994. Ryan, Michael and Douglas Kellner. Camera Politica: The Politics and Ideology of Contemporary Hollywood Film (Bloomington & Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1988). Rynning, Roald. ‘Horse Play’, Film Review, 1–9 September 1998, 52–4. Salter, James. Burning the Days: Recollection (New York: Random House, 1997). Sandford, Christopher. McQueen: The Biography (London: HarperCollins, 2002). Sarris, Andrew. ‘Notes in the Auteur Theory in 1962’, reprinted in Gerald Mast and Marshall Cohen (eds.) Film Theory and Criticism (3rd edition) (N.Y. & London: Oxford University Press, 1985). Sarris, Andrew. Politics and Cinema (New York: Columbia University Press, 1978). Schatz, Thomas. The Genius of the System: Hollywood Filmmaking in the Studio Era (London & New York: Simon & Schuster, 1988). Schickel, Richard. ‘Robert Redford Riding High’, Life magazine, 6 February 1970. Scott, Ian. American Politics in Hollywood Film (Chicago & London: Fitzroy Dearborn, 2000). Shary, Timothy and Nancy McVittie. Fade to Gray: Aging in American Cinema (Austin, TX: University of Texas Press, 2016). Simon, Art. Dangerous Knowledge: The JFK Assassination in Art and Film (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2013). Simon, Jeff. ‘Time to Step Back and Admire Robert Redford’s Late-Life Career’, The Buffalo News, 2 October 2018. https://buffalonews.com/2018/10/02/jeff-simontime-to-step-back-and-admire-robert-redfords-late-life-career/.

228

Bibliography

Smith, Lory. Party in a Box: The Story of the Sundance Film Festival (Salt Lake City: Gibbs Smith, 1999). Smith-Rowsey, Daniel. Star Actors in the Hollywood Renaissance: Representing Rough Rebels (Basingstoke: Palgrave-Macmillan, 2013). Spada, James. The Films of Robert Redford (Secaucus, NJ: Citadel Press, 1977). Soares, Andre. ‘Young Robert Redford: Bad Politics and Good Movies’, ALT Film Guide, https://www.altfg.com/film/robert-redford-young-politics/. Stefansky, Emma. ‘The Old Man and the Gun Director David Lowery Is Still Floored That Robert Redford Wanted to Work with Him’, OPROXX. https://uproxx.com/ movies/david-lowery-interview-old-man-and-the-gun-robert-redford/. Stern, Marlow. ‘Cate Blanchett and Robert Redford Talk Truth, Guns, and the Legacy of George W. Bush’, The Daily Beast, published 10 September 2015. updated 7 December 2017. https://www.thedailybeast.com/cate-blanchett-and-robertredford-talk-truth-guns-and-the-legacy-of-george-w-bush. ‘The Natural’, The Film Authority, June 2017. https://tensecondsfromnow.wordpress. com/2019/06/27/the-natural-1984/. ‘The Year of Robert Redford’, Films Illustrated, vol.3, no.32, April 1974. Thomson, David. ‘Ordinary Bob: Can Robert Redford Ever Explode?’ Film Comment, vol.24, no.1, January–February 1988. Thompson, Richard. ‘Mr Pakula Goes to Washington’, Film Comment, vol.12, no.5, September/October 1976. Thorpe, Vanessa. ‘Robert Redford, the Sundance Kid, Grows Old with Style as He Reinvents Himself for Film Festival’, The Guardian, 20 April 2013. https://www. theguardian.com/film/2013/apr/20/robert-redford-reinvents-himself. Toeplitz, Jerzy. Hollywood and After: The Changing Face of Movies in America (Chicago: Henry Regnery Co., 1974). Toplin, Robert Brent. ‘All the President’s Men: The Story That People Know and Remember’, in History By Hollywood: The Use and Abuse of the American Past (Urbana & Chicago: University of Illinios Press, 1996). Walsh, Michael. ‘Changing His World’, Reeling Back, 30 December 2014. http:// reelingback.com/articles/changing_his_world. Wead, George. ‘Filmnoia, or How Fear Permeated the Cinema’, 1 September 2017. https://slate.com/culture/2017/09/filmnoia-or-how-fear-permeated-cinema.html. Wearing, S. ‘Subjects of rejuvenation: Aging in a postfeminist culture’, in Y. Tasker and D. Negra (eds.), Interrogating Postfeminism: Gender and the Politics of Popular Culture (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2007), 277–310. Weis, Elizabeth (ed.). The Movie Star (New York: The Viking Press, 1981). ‘What Brings Redford Back after Four Years?’ Films Illustrated, vol.9, no.104, April 1980.

Bibliography

229

White, Timothy R. ‘Hollywood’s Attempt at Appropriating Television: The Case of Paramount Pictures’, in Tino Balio (ed.), Hollywood in the Age of Television (Boston & London: Unwin Hyman, 1990). Winn, Steven. ‘Robert Redford’s Lions for Lambs Takes on Iraq War’, SF Gate, https:// www.sfgate.com/entertainment/article/Robert-Redford-s-Lions-for-Lambs-takeson-Iraq-3301489.php. Wollen, Peter. Signs and Meanings in the Cinema (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1972). Zanuck, Darryl F. ‘Free Speech on the Silver Screen’, Free World, March 1945.

Index ABC 19, 21, 23–4 About Schmidt 202 acting 13–14, 17, 25–6, 45, 68, 148, 154–5, 160–1 actor-directors 148–9, 160, 161–2 Adventure Odyssey plot 202–6 Agatha 65 Alcoa Premiere 19 Alfred Hitchcock Hour, The 28 Alfred Hitchcock Presents 28 Alien 151 Allen, Woody 161 All Is Lost 204–6, 212 All the President’s Men 1, 3, 64–5, 89, 101, 103, 104–9, 113, 114, 150, 194, 211 Altman, Robert 28, 37 American Broadcasting Corporation. See ABC American Century 71 American Dream 73, 94, 168 An Unfinished Life 189, 190–191, 195, 197–8, 199 And So It Goes 180 Antigone 7 Any Which Way You Can 65 Appointment, The 126 Apocalypse Now 81 Armstrong Circle Theater 7, 9 Ashley, Ted 128, 129 Astaire, Fred 19 Attenborough, Richard 67–70 Auteurism 145, 175–6 Avengers: Endgame 213 Barefoot in the Park 44, 45–8, 125, 182, 183 Beatty, Warren 39, 50, 65, 101 Being There 147 Bergen, Candice 181 Bergman, Ingmar 37, 162–3 ‘Berlin, City with a Short Fuse’ (TV play) 7, 9. See also ‘Thunder over Berlin’

Bernstein, Carl 89, 101, 104, 105, 107, 108, 114, 174 Best Exotic Marigold Hotel, The 180 Bing Crosby Enterprises 15 Birth of a Nation, The (1915) 119 ‘Black Monday’ (TV drama) 19 Blood Simple 133 Blue 47, 54, 55, 56, 125 Bluhdorn, Charles 126–7, 128 Bonnie and Clyde 39, 43, 50, 80 Book Club 181 Boyer, Charles 19 Braga, Sonia 161 Brando, Marlon 41, 43, 46, 49–50 Breaking Point 45 Bridge Too Far, A 1, 67–70, 108 Broken Arrow 77 Bronco Billy 153 Brother from Another Planet, The 133 Brubaker 109–10, 182, 194 Bryson, Bill 202–4 Bucket List, The 202 Bush, George W. 110, 116, 170 Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid 12, 43, 49–53, 54, 56, 57, 58, 59, 62, 63, 64, 80, 82, 86, 105, 124, 130, 183, 191, 194, 209, 210, 212 Byrna Productions 120 Caine, Michael 180, 181 Calendar Girls 180 Calley, John 128, 129 Camelot 22 Candidate, The 41, 54, 64, 73, 84–91, 94, 96, 104, 105, 110, 124, 129–31, 146, 211 Captain America: Winter Soldier 177, 182 ‘Captain Brassbound’s Conversion’ (TV play) 10, 24 Carnal Knowledge 65 Casino 164

Index Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) 96–102, 194, 201 Chaplin, Charlie 57, 120, 149 Chariots of Fire 148 Chase, The 43, 46, 182 Cheyenne Autumn 78 China Syndrome, The 102 Chinatown 65 Christie, Julie 174, 200 Clearing, The 188, 189, 194 Clooney, George 120 Coalminer’s Daughter, The 147 Cobb, Lee J. 27–8 Coblenz, Walter 130, 132 Cold War 76, 77, 78, 95, 98 Columbia Pictures 39, 139, 149, 159 Coma 102 Coming Home 80, 147 Company You Keep, The 113–16, 152, 162, 170, 173–4, 195, 199, 201, 203, 211 Connery, Sean 68 Conspirator, The 112–13, 145, 152, 158, 162, 170, 172, 173 Cooper, Gladys 28 Coppola, Francis Ford 37, 44, 97, 103, 121 Corman, Roger 39 Corr, Eugene 141 ‘Covering Darkness, The’ 28 Craig, Stuart 158 Cruise, Tom 111, 170, 171 ‘Cry, the Beloved Country’ 78 Danner, Blythe 181 Day-Lewis, Daniel 172 ‘Deep Throat’ 104, 108 Deer Hunter, The 80, 147 Defiant Ones, The 78–9 Dench, Judy 180 De Niro, Robert 2, 53, 55, 145, 148, 212 Deputy, The 24–5 Desert Bloom 141 Desilu 23 Dick Powell Theatre 19 Diller, Barry 153 Discovery, The 209–10 Disney 21, 23 ‘Disneyland’ (TV show) 21

231

Doctor Doolittle 38, 41 Douglas, Kirk 57, 120 Douglas, Michael 180, 181 Downhill Racer 38, 54, 55, 56–9, 64, 73, 85, 86, 94, 105, 124, 125–8, 130, 147 Dr Kildare 29 DuMont Television 20 Duvall, Robert 138 Eagle-Lion Film 23 Eastwood, Clint 65, 149, 151, 153, 161, 163, 179, 186, 192, 193, 201 Easy Rider 39, 59–60, 80, 89, 120, 123, 149 Education, Youth and Recreation (EYR) 37, 122–3 Eisner, Michael 150, 162 Electric Horseman, The 65, 109, 182, 183, 184, 185, 194, 212 Elephant Man, The 147 Elliott, Sam 181 Elsa and Fred 181 Esquire 192 European Art Cinema 37–8, 76, 81, 121, 122, 123, 163, 171 Evans, Robert 126 Every Which Way but Loose 65 Face of Love, The 180 Fairbanks, Douglas 57, 120 Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) 101, 201 Federal Communications Commission (FCC) 21 Fellini, Federico 37 Fields, Verna 131 Fiennes, Ralph 151, 161 filmnoia 96–102 Five Easy Pieces 39, 55, 65, 89 Fonda, Henry 24, 25, 28, 148, 207 Fonda, Jane 48, 109, 179, 181, 182, 183, 207, 212 Fonda, Peter 60, 89, 120, 123 Fortune, The 65 Four Star Productions 19, 23 Frankfurt, Mike 62, 86, 122 Freeman, Morgan 138, 179, 180, 181, 199, 202 Friedberg, Richard 122

232 Garfield, Andrew 111, 170, 171 Garner, James 24 Garson, Greer 10 General Cinemas 141, 143 generational films 194–200 Gleeson, Brendon 181, 200 Godard, Jean-Luc 123 Godfather, The 55, 97, 102–3 Godfather II, The 55, 97, 102–3 Go Fish 134 Goldman, William 49, 50, 103, 106, 185 Goldwyn Company 134 Gould, Elliott 45, 68 Graduate, The 39–40, 41, 48–9, 67–8 Gran Torino 153 Great Gatsby, The 61, 63, 64, 85, 94, 105, 194 Great Waldo Pepper, The 61, 194 Green Berets, The 79–80 Griffith, D.W. 57, 119–20, 149 Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner 79 Guinness, Alec 43 Gulf+Western 126 Guys, The 110 Hackman, Gene 7, 45, 89 Hallmark Hall of Fame 10 Hallstrom, Lasse 199 Hamill, Pete 84 Hampstead 181 Hannah, Daryl 186 Harrelson, Woody 188 Harris, Ed 180 Harrison, Rex 41 Havana 187–8, 189, 194 HBO 132 Heard, John 150 Heartburn 65 Heaven Can Wait 65 Hecht, Ben 120 Hellman, Lillian 43 Hello Dolly! 22, 38, 81 Hendler, Gary 150 Hepburn, Katherine 148, 207 Hercules 67 Heseltine, Stark 9 High Plains Drifter 65 Highest Tree, The 7, 9 Hill, George Roy 50, 52, 63, 94, 163

Index Hitchcock, Alfred 28, 29 Hoffman, Dustin 2, 7, 39–40, 41, 45, 49, 65, 106–7, 179 Hofstadter, Richard 95 Hollywood 20–1, 30, 34, 38, 43, 44, 56, 57, 60, 62, 66, 81–2, 89, 93, 106, 119–20, 130, 179 and Genre redefinition 75–7 Homolka, Oscar 11 Honkytonk Man 153 Hopkins, Anthony 68 Hopper, Dennis 60, 89, 120, 123, 149 Horse Whisperer, The 152, 158, 160, 162, 165–7, 169, 175, 189, 194, 195–9 ‘Hot kine’ 15 Hot Rock, The 54, 105, 124 House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC) 55–6, 76–7, 91–4, 95, 97 Humphrey, Hubert 84, 85, 87 Hurt Locker, The 110 Hutton, Timothy 147 ‘Iceman Cometh, The’ (TV drama) 15–19, 211 Indecent Proposal 151, 188, 189, 194 independent American cinema 5, 57–8, 62, 67–8, 81, 119–43, 163, 172 and TV 22 In the Heat of the Night 79 ‘In the Presence of Mine Enemies’ (TV play) 11–15, 18, 211 Inside Daisy Clover 38, 43, 45–7, 58, 87 Is Anybody There? 180 I’ll See You in my Dreams 181 Jalbert, Joe Jay 127 James, Monique 10, 18 Jaws 123 Jeremiah Johnson 54, 62, 79, 85, 124, 128–9, 154 Johnson, Lyndon B. 72 Keaton, Diane 180, 181 Keltz, Marty 123 Kennedy, Arthur 11–15, 28 Kennedy, John F. 72, 77, 78, 80, 84, 85, 101, 173 Kennedy, Robert 72, 80, 82, 101

Index Kilgallen, Eleanor 9 King, Martin Luther 72, 80–1, 173 King of Marvin Gardens, The 39, 65 Klute 102, 103 Kramer, Stanley 145 Kramer vs. Kramer 65, 147 Ladies in Lavender 180 Lady in the Van, The 181 Lancaster, Burt 57, 120 Landmark Cinemas 142 Lange, Jessica 181 Larner, Jeremy 84 Last Castle, The 188, 189, 194 Last Detail, The 65 Last Love 180 ‘Last of the Big Spenders, The’ 19 Last Tycoon, The 65 Laughton, Charles 11–15, 28 Laurents, Arthur 91–3 Lawron, Harry 55 LaBeouf, Shia 114 Legal Eagles 186, 189, 194 Legend of Bagger Vance, The 152, 158, 162, 165, 169–70 Lenny 65 Levine, Joseph E. 1, 67 Lincoln 172 Lions for Lambs 111–13, 145, 152, 162, 165, 170–2, 189, 190, 211 Lippmann, Walter 71–2 Little Big Man 80 Little Fauss and Big Halsy 54, 56–7, 59–61, 64, 85, 105, 124 live television drama 10–11, 16–17 Lopez, Jennifer 190–1, 199 Loews/MGM 20 Lucas, George 63, 67 Luce, Henry 71 Lumet, Sidney 25, 28, 76, 126 Lupino, Ida 19 Lynch, David 147 MacLaine, Shirley 179, 181 Maclean, Norman 159 Mafia, The 96, 97, 99 Malden, Karl 138 Marathon Man 65 M*A*S*H 80

233

Maverick (TV series) 10, 24 McAvoy, James 112, 113, 172 McCabe and Mrs Miller 65, 131 McCarthy, Eugene 75, 76, 77, 84 McCord, Ted 121 McCormick, Myron 18 McCrea, Joel 19 McDonnell, Mary 189 McQueen, Steve 7, 40, 41, 49, 65, 67, 69–70 Mean Streets 131 Melies, George 119, 149 ‘Method’ school of acting 12 Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer (MGM) 20, 38, 80, 126 metteur-en-scène 40, 176 Midnight Cowboy 127, 131 Milagro Beanfield War, The 146, 150, 152, 157, 161 Miramax 120 Mirren, Helen 180 Moore, Demi 181, 188 Morrow, Rob 161 Mulligan, Robert 43 Moment of Fear 25 Murphy, Audie 28 Music Corporation of America (MCA) 7–10, 19, 23, 142 MCA-TV 10 My Dinner with Andre 171 Naked City 25 Narizzano, Silvio 125 National Broadcasting Corporation (NBC) 9–10, 23 National Educational Network 19 National Endowment for the Arts (NEA) 137 Natural, The 182, 183–5, 189, 194, 196, 199 Native Americans 5, 56, 77–9, 86, 146 Nelson, Ralph 19 Netflix 177, 182, 209 Network 102 New Breed, The 25 New Hollywood 4, 22, 30, 34–5, 37, 38, 39, 40–1, 42, 43, 44, 45, 50, 54, 55, 59, 61, 64–5, 67, 76, 81–2, 89, 102, 106, 131, 146, 179 actors 40–1, 64–5 Newman, Paul 7, 12, 49–52, 62, 63, 94, 163, 179

234

Index

Nicholson, Jack 39, 41, 45, 55, 65, 89, 123, 201–2, 212 Nighy, Bill 180 9/11 5, 110, 112–13, 171 Niven, David 19 Nixon, Richard 5, 72, 82, 83, 84, 88, 89, 90, 95, 97, 104, 107, 129 Nolte, Nick 174, 204 Norma Productions 120 Norma Rae 148 ‘Nothing in the Dark’ 29 old-age character films 180–1 Old Man and the Gun, The 2, 208–10 Olin, Lena 187 On Golden Pond 148, 207 One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest 65 O’Neal, Ryan 68–69 O’Neill, Eugene 15, 16, 17 On Her Majesty’s Secret Service 127 Ordinary People 136, 137, 146, 147, 148, 150, 152, 153, 154, 155–7, 160, 162, 164, 165–6 Oscars 147, 148, 157, 172 Our Souls at Night 181, 206–8, 209 Out of Africa 154, 164, 184–5, 194, 199, 212 Outlaw Josey Wales, The 65 Ozu, Yasujiro 162 Pacino, Al 2, 53, 55, 145, 212 package deal system 8, 36, 50, 57, 106, 149 Pakula, Alan J. 86, 103, 105, 106, 108, 150 Pale Rider 153 Pando Productions 120 Papillon 65 Parallax View, The 65, 101–2, 104 Paramount Pictures 20, 43, 44, 55–7, 62, 86, 124, 125, 126, 128, 139, 153, 162 Paramount Decrees 21, 24, 35–7, 120 Paramount United Theatres 21 Paranoid Cycle of political films 94, 95–109 Passenger, The 65 Penn, Arthur 37, 43, 86 Pennell, Eagle 136 Pickford, Mary 57, 120 ‘Piece of the Action, A’ 28

Pitt, Brad 151, 159, 201 Play Misty for Me 65, 149 Play of the Week 19 Plummer, Christopher 10, 41, 43, 179, 181 Poitier, Sidney 78–9 Polanski, Roman 38, 126, 147, 157 political films Advise and Consent; Best Man; The; Fail Safe; Manchurian Candidate, The; Seven Days in May 77 as box-office poison 73–5 Pollack, Sydney 44, 62–3, 91, 92, 97–100, 121, 128–9, 132, 137, 138, 139, 142, 146, 153–4, 156, 163–4, 185, 187 Polonsky, Abraham 55 Powell, Dick 19 Primary 85 Professionals, The 80 Pulp Fiction 134, 139 Pursuit Plot, the 54, 99, 114, 201, 209 Quiz Show 151, 152, 157, 161, 164, 167–9 race tensions 72, 77–9, 80, 84, 86, 95 Raging Bull 53, 147, 148 Rather, Dan 116 Redacted 110, 171 Redford, Robert as director 5, 145–76, 196–9 environmental interests 2, 64, 67, 85, 87, 146, 157, 211 and Nixon 83–4, 129 old age 5, 177–213 Oscars 147, 157 playing anti-heroes 45, 47, 50–3, 55–61, 150, 211 politics 4–5, ch.3, 82–4, 86, 153, 211 roles as a Nazi 11–15, 25 stardom 1, 4, 33, 53, 60–1, 63, 82, 94, 105, 124–5, 151, 210 testing for The Graduate 40 in theatre 7–9, 44, 46 Utah Home and Ski Resort 62, 64, 82, 86, 88, 126, 136, 167 Reinhardt, Gottfried 43 Rendition 110 Reservoir Dogs 134 Revue Studios 10, 19, 23

Index Reynolds, Burt 179 Richardson, Tony 38 ‘Right Kind of Medicine, The’ 28 Ritchie, Michael 38, 58, 62, 85, 124, 126, 127, 130 River Runs Through It, A 151, 152, 157, 158, 159, 167 RKO 80 RKO Television 20 Robards Jr., Jason 15–18, 28 Rocky 147 Roizman, Owen 103 Roos, Fred 132 Rosenberg, Mark 132 Rosenberg, Meta 38 Rosemary’s Baby 38, 57, 126, 147 Ruddy, Al 59 Rush, Richard 147 Ruth and Alex 180 Ryan’s Daughter 81 Salter, James 58, 126 Saltman, Charles 123 Sanders, Terry and Denis 35, 42, 121–2 Sanford Productions 128 Sarandon, Susan 179 Sarris, Andrew 65, 88, 89, 131, 175 Saxon, John 42, 121–2 Scorsese, Martin 123, 147, 148, 151, 157, 162, 163, 164 Seagull, The 7 Second Best Marigold Hotel, The 180 Section Eight Productions 120 Sex, lies, and videotape 134, 139 Shampoo 39, 65, 101 Shapiro, Angela 132 Shaw, George Bernard 10, 11 Shepard, Sam 123 Silkwood 102 Silver actors 180–1 Silver audiences 179–82 Silver films 180–1 Sirk, Douglas 165 Situation Hopeless … but Not Serious 43 Skerritt, Tom 151 Slamdance Festival 135–6 Slow Cinema 165–7 Smith, Annick 137, 159 Smith, Lory 132

235

Smith, Maggie 180, 181 Sneakers 188, 194 Soderberg, Steven 120, 134, 140 Soldier Blue 78 Sound of Music, The 38, 43, 49 Spiegel, Sam 43 Spielberg, Steven 63, 67, 172 Spy Game 189, 194, 201 Star! 38 Stark, Ray 62, 91 Star Wars 123, 147, 148 Stars over Hollywood 23 Stavis, Gene 122 Steenbergen, Mary 181 Sting, The 61, 63, 64, 85, 94, 105, 194, 212 Stallone, Sylvester 147, 149, 151, 153, 161, 179 Stewart, James 36, 186 Straight Time 65 Stranger than Paradise 133 Streep, Meryl 111, 170, 171, 179, 186 Streisand, Barbra 61, 62, 91, 149 Sundance Film Festival 2, 64, 66, 125, 131, 132, 133, 134, 139, 189, 211 Sundance Institute 2, 64, 66, 67, 122, 125, 131, 132, 133, 134, 135, 136–40, 142, 146, 159, 163, 170, 171, 185, 189, 211 Cable Channel 141–2 Cinema chain 141–2, 143 first planning conference 137 members of the first Board 137–8 production 140–1, 143 Redford’s attitude to fronting it 138 Sutherland, Donald 160–1 Swimming to Cambodia 171 Syriana 110 Talent Associates 19 Tall Story 7, 9 ‘Tangled Web, A’ 28 Tarantino, Quentin 134–5, 140, 162 Tate 26 T-D Enterprises 121 television 4, 7–31, 38, 42, 45, 46, 52, 55, 60, 72, 73, 76–7, 80, 81, 84, 104, 149, 152, 157, 167, 168, 177, 179, 211 Television City (CBS) 15

236

Index

Tell Them Willie Boy Is Here 50, 54, 55–6, 124, 125–6 Terms of Endearment 65 Tess 147 This Property Is Condemned 44, 46, 87 Three Days of the Condor 97–102, 103, 194 ‘Thunder over Berlin’ (TV play) 7, 9. See also ‘Berlin: City with a Short Fuse’ Tiger at the Gates 7 Time Out of War, A 42, 121 Trumbo, Dalton 91 Truffaut, Francois 37–8, 175 Truth 116, 211 Turturro, John 161 20th Century Fox 20, 39, 49, 74, 124 Twilight Zone, The 28 Two-Lane Backtop 59 Tyler-Moore, Mary 160–1 UCLA film school 42, 44, 121 Ulzana’s Raid 80 Unforgiven 153 United Artists (UA) 38, 57, 119–20, 121–2, 137 Universal Pictures 42, 56, 124, 126, 131, 139, 142 Untouchables, The (TV drama) 29 Up Close and Personal 194 US Film Festival 131–5, 136, 137, 139 Utah/US Film Festival 132 Van Wagenen, Sterling 131, 133, 136, 138 Vanishing Point 59 videotape 15–16, 19, 20, 137 Vietnam 72, 77, 78, 79–81, 84, 95, 147–8, 199 Virginian, The 27–8, 55 Vivendi 142 ‘Voice of Charlie Pont, The’ 19 Voight, Jon 179 Von Sydow, Max 99, 102 Vulcan Ventures 142–3 Walken, Christopher 150 Walk in the Woods, A 202–4 Wall Street Journal, The 191–2

Walters, Julie 180 War Hunt 25, 42, 121–2, 123 Warden, Jack 106 War on Terror 4, 110, 112, 171 in film 110 Warner Bros. 21, 23, 30, 38, 43, 74, 85, 105, 124, 128–30, 132 ‘Warner Brothers Presents’ 21 Washington Post, The 89, 103, 105, 187 Watergate 5, 72, 89, 95, 96, 104–5 Way We Were, The 61, 62–3, 64, 85, 91–4, 105, 124, 194, 212 Wayne, John 79–80 Weathermen, The 113–15, 153, 173, 174, 195, 200, 201 Welles, Orson 149 Wells, Frank 128–9 Western genre 4, 24, 25, 47–8, 49–52, 65, 73, 75–6, 77–8, 80, 109, 153, 198, 211 TV 24, 26–7, 55 Whole Shootin’ Match, The 136 Wild Bunch, The 80 Wild Oats 181 Wildwood Enterprises 38, 57, 126, 147 Wilkinson, Tom 112, 113, 172, 180 William Morris Agency 19, 23 Williams, Robin 180 Williams, Tennessee 44 Willie Boy: A Desert Manhunt 55 Willis, Gordon 102–3, 106 Winchester ’73 36 Winger, Debra 186 Wood, Natalie 43, 44, 87 Woodward, Bob 89, 101, 104–8, 113, 114, 174 World Trade Center 110 Wright, Robin 112, 113, 172 Zanuck, Darryl F. 74 Zanuck, Richard 85, 130 Zeffirelli, Franco 126 Zero Dark Thirty 110, 171 Zoetrope Studios 132

237

238