Natalie Wood and Robert Redford in Sydney Pollack's This Property Is Condemned (1966). Photo: Paramount/Seven Arts/Ray Stark/The Kobal Collection.
Editor's Note: Richard Corliss (1944-2015) was the editor of Film Comment from 1970-1985 and served on the New York Film Festival selection committee from 1971-1987. Shortly before he passed away, he wrote this piece for our 42nd Chaplin Award Gala honoring Robert Redford on April 27. We hope that, as you read it, you join us in reflecting on Corliss's tireless contributions to criticism and film culture. R.I.P., Richard. You will be missed.
Robert Redford is a California boy—born in Santa Monica, raised in Van Nuys—and a prime exemplar of Hollywood glamour, achievement, and tenacity. But in a way he’s a son of New York. He arrived in the mid-'50s to study painting at the Pratt Institute and acting at the American Academy of Dramatic Arts. In 1959 he made his Broadway debut as a basketball player in the Lindsay-Crouse comedy Tall Story. He graduated to leading-man status in two romantic comedies whose very titles proclaim the magic of Gotham: Norman Krasna’s Sunday in New York and Neil Simon’s Barefoot in the Park, which also marked Mike Nichols’s directorial debut. Redford was a Broadway star, at 26 in the 1963 Barefoot in the Park, before he was a movie star. That came three years later, in the film adaptation with his leading lady Jane Fonda.
Like most young, serious actors of the early ’60s, Redford appeared in dozens of TV dramas, here and in Los Angeles. His first significant TV credit was as Don Parritt, the anarchist’s son, in Sidney Lumet’s 1960 production of The Iceman Cometh. Recognizing the hints of anguish and urgency behind his all-American good looks, directors of network shows often cast him as a figure who either wrestled with or personified dark forces. He was a young Nazi lieutenant, stricken by conscience, in Rod Serling’s In the Presence of Mine Enemies on Playhouse 90; a robber who shoots a cop on Alfred Hitchcock Presents; a bootlegger who sells wood alcohol to college students on The Untouchables. In the “Nothing in the Dark” episode of Serling’s The Twilight Zone, Redford was the spectral spirit who escorts a frightened old lady (Gladys Cooper) to the land beyond this life—the gentle embodiment of e.e. cummings’ poignant rhetorical question, “how do you like your blueeyed boy Mister Death.”
His Hollywood success in Barefoot in the Park might have launched Redford into a career of light comedies, but choice or chance nudged him toward gnarled dramas. He starred with Natalie Wood in two Depression-era films, Inside Daisy Clover and This Property Is Condemned (story by Tennessee Williams, script by Francis Coppola), which was the first of seven Redford films directed by his most sympathetic collaborator, Sydney Pollack. He played another convict on the run in Arthur Penn’s turbulent misfire The Chase, with Marlon Brando in the lead.
Paul Newman and Redford in George Roy Hill's Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid (1969). Photo: 20th Century Fox/The Kobal Collection.
Redford needed a more congenial co-star in a more accessible movie, and found both when he teamed with Paul Newman in 1969 for Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid. William Goldman’s larkish tale of Western outlaws as irresistible as they were unheroic became one of Hollywood’s essential bromances; it nudged Redford into the superstar firmament by putting the twinkle of roguery in his eye. Four years later, he and Newman parlayed their Butch Cassidy stake into a con-man windfall with writer David S. Ward’s The Sting. Both films, directed by George Roy Hill, were smash hits—The Sting was also the rare comedy to win a Best Picture Oscar—for two actors who used their scintillating sex appeal to make better, more demanding movies.
To control his own career, Redford turned producer in 1972 with The Candidate, casting himself as Bill McKay, a handsome young lawyer who uses his charm and telegenicity to challenge an aging Senate incumbent. Written by Jeremy Larner, who had been Eugene McCarthy’s speechwriter in the 1968 Democratic primaries, The Candidate served up a caustic inside view of how senatorial sausage is made, and how noble ideas, ground into please-everybody slogans, soon turn to gibberish. “Can’t any longer play off black against old, young against poor,” McKay says, mocking his own elevated rhetoric. “This country cannot house its houseless, feed its foodless.” Getting elected becomes the end, not the means, of the political process. And when McKay wins, he asks, with a child’s winsome helplessness, “What do we do now?”
McKay may not have known, but Redford did. He sailed through the 1970s gracing, and often producing, the sharpest mainstream dramas and romances. Pollack’s The Way We Were pitted Redford against Barbra Streisand, his opposite in everything except cinematic charisma, in a battle of cool liberal (him) vs. fiery radical (her) that still lights the corners of moviegoers’ minds. Redford was also the first to see that a nonfiction book about two reporters cracking a White House scandal could make for crackling film melodrama: All the President’s Men. And to the subgenre of political-paranoia films—in a decade when nightmares of conspiracy were often validated on the front pages—he contributed the high-IQ thriller Three Days of the Condor (again with Pollack). If the ’70s mass audience was paying to see works of political and social purpose, they probably went because of him.
Redford directing Ordinary People
For most actors, attaining movie stardom would be enough. But for Redford it was just the beginning. He became a passionate advocate for the environment, arguing that “Defense of our resources is just as important as defense abroad. Otherwise what is there to defend?” And in 1981 he created the Sundance Institute and the Sundance Film Festival, both of which have crucially helped to promote and define American independent film. In the arts and in our national life, Redford has long epitomized the fruitful use of power. And doesn’t it speak to America’s glorious self-image that our national conscience should be such a fine-looking fellow?
He turned to directing in 1980, and on his first try, Ordinary People, earned Best Picture and Director Oscars for a family-crisis story of almost virtuosic austerity, and a major work in a minor key. Redford never stinted on his work either as Sundance’s guiding light or as an actor—including key roles as the aging baseball phenom in The Natural, as Meryl Streep’s wandering lover in the Oscar-winning Out of Africa, and as Demi Moore’s million-dollar seducer in Indecent Proposal—but for the last 30-plus years he has basically been Bob Redford, auteur. Not at all surprisingly, his films as director have kept finding novel ways to approach big issues: Latino immigration in The Milagro Beanfield War, the environment in A River Runs Through It, the nexus of television and greed in Quiz Show, America’s Afghanistan adventure in Lions for Lambs.
His two most recent films as director are arguably his most probing and satisfying. In The Conspirator, an account of the case of Mary Surratt (Robin Wright), accused of harboring John Wilkes Booth before and after he shot President Lincoln, Redford draws a bold comparison between the repeal of civil liberties by the Andrew Johnson administration immediately after the event of April 14, 1865 and the policies of the Bush Administration in the months and years after the events of September 11, 2001. The Company You Keep portrays the violent American radicals of the Vietnam era 40 years later, when they are senior citizens living under false identities. Both of these films deal with figures suspected of terrorism on U.S. soil; both look for psychological ambiguities within a First Amendment sympathy for the rights of those whose ideals may have led them to do wrong. As a director no less than an actor, Redford has sought to understand and explain the sometimes perplexing actions of ordinary people.
Redford directed and starred in The Horse Whisperer (1998). Photo: Touchstone/The Kobal Collection.
Yet it’s been clear from the start that he is anything but ordinary. He seems above and alone, the rare star whose movies barely penetrate the cocoon of his mystery. For all the screen time Redford has spent gazing meaningfully into the receptive eyes of Wood, Fonda, Streisand, Streep, and, first and bluest, Newman, he has always projected a curious self-sufficiency. The characters he has played seemed to enjoy people’s company but not to need it. He has embraced solitude on the slopes (Downhill Racer), in the mountains (Jeremiah Johnson), and on a ranch (The Horse Whisperer). The California blond with the calculating brain was a separate species, independent of and perhaps impatient with the mass of mortals. In the harshest elements, he could survive on his own.
In writer-director J.C. Chandor’s All Is Lost, he has no name—the closing credits identify him only as “Our Man”—or known past. Except for a farewell message intoned at the beginning, he barely speaks. And he has no one to speak to; his is the only face we see in this engrossing, stripped-to-the-essence parable of survival. Yet we know all we need to know about the weathered gent stranded in the Indian Ocean on his disabled 37-foot yacht, frantically applying his sailor skills to staying alive totally on his own, because he is played by Redford. A ripe mix of thrilling Hollywood craft and Sundance-style independence, All Is Lost is also the actor’s one-man show. It may be his testament.
After 43 features as an actor and nine as director, Redford remains a blessed anachronism. He made no sequels to any of his hits—though The Candidate 2 would have been nice—and finally appeared in an action-fantasy film, Marvel’s Captain America: The Winter Soldier, just to stretch his range and have some fun. At 78 he’s not slowing down but speeding up. In 2015 he plays Nick Nolte’s hiking companion in A Walk in the Woods; CBS news anchor Dan Rather in James Vanderbilt’s Truth; and a father role in the Disney remake of Pete’s Dragon. This will be the first year since 1972 to offer three Robert Redford movies.
Given his crammed film schedule, and his nonstop helming of the Sundance Institute, the Film Society is grateful that Robert Redford carved out some time to be honored this evening. Sixty years after he arrived in New York, the golden boy deserves a hearty welcome home.
