On the screen, Robert Redford often played antiheroes. His distinction was that his antiheroes looked like heroes. In other words, they looked like Robert Redford. No other actor had such reserves of glamor. Offscreen, as the founder of the Sundance Institute, the person who made the Sundance Film Festival what it is today, and a tireless environmental activist, he became a real-life hero.
In a career spanning seven decades, beginning in the late 1950s on stage and television before entering movies in the early 1960s, he managed to bridge the realms of Old and New Hollywood. When he started out, he had the golden boy look that was standard for young heartthrobs of that era. But he had also a subversiveness – an edginess – that stood out from the beginning. It’s what separated him from the pretty boy pack. Redford’s distinction as an actor is that he always held something back. He hid a vital part of himself. This had the paradoxical effect of drawing us closer to him.
The first time I recall seeing Redford was when I was a kid. It was on an episode of “The Twilight Zone” in 1962 called “Nothing in the Dark.” He played a wounded policeman who is taken in by a scared, isolated woman (Gladys Cooper) who fears dying. It transpires that the policeman is really Death, who is there to allay her fears as they move together into the next life. What I remember most distinctly about this episode is Redford’s steady, comforting presence. What could have been soapy was, instead, deeply moving.
Why We Wrote This
Robert Redford always had ambitions to be more than an actor. His legacy, our critic writes, will be as much about his nurturing of new filmmakers as about his movies.
Audiences may think Redford emerged full-blown as a movie star. That wasn’t quite the case. As a youngster growing up in Southern California, he had no particular yen to be an actor. In fact, living so close to Hollywood, he had disdain for all the glitter. When he started to make real money in the early 1960s, he bought property in mountainous Utah, where he could bask in the freedom he found there.
He was an unruly high school student. According to biographer Michael Feeney Callan, during his graduation ceremony he sat in the back reading Mad magazine. He was kicked out of the University of Colorado, Boulder, for partying and proceeded to bum around Europe with the intention of becoming an artist. Eventually he joined the American Academy of Dramatic Arts in New York City. His first stage success was on Broadway in 1963 in Neil Simon’s “Barefoot in the Park,” directed by Mike Nichols, a starring role he repeated in the 1967 film version. He was a highly acceptable romantic lead in that film, but for me, the role that really showed his true colors came a year earlier, as the Mississippi city slicker in the Tennessee Williams adaptation, “This Property Is Condemned.” He showed a restlessness, a tension, that demonstrated he wasn’t willing to just get by on his looks.
Not that he ever really made a point of capitalizing on them. Like Paul Newman, his co-star in his subsequent breakout hits “Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid” and “The Sting,” he always seemed slightly sheepish about his star wattage. Perhaps he didn’t quite recognize how he appealed to audiences.
I recall hearing a funny story once, which I hope is true, about Redford auditioning for what became the Dustin Hoffman role as Benjamin in “The Graduate.” The director, Nichols again, didn’t think he was right for the role. When Redford demanded to know why, Nichols asked him if he had ever been turned down by a woman. To which Redford replied, “I don’t understand what you mean.” Nichols’ response: “You just proved my point.”
What’s interesting about this anecdote is that it points to a shift that was happening in the acting world at that time. Actors who looked like Redford were joined by a new crop of performers, like Hoffman and Robert De Niro and Al Pacino, who offered a very different look from the blond-haired and blue-eyed icons. The movies that were made in the 1970s – directed by auteurs such as Martin Scorsese and Francis Ford Coppola – brought a new despairing sensibility to American movies. And yet Redford was such a strong actor, and such a startling presence, that he prospered in that era as well. It would be a mistake to think of him solely in terms of “Butch Cassidy” and “The Sting.” Enjoyable as they are, they are old-school. (“The Way We Were” is old-school, too, and yet has there ever been a more maddeningly bingeable romantic weepie?)
More invigorating, in my view, is the work he did in “Downhill Racer” (1969), as a surly skier, or “The Candidate” (1972), in which he plays a senatorial candidate who coasts more on image than ideas. That film seems especially prescient today.
It’s no accident that Redford’s companies produced both of those films. And with his nose for political intrigue, he approached Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein about the movie rights to their book, “All the President’s Men,” before they had even written it. He increasingly wanted to make movies that reflected America’s darkening political climate. He once said he felt “out of place in the country I was born into.”
As he hit his prime, Redford also turned to directing. The dysfunctional family drama “Ordinary People” won him an Oscar, but my favorite is “Quiz Show,” a movie about high-stakes corruption that in some ways rivals “All the President’s Men.”
He also pursued his passion for public works in support of such causes as the arts and the environment and Native American rights.
It may be true that actors of his generation or a bit older – like Marlon Brando – felt there was something unmanly about playacting. But Redford from early on wanted to be more than an actor. His legacy will, I think, stand as much for his promotion of new talent, at the Sundance Institute and Film Festival, as for his movies. He chose, perhaps to his detriment, to appear in very few indie movies himself. But he engendered an entire generation of filmmakers who otherwise could not break through and make “personal” films in the studio system – the same system that Redford was for so long synonymous with. He told Variety in 2002 that “I think it is wholly appropriate to focus on social cultural issues of our time.” He was right then and he’s right now, which makes his passing all the more poignant.
Peter Rainer is the Monitor’s film critic.
