“I can’t swim!” Robert Redford uttered many immortal lines over his long film career, but there was something about the revelation, halfway through Butch Cassidy And The Sundance Kid, that stuck in the mind. Up to that point his character — Sundance — had been cool and tough, the gunfighter so famous that his name stops duels before they begin. Now suddenly he was vulnerable and scared and angry, preferring to face the impossible odds of fighting his pursuers than a jump off a waterfall.
Growing up after these films were released, I had no sense of the order in which they came, but it was as Sundance that Redford became a superstar, beginning a decade of films that ten, twenty, even fifty years later seem not to have aged at all. He was, first of all, impossibly handsome. Asked in the run-up to Indecent Proposal whether she would sleep with him for a million dollars, one critic is supposed to have replied “Yes, but where would I find the money?” But Hollywood is littered with beautiful people whose careers go nowhere. Redford also had charisma, an ability to look down the lens and make us melt. Perhaps it was that vulnerability.
Everyone can pick their own favourite of his films, but I’ll take the Seventies run. The Candidate made a joke of his impossible good looks but also showed him as a man who knows he’s out of his depth. The Sting reunited him with Paul Newman for a film that once again mixed comedy and drama. Three Days of the Condor is a model man-on-the-run spy thriller, with Redford vulnerable again: “I just read books.” Decades later, when Marvel wanted to make a superhero film that felt like a paranoid Seventies thriller, he was the perfect man to cast.
The movies he directed himself were intimate stories masterfully told
Like most wannabe journalists of my generation I watched All The President’s Men obsessively. His scenes as an officer “tough enough to do it and dumb enough to do it” in A Bridge Too Far are a masterclass in showing both terror and courage. I could go on. The music from The Natural makes my hair stand on end.
But his influence on cinema wasn’t simply from his work in front of the camera. The Sundance Film Festival, which he founded, became a funnel for hit indie films from Reservoir Dogs onwards.
And the movies he directed himself were intimate stories masterfully told. A River Runs Through It is beautiful. I don’t think a month has gone by in the thirty years since I first watched Quiz Show that I haven’t thought about it. The first two minutes of that film, as a man in a showroom looks at a car he can’t afford, are a short story on their own.
It was a magnificent career, that will last as long as cinema. As the song goes at the end of Jeremiah Johnson: “Some folks say he’s up there still.”
