Tuesday, August 18 | 11 Movies
This August 18th marks what would have been Robert Redford’s 90th birthday. Over the course of his life, Redford became one of cinema’s most indelible figures, and while one could argue his conventional good looks and natural charisma would have made him a star at any time, such myopia misses his range as a performer and the breadth of his contribution to movies. Redford’s acting work could easily fill an entire month’s spotlight, and that’s before you consider his Oscar-winning direction and incomparable contribution to elevating independent films through the Sundance Film Festival. The movies for his Summer Under the Stars celebration represent a narrow but important slice of his stunning career.
The day kicks off with War Hunt (1962), which wasn’t Redford’s first feature (that would be Tall Story, 1960, where he went uncredited), but the first where he had a major role. Prior to starring in War Hunt, Redford appeared on Broadway and guest starred on TV shows such as “Naked City,” “The Americans” and “Bus Stop”. War Hunt slots Redford into the part of the idealistic soldier Pvt. Roy Loomis, who joins an infantry company near the end of the Korean War. The role is an archetype—the neophyte soldier hardened by the horrors of battles—but Redford finds the texture and nuance in the character, playing perfectly off the disturbing Private Endore (John Saxon), who goes on independent night raids to feed his bloodlust. War Hunt not only marked Redford’s first major role, but also the feature debuts of Tom Skerritt and Sydney Pollack, the latter of whom would be one of Redford’s key creative collaborators, directing the actor in seven features.
Redford would have another important director when he teamed up twice with Michael Ritchie, first for the sports drama Downhill Racer (1969) and then a few years later for The Candidate (1972), which remains a vital political text of modern America. Redford plays Bill McKay, a legal aid organizer and son of a former governor. When political consultant Marvin Lucas (Peter Boyle) lures Bill into the California senate race with the promise that he can talk about whatever he wants to, Bill accepts only to discover he’s now a cog in a larger machine. The genius of the film, and Redford’s performance, is to feint at the idea that this young, charismatic figure would obviously be a great candidate and then upends that expectation by showing how a modern campaign with its talking points, TV appearances, fundraising, etc., diminishes any politician who steps into it. By the time Bill’s stump speech is so rote and memorized, he can’t help but lean into the absurdity of the whole endeavor as he rides between appearances.
The space between traditional movie star and digging deeper into the character’s psychology is how Redford found tension in his characters, as you can see in The Great Waldo Pepper (1975). The film reteams Redford with his Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid (1969) director George Roy Hill and screenwriter William Goldman, with a similar thematic subtext of men in a dangerous profession trying to continue their way of life in a modernizing world. Swap out train robberies for aerial acrobatics, and you have a spiritual sequel of sorts, but Waldo is no Sundance and allows Redford to start the film as a self-mythologizing playboy of the skies who, figuratively, comes back to Earth as his daredevil stunts take a toll on his loved ones and his health. It’s a sneakily melancholy film rooted in Hill’s past as a pilot, but Redford (along with the stunning aerial stunts) makes the movie soar.
Redford’s lead presence would be central in winning Oscars for directors (before winning one himself for his directorial debut feature, Ordinary People, 1980). For Hill, it was the second of three features with Redford, The Sting (1973), and one of many movies in the actor’s filmography that showed he couldn’t be pegged to any one time period. Although he was a performer who achieved stardom during the New Hollywood era, Redford appeared as comfortable in the Great Depression of The Sting as he did in the Wild West of Butch Cassidy, just as he is in the tumult of a contemporary setting like The Candidate. But the breeziness he can bring to a role without it ever feeling light is beautifully exemplified in The Sting, where he reteams with Paul Newman to pull a con on a crime boss (Robert Shaw). The film would go on to earn Best Picture and Best Director for Hill as well as, surprisingly, earn Redford his only Oscar nomination for acting.
Of Redford’s seven collaborations with Pollack, the one that would win the Oscar is Out of Africa (1985). The film is a sweeping romance set in Nairobi and follows Danish aristocrat Karen Dinesen (Meryl Streep) as she grows to love her new homeland and bristles against the patriarchal and colonialist attitudes she encounters. Her awakening comes in part through her relationship with big-game hunter Denys Finch Hatton (Redford), who loves Karen but also treasures his independence. It’s a lush drama that unsurprisingly won seven Oscars, including Best Picture, but one where Redford once again shows himself as a generous scene partner, fitting comfortably into the piece that places the central focus on Karen rather than Denys. That kind of generosity appears again and again in Redford’s work and is one of the reason co-stars like Jane Fonda, Barbra Streisand and Sissy Spacek spoke so highly of him.
He plays off both Debra Winger and Daryl Hannah in Ivan Reitman’s screwball-esque picture Legal Eagles (1986), which makes its TCM debut for Redford’s day. In this film, he plays an assistant district attorney who gets caught up with a charming defense lawyer (Winger) and her performance artist client (Hannah) in a case involving lost works of art. Redford was no stranger to comedic performances, but rarely did he get the opportunity to be as silly as he is here. During a sleepless night, his character ends up tap dancing in the bathroom while Singin’ in the Rain (1952) plays on the television. He later has to outrun an explosion by driving a forklift.
It could be easy to mistake Redford as just another pretty face, but he refused to let audiences or directors pigeonhole him as such. If anything, Redford continued to push himself as an actor throughout his career, finding new collaborators and keeping audiences on their toes. As serious as he was about filmmaking as an art, he never stopped being playful, showing up later in his career in Marvel movies, lending his credibility to the blockbuster fare of Captain America: The Winter Soldier (2014), which aimed to channel his ‘70s conspiracy thrillers like Three Days of the Condor (1975) and All the President’s Men (1976).
There was no drop-off in his career, and you could just as easily program a day of his movies including his work from the 1990s onward, including Sneakers (1992), Up Close & Personal (1996), The Last Castle (2001), Spy Game (2001) and the stunning All Is Lost (2013), in which he has almost no lines of dialogue. And again, that’s before you even get into his directing work or the world of the Sundance Film Festival and Sundance Institute.
It’s perhaps fitting that his final major role was in The Old Man & the Gun (2018), the true story of a bank robber who escaped from prison numerous times. Director David Lowery was able to use footage from earlier Redford movies like The Chase (1966), which is also about a prison escapee, as “flashbacks” for the character, later noting how the montage of the prison breaks functioned as a kind of retrospective for the actor’s career.
There’s only so much one can do in a day, and yet any section of Redford’s career is important for understanding one of the legendary performers of the 20th and 21st century. Redford’s day of programming is not all-encompassing, but a humble tribute to a performer who gifted us so much over his six decades of screen work.
