Robert Redford: act natural

In 1961, in a television series called The New Breed, a relative unknown named Robert Redford stars as a serial killer. He’s a clean-cut, conservative-looking young fellow who happens to enjoy strangling housewives with their husband’s neckties. Around the same time, he also showed up on small screens as a violent Nazi and in an episode of The Twilight Zone, where he plays the grinning spectre of Mr Death. 

Who was this man with a seeming propensity for sinister roles? Hardly the Redford we now recognise. Within a decade, he would be one of the most famous leading men in the world. But that process was not without its stumbling blocks; in 1967, he was famously unable to take on the role of Benjamin Braddock in The Graduate because director Mike Nichols didn’t believe a girl had ever turned him down. Or as Redford drolly put it, “I never did look like a 21-year-old kid just outta college who’d never been laid.”

But no matter: he would become a part of the same wave of movie iconography The Graduate would belong to, in those first febrile stirrings of the New Hollywood. His path was eventually set by the enormous success of Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid (1969) – a part he had to fight to get, and was only given after being vetted in a Manhattan bar by Paul Newman himself. From that point onward, Redford could do no wrong. In late 1969, he would have three films released in three months: Butch Cassidy, Downhill Racer and Tell Them Willie Boy Is Here. By early 1970, he would grace the cover of Life magazine wearing a moustache and a taciturn cowboy gaze. Regardless of any other roles, his reputation as the Sundance Kid would utterly blot out his ability to be the bad guy. No more parts as killers or right-wing thugs would ever be on the agenda again for Mr Redford.

In a career spanning six decades, Redford has starred in more than 40 feature films, played a vital role in shifting the position of independent film in America via his Sundance Institute, and won an Academy Award for Best Director for Ordinary People (1980). Whether his endurance is due to clean-living, his family ties, or his avoidance of the perils of Hollywood, he is now 82 years old and – without exaggeration – one of the legends of his era. His latest film, David Lowery’s The Old Man & the Gun, is a throwback heist picture about a man named Forrest Tucker. Tucker was a gentlemanly septuagenarian bank robber and prison escapee who went on a bloodless crime spree across 1980s Texas. Reflective of movie myth and romantic Americana, it’s a wholly good-natured film, leaning on the considerable charms of its cast. It wouldn’t exist without Butch Cassidy, The Sting (1973) and The Great Gatsby (1974): it’s simply too reliant on the past.

In the lead-up to the film’s premiere, Redford announced his retirement – and subsequently backtracked. But it would be a very fitting note to retire on, given that The Old Man & the Gun is so much an amalgamation of Redford’s career preoccupations. By turns, he’s allowed to inhabit the slick but charismatic outlaw, the pseudo-cowboy rancher on horseback, and the romantic leading man who can sweep in with a toss of his straw-blond hair. It’s hard to imagine too many other stars, regardless of gravitas or talent, playing a role like this in their eighties. But Redford has a liveliness and piercing curiosity that make him seem spritely. That he can carry the film on sheer sparkly charm and make Sissy Spacek’s Jewel fall for him is no great surprise, but Tucker even has the cops enamoured. For the sole encounter between Casey Affleck’s Detective Hunt and Tucker, director Lowery asked Affleck to play the scene as if he was star-struck – amazed by the criminal’s daring feats and outlaw reputation – and even suggested that Affleck should pretend he was a man on the street who’d just bumped into Redford.

Charles Robert Redford was born in California to an emotionally distant, tough-minded Irish-American family. His mother died when he was 18, and an uncle he was very close to was killed in action in World War II. On the occasions he has spoken about his family, he mentions that these losses were rarely talked about. He grew into a natural athlete, getting a baseball scholarship before flunking out and traipsing across Europe in the hope of becoming a painter. By the end of the 1950s, the rudderless jock with artistic inclinations had decided to try his hand at acting. Cheap psychologising aside, Redford’s demeanour has always retained some of that inherited remoteness. In his first Esquire profile in 1970, not long after playing the Sundance Kid, he was described as “charming but impenetrably restrained” and a “locked box”. Over the years, it’s a trait that’s been much criticised; an icy element of the actor’s personality that seems intractably connected to all his screen performances. In Downhill Racer, it’s used to great effect. Michael Ritchie’s downbeat story of a self-centred, arrogant Olympic skier is a classic of late 60s existentialism. With its stylish snap zooms, it thoroughly undermines the patriotic athlete-ashero myth – using its star’s unreadability as a key factor.

Of all Redford’s directors, Ritchie was among his most challenging. The one-two punch of Downhill Racer and The Candidate (1972) features the golden boy at his most unfathomable and unlikeable, a cipher of American manhood that was well-suited to being subverted during the counterculture era. In The Candidate, his role as puppet politician Bill McKay is a clear echo of Bobby Kennedy, and just as unreadable as his Olympic skier. It’s an asset here, allowing his constituents to project whatever they want on to him. Troublingly, McKay’s empty platitudes work; the less he stands for, the more popular he seems to become. One can imagine a rather less attractive blondhaired man asking the same haunting question in the final election victory scene: “What do we do now?”

By the end of the decade, Redford would be one of the highest-paid actors in Hollywood. In the underrated The Electric Horseman (1979), which saw him play a down-and-out ex-rodeo star who moonlights as a caricature of himself for a corporate job as a cereal salesman, he would touch on this very celebrity. There’s a real melding of Redford’s own long-held concerns and interests within it: the death of the American West, the corporatisation and cheapening of the culture; Redford’s dislike of his own fame. Ultimately, he decided to do something about what he perceived as an ugly turn in American cultural and political life. He summarised it as such in a 1988 interview with Esquire, saying, “Now if someone makes $10 million selling venetian blinds, next thing you know they’ve bought a studio.”

Someone of Redford’s calibre had a great deal of power to exert on his studio heads, producers and directors. He didn’t always take artistic advantage, but he generally wielded that power admirably, forming a distribution company in the early 70s that would be the seed for his Sundance experiment. The goal was to release small films and documentaries that may have struggled otherwise. Of Sundance, Redford explained, “Hollywood was shifting away from content-rich, character-based films. Young and daring filmmakers were stopped at the gate; there was really no place for anyone to see their films. These trends opened up the opportunity for Sundance to become a content leader.”

Although the festival has become more mainstream since its founding in 1980, it’s hard to underestimate the impact it – along with the Sundance Labs, which work to train and mentor a younger generation in the industry – have had on countless indie filmmakers. In this year’s edition, stand-outs such as Boots Riley’s Sorry to Bother You and Debra Granik’s Leave No Trace were among the crop – a testament to the festival’s continuing relevance. But what of its founder?

In the 70s, the A-list actor was a multifarious thing. Pacino was dynamic, unpredictable, even volatile – like water coming to the boil. Hoffman was reserved and neurotic. Redford was stalwart; confident without the macho bravado of a McQueen, intelligent without the maladjustment of a De Niro. But what does that leave? There’s no excess in his performance; he’s so restrained you could be forgiven for sometimes calling him wooden. Yet in a split second everything can change: in the famous final scene in torrid romance The Way We Were (1973), for example, his eyes mist with tears and the ineffable, sculpted handsomeness softens into something more tactile. There’s more craft at work than he’s given credit for, perhaps because it’s never as showy as his fellows. He’s reactive, making him an excellent co-star; his interactions with great actresses are memorable because they seem effusive in their affection for him and he never seems to know quite what to do with it. In roles of quiet intensity, like that of Bob Woodward in All the President’s Men (1976), there’s nobility, but there’s also a sliver of careerism in all that dogged investigative reporting. You just have to squint a little to see it.

Redford is a screen minimalist, displaying a subtlety that blends perfectly with the image of idealised American manhood he portrays; a Gary Cooper type, aligned with the rugged masculinity of the West, strong and silent. He’s been Jeremiah Johnson and he’s been baseball player Roy Hobbs, making The Natural (1984) as Cooper did The Pride of the Yankees (1942). He also recalls Gregory Peck, an avowed liberal off screen who carried those causes on screen, sometimes making for iconography (To Kill a Mockingbird, 1962) and sometimes for self-righteous didacticism (Gentleman’s Agreement, 1947). It’s no coincidence that both of these men were stars of Golden Age Hollywood, a time when personas were vitally important and the man needed to fit the image. Redford should have belonged to a previous generation.

Measured against a failed studio system and the new freedoms of 70s American cinema, his choices seem more staid than they might have done. It’s no great leap, then, to understand why Redford was an appealing choice for so many period pieces, particularly those set in the early 20th century. In The Sting, The Great Waldo Pepper (1975) and The Great Gatsby, among others, he is capitalising on that distinctively old-fashioned appeal. As he looks immaculate in 1930s flat caps, dashing pilot gear and pinstripe suits, it works fabulously – perhaps too well for an actor who has always seemed to want to shy away from glamour.

As TCM’s Robert Osborne once put it, “He should have been leading in the days of Tyrone Power… The days when movie stars were magnificent and didn’t look like anyone you knew.” Osborne, not wrongly, thought that the 70s era of ordinary-looking actors and gruff realism put Redford at a bit of a disadvantage. Still, his box-office receipts from 1970-79 made him the number one domestic audience draw for the decade. And even if this wasn’t the case, it’s difficult to feel sorry for anyone because they’re too good-looking.

He’s a flashy thing in The Way We Were, highlighted for his beauty, his tawny hair as insurance-worthy as Betty Grable’s storied legs. Sydney Pollack understood how to play up Redford’s physical glamour while appealing to the star’s sense of earthy authenticity. That may account for their seven collaborations together, although Pollack once remarked that he’d never had a more difficult job in his life as convincing Redford to take on the part of Hubbell Gardiner. Many audiences were pleased that he did, and even Kael – no great fan of Redford – conceded that the film played perfectly to the actor’s best qualities, as seen “through Barbra Streisand’s infatuated eyes”. 

While Burt Reynolds gladly posed as undressed centrefold in Cosmopolitan magazine, Redford steadfastly – some might say unsportingly – avoided this attention. He’s aware of his effect on women, but his attitude is dismissive at best: “Nothing to see here, let’s move on.” What he fails to understand – or chooses to ignore – is how impossible it is to extricate his appearance from his stardom. He can’t help the inevitable. As with all great movie stars, Redford is partly defined by his physicality, gaze and aesthetic qualities. He’s aged, and claims to be thankful that this sort of attention has faded a little, but even as an older man, there’s an almost stately quality to his features: these days, he looks sculpted from some craggy Utah mountain, every inch the cowboy he always personified.

The Old Man & the Gun leans into these archetypes, but also into a certain perceived wholesomeness about Redford. Lowery massages this to the film’s benefit, but it can also be a weakness. When a young bank teller begins to cry during a robbery, Forrest is taken aback. “Whatcha crying for?” he asks her, with a ‘Who, me?’ smile. How could she possibly be scared of him?

But it’s this same assurance that Redford would never hurt her – this same sense of absolute safety – that has also proved to be one of his biggest flaws. In a 1980 interview, talkshow host Michael Parkinson opened with a tough question posed by a British newspaper: “Why is it that you’re an actor who projects himself as an establishment outcast… but you always cast yourself as the hero in every film you make, and never in a role that will engender anything less than the audience’s total sympathy?”

It’s true that since the 1960s – at least until his canny casting as a duplicitous politician in Captain America: The Winter Soldier – he has rarely played a truly villainous character. His marriage-wrecking billionaire in Indecent Proposal (1993) came close, but he’s too much of a figure of fantasy to be really threatening. Sometimes, as in the prison drama Brubaker (1980), even the implication of a more complex, unheroic dimension is shooed away.

This safety also manifests itself in another way. If the fair-haired Redford is an archetypal fairytale prince, the fact is that he’s as neutered as one. For all his sex scenes – with, say, Faye Dunaway in Three Days of the Condor (1975) or Michelle Pfeiffer in Up Close & Personal (1996) – he never truly radiates active, desirous sexuality. When he’s shirtless, which is often, he’s a love object and matinee idol writ large. 

But he’s too righteous and aloof to really commit to portraying lust, especially when compared with some of his male contemporaries. In The Thomas Crown Affair (1968) Steve McQueen looks at Dunaway so voraciously you think he might eat her. Paul Newman’s knowing smirks and faintly mocking eyes were those of a man who knew he had a woman in the palm of his hand. Redford is charming, sure: he tenderly adjusts the sleeve of Jane Fonda’s blouse or protectively slings an arm around Babs. But he’s too much the gentleman to ever be a cad, and more’s the pity.

As a filmmaker, Redford has regularly tackled subjects which are meaningful to him. His directorial career has nonetheless been tepid; with the exceptions of Ordinary People and Quiz Show (1994), most of his output has been mediocre. He’s earnest, sure, but he’s never had particular flair. Kael, in a review of Brubaker, wrote, “It seems to be a two-hour commercial for a man running for governor, for senator, or for God.” It’s a brutal appraisal, but not wrong vis-à-vis the star’s sometimes self-congratulatory tendencies. The rumours are manifold: until recently, they’d say he wouldn’t play ‘old’, he wouldn’t be dumped on screen, he was pernickety about his lighting. None of them really matter in the final analysis; if he’s been risk-averse in the past, his incredible solo performance in J.C. Chandor’s All Is Lost (2013) serves as a late-career antidote – and should put those rumours of vanity to bed.

In a strange way, Redford’s flaws as a creative artist have a consistency with the things that continue to make him a great star: inaccessibility, traditionalism and a certain degree of predictability. That part of him that remains reserved and untouchable is a paradoxical thing. Such is the secret filigree of gold in the personality of the movie star. In his best films, Redford’s unknowability is appealing, and yet after all these years, don’t we know him at least a little bit?