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Forty years of Robert Redford Robert
Redford has always been one of my favourites over the years, not only
because of his protean acting skills and his even more impressive show
as a director but because of his commitment to parallel cinema through
his Sundance Institute. He has the courage to break away from the
Hollywood pattern which today seems to be scraping the bottom of the
barrel. So when this writer chanced to catch Spy Game on Star
Movies the other day, one couldn’t help going down memory lane with
Redford. That Spy Game, too, is one of the best spy thrillers
in recent times just cannot be doubted with British director Tony
Scott doing an excellent job. And young Brad Pitt who co-stars with
him harks back to the budding Robert Redford of the late 1960s as far
as youth went. True they have totally different personas but Redford
made as impressive a start in Hollywood as Pitt in This Property Is
Condemned (1967) and Barefoot in the Park. His seniors were
Natalie Wood and Charles Bronson in the former and a blooming Jane
Fonda in the latter, which is before becoming an anti-war activist and
aerobics instructor. Redford was also an exuberant young newly wed in
Neil Simon’s play-turned-film Barefoot in the Park. Then
Redford teamed up with "Blue Eyes" Paul Newman in two of
George Roy Hill’s most outstanding movies Butch Cassidy and
the Sundance Kid, an off-beat Western, and The Sting,
about a con operation, both runaway successes that sent his stock
skyrocketing. I remember the film particularly for the scene in which
Butch and Sundance jump off a ravine into a river down far blow,
hollering, to escape from their pursuers. But the Raindrops Keep
Falling on my Head with Newman and Katherine Ross on a bicycle is
not far behind. Why, the Sundance Institute and festival are derived
from his Sundance Kid performance. As for The Sting, that last
incident, faked for the benefit of Robert Shaw, is just out of this
world. That was Hollywood at its best. Maybe Redford wasn’t in as
many films as Pitt but he tended to pick and choose his roles. Who can
forget his gritty performance opposite Dustin Hoffman in All the
President’s Men (1976), the story of Watergate and Richard Nixon’s
Waterloo? Journalism was a familiar Hollywood subject in those days
and several films were on the Fourth Estate, such as Network and
Absence of Malice. But especially memorable was his getting
under the skin of that Long Island socialite in The Great Gatsby,
based on a F. Scott Fitzgerald novel whose milieu was that New York
suburb. Incidentally Francis Ford Coppola (The Godfather) wrote
the script. The 1980s saw Redford in an occasional film, like Brubaker
(1980) and The Natural, but they were merely potboilers. He
must have been more involved in directing and the Sundance Institute.
After all one must grow in life and for talented guys like him leave
some mark on the cinema world. He made his directorial debut in Ordinary
People, which won him an Oscar in 1980. It marked the emergence of
new star Timothy Hutton though the main honours belonged to Donald
Sutherland, by then a veteran, and Mary Tyler Moore. The thing about
Redford’s direction is his choice of films. He steered clear of the
routine or humdrum topics. The Milagro Beanfield War (1988) is
a heart-warming story of impoverished New Mexico farmers fighting
against the unscrupulous land developers. In A River Runs Through
It (1992) he deals with fly-fishing and how in some parts of the
United States it is a virtual religion. It was also one of Pitt’s
early films. Quiz Show (1994) is an expose of one of those
popular 1950s TV programmes where the prizes were fixed and apart from
Paul Scofield (A Man for All Seasons), he worked with
comparative newcomers, one of them Ralph (pronounced Rafe) Fiennes.
But what an enthralling drama he churned out. The Horse Whisperer
tackles an unusual subject in which he is that rare breed.
Kristen Scott-Thomas too plays a supporting role in this compelling
drama, which only shows that if one wants to, one can make some
delightful, thought-provoking films. This is what I like most about
Redford who in the last four decades has come a long way from just
being a good-looking blonde. Here’s wishing him more strength to his
bow and like Oliver Twist one would sincerely ask for more.
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