I was saddened to learn last week of the death of the Sundance Kid. I’ve always thought of Robert Redford as Sundance because he wasn’t really Robert Redford until he played the Sundance Kid against Paul Newman’s Butch Cassidy in that very amusing 1969 movie. Before that he was just another Hollywood pretty face. After, he was an international star on his way to fame and fortune in a long and successful career on the silver screen.
“A star is different from an actor,” Epstein wrote. “Stars always play themselves, while actors play characters.”
And no wonder. The movie, though laced with the odd liberal sermonette, is funny and charming. Redford’s Sundance is riveting. It’s beautifully filmed, has a pleasing soundtrack, and gives us some memorable movie lines, including but not limited to: “Who are those guys,” “You just keep thinking, Butch. It’s what you’re good at,” and “Think ya used enough dynamite there, Butch?” I also enjoyed the incomparable Strother Martin’s, “I’m not crazy, I’m just colorful.”
In subsequent Redford roles there was almost always a little to a lot of Sundance. A straight, competent, confident, and courageous alpha male who deals with the problem the movie presents and wins the pretty girl in the process. Just the type that Hollywood rarely gives us today.
In this regard I call the jury’s attention to 1975’s Three Days of the Condor, an implausible story with the usual liberal tilt, in which Redford is watchable as he unravels the mystery and outwits and defeats the bad guys while managing to fall into the arms of a radiant young Faye Dunaway. The ending, where the Redford character tells a CIA bad guy played by Cliff Robertson that the New York Times will save us, depending on one’s mood, induces either laughter or gagging. But the trip with Sundance and his lovely companion was enjoyable enough that I ignored this knee-slapper. (I also admire Max von Sydow’s fine supporting role as the amoral assassin, Jobert.)
In his attitude, speech, and behavior, Sundance is a very American character. Redford always stayed in this character, even when he played British aristocrat Denys Finch-Haton, who woos and wins Meryl Streep’s Karen Blixen in 1985’s Out of Africa. It was of course world-class miscasting to have Sundance playing a posh Brit with two last names. It would make as much artistic sense casting Gabby Hayes as the Archbishop of Canterbury. But in 1985 Redford’s box office appeal was enormous, so the makers of the movie knew movie-goers would happily go along with the gag, regardless of this disconnect. Few even noticed it.
In his Tuesday tribute, our own Bruce Bawer (one of my literary heroes — I counsel to be on the lookout for his byline) explores Redford’s tragic flaw, that being his naïve, off-the-rack, Hollywood liberalism which infected and disfigured many of his movies. But Bruce concludes, as I do, that even though many of Redford’s sappy message movies are best ignored, there is much for anyone of any politics to admire in much of Redford’s work, both in front of and behind the camera.
In Friday’s Wall Street Journal the estimable Joseph Epstein makes the case that Redford was “the last movie star,” the biggest attraction from the end of the era when the only way to watch movies was to go to a theater. And we all watched the same movies back then. No more. Today movies are spread across countless streaming services and are often made for specific demographics and interest groups. For good or ill, movies are no longer part of our shared culture.
“A star is different from an actor,” Epstein wrote. “Stars always play themselves, while actors play characters.” True enough. Ticket buyers during Redford’s heyday went to the local Bijou to see the latest Redford, in the way movie-goers of a previous time flocked to the theaters to see the latest Duke Wayne (even when the critics said it was bad for them to do so). No one inhabited the screen in the way Redford and the Duke did during their times. There were others before these two, both actors and actresses, who dominated the silver screen. But none, Epstein rightly suggests, since then. How many today eagerly anticipate the latest Clooney, the latest Pitt, or that latest Neeson?
I can’t leave the subject without picking this nit with the departed Sundance (a complaint doubtless shared by many men of a certain age). After the failure of my first marriage, I was thrown back on the dating scene at the peak of Redford’s popularity in the late seventies and the eighties. The women I went out with would often want to go to the latest Redford movie. How could I say no? But after two hours in the dark watching the knee-bucklingly handsome Redford, the credits would roll, the theater lights would come up, and my date would look over and realize that she was going home with me. There usually followed the kind of sigh a guy doesn’t want to hear.
Just one example: I went out a few times with an attractive woman who stands six-feet tall in her stocking feet. In heels, she was eyeball-to-eyeball with my then 6-3 ½. (Age and back surgery have whittled me down to 6-2.) As we were leaving the theater after watching All the President’s Men, I was treated to the usual sigh. It went in this wise:
She: “Sigh.”
Me: “HE’S SHORT!” (OK, he wasn’t that short. But what else did I have to fall back on?)
She: (In a dreamy voice.) “I don’t care.”
But time moves on. My second marriage was the charm. I’m happy now and no longer sore at Redford who charmed my dates of yesteryear. Redford/Sundance made some political movies that are little more than scolds, and will not be long remembered. But he made enough good ones to be a memorable and positive American figure, and to justify my sincere regret at his passing.
RIP Sundance.
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Class Clown: The Memoirs of a Professional Wiseass — Proof You Can Joke Your Way Through Life