Diane Keaton died last week, less than a month after Robert Redford. It’s a pity the two never worked together, having been screen icons in the same three decades — the 70s, 80s, and 90s. His career exploded with Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid (1969), hers three years later in the masterpiece, The Godfather. Although the Hollywood dynamic of the era made the male star more vital than the lead actress — Redford had to carry his films, Keaton just her part — Keaton always pulled more than her weight over the greatness bar.
Only a progressive fanatic would make a loose remake of Casablanca set in 1959 Cuba with the Castro forces as the good guys.
The Godfather, Play it Again, Sam, Annie Hall, and Manhattan would have been brilliant films with another actress in the lead. But Keaton elevated each with her talent and charisma. She had something else most of the other top 70s actresses — Ellen Burstyn, Julie Christie, Liza Minnelli, Jill Clayburgh, Mia Farrow — sorely lacked, likability. Only Goldie Hawn matched her in this asset, which is why both women remained stars for over 50 years. Their chemistry in 1996’s The First Wives Club helped turn the comedy into a major hit.
As funny and manic as Steve Martin is in the two Father of the Bride movies, they sparkle thanks to Keaton’s attractive calming presence. Yet she also proved the perfect goofy match for Woody Allen’s shmuck persona in eight films, three indelible ones — Play it Again, Sam, Annie Hall, Manhattan. This quality also had its drawbacks. Because as sexless as Keaton’s wardrobe is in the title role of Annie Hall, including a horrible masculine tie, it set a fashion standard for too long afterward, which discouraged girl-dating boys like me at the time.
Keaton was so effortlessly good in the Woody Allen movies that Mia Farrow couldn’t equal her, hard as Allen tried to turn Farrow into the same character. Consequently, in the best Allen-Farrow film, Hannah and Her Sisters (1986), the audience guiltily supports Farrow’s husband, Michael Caine, cheating on her with her smoking-hot sister, Barbara Hershey, as Allen clearly intended. But viewers would have been more resistant to the affair with Keaton in the wife role.
Guided by master auteurs like Francis Ford Coppola, Richard Brooks, and George Roy Hill, Keaton gave excellent performances in The Godfather (1972), Looking for Mr. Goodbar (1977), and The Little Drummer Girl (1984). She was not as convincing in movies by lesser lights such as Reds (1981), Shoot the Moon (1982), Mrs. Soffel (1984), Crimes of the Heart (1986), and The Only Thrill (1997).
Even Coppola didn’t know what to do with Keaton in the erratically great yet overrated The Godfather, Part II until her very last scene, where Michael Corleone (Al Pacino) shuts the door in Kay’s face. Her earlier dramatic exchange with Michael, when she announces her abortion and disgust for him, after he’d risked his life to protect her, comes out of nowhere. The less said about The Godfather, Part III (1990) the better.
I met Diane Keaton very briefly in the late 90s during my Hollywood screenwriter days. The UCLA Film Department was featuring a series of movies that influenced major names. To my surprise and delight, Keaton introduced John Ford’s Stagecoach (1939) and gushed about John Wayne. “Forget his later politics, whatever your opinion of them,” she said. “This is the kind of screen introduction every actor dreams of, and plays off, and nobody ever did it better. I would have loved to work with him.” And that’s when I got a late-in-life crush on Diane Keaton.
Hers was the sort of open-minded artistic perspective that Robert Redford lost in his latter career. He had it in spades once. Even his most blatantly liberal 70s films — The Candidate (1972), The Way We Were (1973), Three Days of the Condor (1975), All the President’s Men (1976) — were intellectually rewarding to all audiences. Condor ends with a chilling challenge by CIA Establishment agent Cliff Robertson to outcast agent Redford about a revelatory story his character just gave to the New York Times.
“Hey, Turner, how do you know they’ll print it?,” Robertson says. “You can take a walk — but how far if they don’t print it?” And as I wrote here about a book on the making of The Way We Were, it was Redford himself who saved the movie from being a commercially disastrous leftwing screed.
His earlier lightness gave Redford a flair for comedy. He didn’t do a lot of comedies but shone in all of them (okay, some of these are only half comedies) — Barefoot in the Park (1967), Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid (1969), The Hot Rock (1972), The Sting (1973), Legal Eagles (1986), and Sneakers (1992). Then he stopped being funny or even light. Though he did get one final unintentional laugh, on his death scene in Up Close and Personal (1996).
Playing a veteran TV journalist, he gets off the plane in a mid-revolutionary Latin American hellhole and hears crossfire. Then he actually does a quick doubletake before getting hit by a bullet. A friend and I who worked for the director, Jon Avnet, burst out laughing at the screening, and had to hush ourselves.
By then, Redford had also lost his political balance in selecting movie projects. Only a progressive fanatic would make a loose remake of Casablanca set in 1959 Cuba with the Castro forces as the good guys. Redford did so in Havana (1990). Or reenact the Dan Rather story playing Rather as the hero rather than a partisan hack — Redford, Truth (2015). Or portray yet another misunderstood 60s militant forced to go back on the run — Redford, The Company You Keep (2012). No wonder he ended up in Marvel Comics movies.
Fortunately, Redford made one late great nonpolitical film in the end, where he hardly says a word. In All is Lost (2013), he plays a yachtsman on the Indian Ocean fighting to survive a fatal boat leak. His physical and emotional displays in the movie showcase a fine actor at his best. And though Redford and Diane Keaton never shared the screen, they separately made it a lot better.
READ MORE from Lou Aguilar:
Hollywood Unraveling: The Idiot Savant
The Loneliness of the Conservative Screenwriter
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