News Robert Redford dies at 89

I just rewatched Sneakers for the first time in forever less than a month ago. It was a delightful surprise to see him in Winter Soldier, and obviously he's well known for The Sting and perhaps less well-known for one of Winter Soldier's inspirations, Three Days of the Condor. I've seen parts but never the entirety of The Candidate as well (not to be confused with the candidate from Manchuria).

A great actor and from all evidence a great man; he will be missed.

His casting in TWS is brilliant because you can totally imagine him as Steve Rogers 50 years earlier, had they made an A-list version of Captain America back then (IIRC, he was on the long list or short list to play Superman, but so were most athletic and handsome leading men of the day) but also because he was one of the great stars of 70s paranoid political thrillers, which that movie evoked.

MoviesTV reran All The Presidents Men on the 50th Anniversary of the Watergate break in.
That unbroken take of Redford on the phone trying to confirm if someone in Nixon's inner circle knew about the payouts is top acting.

THE CHASE is underrated.....if not excellent, still an all-star cast for the ages with Fonda, Brando, Redford, Duvall, Angie Dickinson, James Fox, E.G. Marshall and Paul Williams among many others. Redford's character is gunned down by a STAR TREK guest actor who would later get explosive with Yvonne Craig.

LIONS FOR LAMBS, while talky, is even more underrated. Tom Cruise, Meryl Streep, Redford and Andrew Garfield appear in two of the three major plots. It's a talking heads film, but the dialogue is marvelous for all four. Dialogue as opposed to loud emoting was usually Redford's strength.

Speaking of both, ALL IS LOST is a unique approach with a superstar reverting to 95 percent physical acting. When I saw the end inside a theater, it moved one older woman to tears.

ORDINARY PEOPLE held my attention in a way even RAGING BULL could not. I agree with it winning Oscar's Best Picture from 1980.

It was also nice that he saw the logic in adding his presence to the Marvel Universe twice, and was very briefly one of the 60 major actors in the top-grossing film of all time, AVENGERS: ENDGAME.

RIP

Supposedly Avatar is considered the top-grossing film of all time at this point due to the rerelease.

Set Harth said:

Supposedly Avatar is considered the top-grossing film of all time at this point due to the rerelease.

Click to expand...

Sadly so. AVENGERS ENDGAME held the position for perhaps 2-3 weeks. The first AVENGERS peaked at the rank of all-time #3, for a time.

Besides ORDINARY PEOPLE and LIONS FOR LAMBS, Redford also commendably directed QUIZ SHOW.

His first credited film, WAR HUNT, had a hefty major role for him, though John Saxon was its official lead. Also in that cast: Tom Skerritt, Sydney Pollack, Gavin McLeod and Francis Coppola in a cameo.(Pollack would direct Redford in the future like no other.)

Coppola soon co-wrote THIS PROPERTY IS CONDEMNED, featuring one of two Redford-Natalie Wood teamups, and co-starring TO KILL A MOCKINGBIRD's Mary Badham.

Another one of his oldest movies (in black-and-white) was SITUATION HOPELESS BUT NOT SERIOUS with Alec Guinness which may have been recently released to home video.

Redford was a liberal who was unafraid to fictionally critique occasional liberal characters, such as in BRUBAKER. He was an out-of-the-box thinker in similar ways to George Clooney and others.

I am very glad Bob Woodward at least is still with us. It was great to meet him, though he likes to say women hoped or expected him to look more like Redford. Movies like THE CANDIDATE and ALL THE PRESIDENT'S MEN today are far more likely to be streamers or HBO productions than major wide-releases in theaters. Some blame their decline on the middling grosses of Ben Affleck's STATE OF PLAY adaptation. But what's grosser is the lack of them.

Good jobs, Bob. You were consistently cerebral and story-oriented, despite the Ken-doll looks. That certainly explains why you never hosted SATURDAY NIGHT LIVE.