Robert Redford

The once famously handsome, later famously rugged, actor and director died today (today!?) at 89.

I'm kind of surprised, on checking his filmography, to find that I've only seen nine films he acted in, because I always thought I followed him pretty closely. It was seeing him in Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, which was pretty much his breakout role, that was responsible for my seeking out two films he made a couple years later.

The Candidate, sill a preserved image of how US political campaigns actually worked in that period, is a fine portrait of their soul-sucking quality. Redford plays a young lawyer who embarks on a quixotic campaign determined to speak the truth as he sees it. And when that refreshing honesty brings him unexpectedly wide support, his managers force him into becoming a bland packaged product mouthing platitudes, out of fear of offending anybody and losing that support. This is pretty much what happened to the John Anderson presidential campaign eight years later, so it's penetratingly observant.

The Hot Rock is a crime caper comedy about a gang of hapless crooks led by Redford and George Segal (also new to me at that point). It became significant in my life when I read the novel it was based on, which made me into a lifelong fan of the novel's author, Donald E. Westlake.

Then came The Sting and All the President's Men, both classics of their kind, and in more recent years A Walk in the Woods and The Old Man and the Gun. But the only one of Redford's weepy romantic films I've seen is Out of Africa, encouraged by a friend who was a big Isak Dinesen fan.

In all of these, Redford was a solid presence, with a tendency that increased over the years to be quietly reactive rather than the active presence of his earlier years. Redford's character in The Sting is so much a carefree ne'er-do-well that his motivation, to seek revenge for a friend's death, is almost buried. You wouldn't see Redford play a role that way in later years.