Robert Redford Goes Downhill

There are those who will tell you that Robert Redford was the original choice to play Benjamin Braddock in the 1967 romantic classic, The Graduate. He was certainly in the running, and wanted the role badly. And, as my Seduced by Mrs. Robinson clarifies, he had just finished starring for director Mike Nichols in a Broadway hit comedy, Barefoot in the Park, so he seemed to be in a good position to headline Nichols’ planned first film. But, as the film’s producer, Larry Turman, spelled out to me, neither he nor Nichols was entirely sure that Redford was the right choice to play an awkward lover who was funny precisely because he was in over his head with a sexy older woman. Enter Dustin Hoffman, who turned in a performance that was a comedy gem.

 By 1969, Redford had made a half-dozen films, both amiable comedies and action thrillers. But lightning struck when he joined with Paul Newman for a true blockbuster, Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid. The two Hollywood hunks proved to have remarkable comic chemistry in a story less about the Old West than about the friendship of two rebellious buddies set against a rapidly changing world. Thinking back about the whole of Redford’s acting career, which includes some major thrillers and some films with strong political implications (see The Candidate and, of course, All the President’s Men), I’m convinced that as an actor Redford was at his best in roles that combined substance with comic flair. These include Butch Cassidy and The Sting, two brilliant pairings with Newman, as well as such more modest efforts as Sneakers (a caper comedy about hackers) and the late-in-life The Old Man & the Gun, shot when Redford was over 80.

 Which brings me to Downhill Racer, made in the same year as Butch Cassidy. Michael Ritchie’s first directorial effort, magnificently filmed on some of the world’s great ski slopes, is a gutsy look at the professional ski circuit, and grapples with the question of what it takes to be a winner. Redford plays an ambitious young racer, summoned by coach Gene Hackman to join the U.S. ski team after (in the film’s highly dramatic opening minutes) a talented skier suffers a bone-shattering fall. We know right away that Redford’s character, Dave Chappellet, is good—but also that he’s not particularly nice. He regards his new teammates as nuisances or rivals, and can’t be bothered to listen to his coach’s warnings. He’s willing to work hard on his own skills, but camaraderie is not for him.

 We understand something about Dave’s psychological makeup during the off-season, when he goes home to rural Colorado. His curmudgeonly dad, clearly a loner, greets him coldly, showing little interest in his son’s efforts to achieve Olympic gold on the way to fame and fortune. A local flame is thrilled to see him, but clearly it’s only sex he’s after.. The pattern repeats itself in Europe, where the sophisticated assistant (Camilla Sparv) to a manufacturer of ski equipment falls hard for him, only to learn that he’ll give her nothing beyond a roll in the hay.  He’s a loner and a user, that’s all.

 I won’t go into the end of the film, when his jest to the team’s #1 skier leads to an outcome he may or may not have anticipated. Is he a carefree hotdogger, or is there something more devious in the back of his mind? That’s an open question, one the film leaves us asking ourselves. I’d much rather watch Redford again in Butch Cassidy.

 

 

Older Doesn’t Always Mean Wiser: “Nobody’s Fool”

Why’d I watch a 1994 character piece called Nobody’s Fool? Partly it had to do with the death in May of writer/director Robert Benton, whose down-to-earth work I’d long admired. As a complete unknown, he co-wrote (with David Newman) Bonnie and Clyde, one of the most remarkable films of the remarkable film year 1967. Over a decade later he both wrote and directed Kramer vs. Kramer, winning himself two Oscars. And there was another Oscar in 1984, honoring his original script for Places in the Heart, a film based—I’m told—on his own Texas family. He directed that one too.  

 Watching Nobody Fool was my salute to Benton’s talent for making the everyday seem special and unique. It was also my tribute to co-star Jessica Tandy, for whom this was a final film. (The original Blanche DuBois died at age 85, just before the film’s release.)  Many others in the film’s cast are also no longer with us: it’s particularly poignant to see Philip Seymour Hoffman in the small but goofy role of a small town cop who’s a little too quick on the trigger. But of course the biggest loss has been that of star Paul Newman, who—then just shy of 70 years of age—was nominated yet again for a Best Actor Oscar for this role. (He lost to Tom Hanks in Forrest Gump, but at this late point in his career Newman had already finally snagged a statuette for The Color of Money.) He would be nominated once more for 2002’s Road to Perdition, voiced a role in Disney’s Cars in 2006, and passed from the scene in 2008, at age 83. 

 Nobody’s Fool is poignant, but also quite funny. (At least some of the credit should go to novelist Richard Russo, who wrote the novel on which the film is based.) Set in the dead of winter in an upstate New York hamlet where everybody knows everybody’s business, it focuses on Donald “Sully” Sullivan, a sometimes-construction worker with a bum knee, an appreciation for poker, and a boyish enjoyment of playing tricks on his boss (Bruce Willis). He may seem happy-go-lucky, but there are dark memories of a drunken father and of his own greatest misstep: walking out on a wife and young son many years before. Though he only moved across town, Sully and his son have never re-connected. But the son is back now, with kids and problems of his own, and Sully finds himself in the odd position of needing to act like a grown-up. It’s a layered and thoroughly fascinating performance.  

 Part of what makes the film feel so lived-in is the casting of veteran actors who really help the fictional North Bath, New York feel like a community full of lovable eccentrics. There is, for instance, the rather inept lawyer (Gene Saks) who puts up his artificial leg as his stake in a poker game. Bruce Willis, who reportedly took a major pay cut for the chance to act with Newman, is memorable as the construction boss (and feckless womanizer) who makes Sully’s life miserable but owns a really classy red snow-blower that becomes a running joke. As Willis’s neglected wife, Melanie Griffith is her appealing self. 

 What’s really striking about Newman’s character is that—for all his reputation as a ne’er-do-well—he turns out to be one of the kindest souls in town. It’s his kindness that Jessica Tandy sees in him when she refuses to stop being his landlady, despite her own son’s bluster. Yes, he’s a nuisance, but we sure need more of his ilk.  

 

 

 

Paul Newman Holds His Own: “Fort Apache, The Bronx”

Paul Newman was well known to most movie fans (as well as to Hollywood casting directors) as the epitome of the tough, sexy American male, sometimes an iconoclast and a loner but always the most attractive guy in the room. Fellow macho-man Steve McQueen lumped himself with Newman when worrying that, in the wake of The Graduate, “ugly” guys like Dustin Hoffman might threaten the careers of classically handsome types. The funny thing is that my first awareness of Paul Newman made me categorize him as the wimp who doesn’t get the girl.   

Newman made his Broadway debut in 1953, in a featured role in William Inge’s explosive play, Picnic. Set in a small midwestern burg, it’s about the local beauty who defies convention when a handsome drifter comes to town on the eve of the annual picnic. Left behind in her passionate connection with the drifter is her longtime beau, a good guy but one who bears the limitations of his small-town upbringing. Newman would seem to be obvious casting as the hunk (that role went to Ralph Meeker), but instead he played the rejected boyfriend. Since I—living thousands of miles from New York City—was an inveterate reader of Broadway plays I never saw on stage, I jumped to the conclusion that Newman came off as a weakling.

 Not hardly, as fans of such landmark films as The Hustler, Hud, Cool Hand Luke, and Butch Cassidy would be quick to point out. Newman’s signature character is not always smart in his behavior, but he’s crafty, highly physical, has a disarming sense of humor, and (whatever his weaknesses) you can’t help but love him. These movies were all made in the Sixties, but in 1981 a gracefully ageing Newman (age 56) brought some of those same qualities to a nice little cop thriller called Fort Apache, the Bronx.

 Fort Apache, The Bronx appropriates the name of a 1948 John Ford western to describe a much-beleaguered police precinct house in New York City. (A former Bronx cop had used that same name in his published memoir, leading to a lawsuit that plagued the production.) Newman plays Murphy, a veteran cop with an ex-wife and a drinking problem. His partner, played by Ken Wahl, is something of a newbie, but the two are devoted to one another. They have far less affection for their fellow law officers, some of whom are bottom-of-the-barrel discards from other precincts. The new precinct captain, played by Edward Asner, wants to run things by the book, but fails to understand the challenges of a neighborhood in which drugs, guns, and prostitution rackets are everywhere. (Really, he should have stuck to journalism!) Not only does he trigger a riot but his new policies lead to a heinous crime by one of the boys in blue.

 The action of Fort Apache, The Bronx, kicks off with the apparently senseless murder of two rookie cops sitting in a squad car. The police never solve the crime, though we in the audience know from the start who’s behind it and why the culprit will never be brought to justice. This is just one of the indications that the problems spelled out in this film will not be solved anytime soon. It’s a grim message, but Newman’s character (despite the bitterness that leads him to consider an abrupt retirement) is a cop through and through. I’m grateful to director Daniel Petrie and screenwriter Heywood Gould for leaving us in the coda with a glimpse of Newman and his partner joyously doing what they do best.