The Candidate (1972)

          “Our lives are more and more determined by forces that overwhelm the individual,” remarks Senatorial candidate Bill McKay (Robert Redford) at one point in The Candidate. The same can be said of McKay’s life, because over the course of this remarkable movie, the idealistic young activist gets swallowed by the machine that sells politicians to the American public. And keep in mind this sobering film was made two decades before the emergence of the Internet as a key factor in campaigns, so the realities to which it speaks have only become more troubling in the ensuing years. The wild part, of course, is that The Candidate isn’t a pure drama—it’s got a strong thread of comedy, because the filmmakers zeroed in on the absurdity of modern American politics. This is mainstream cinema of the highest order, blending lively entertainment and important themes into a unique viewing experience.

          The Candidate was written by Jeremy Larner, a speechwriter for Eugene McCarthy’s 1968 presidential campaign and, incidentally, the author of the book and screenplay for the eccentric 1971 drama Drive, He Said. Larner netted a Best Original Screenplay Oscar for The Candidate—although, inexplicably, he’s never written another movie—and his work meshes beautifully with that of his two plugged-in collaborators, director Michael Ritchie and star Robert Redford. Together, the team present the fictional McKay as a keeper of the Kennedy flame, an unapologetic liberal concerned with the troubles of minorities and the underclass. He’s blessed and cursed with unique political gifts, not only because he’s articulate and handsome but also because he’s the son of a legendary Senator, John J. McKay (Melvyn Douglas).

          When the story begins, Bill is happily involved with community activism and legal aid for the poor. He’s approached by ambitious campaign manger Marvin Lucas (Peter Boyle), who envisions Bill as an ideal opponent for slick Republican incumbent Crocker Jarmon (Don Porter). Naïvely (or cunningly) accepting Marvin’s line that a Senatorial campaign can be used to air Bill’s favorite issues, Bill agrees to run, although he’s told there’s little chance of actually winning. Then, as the campaign gains momentum, Bill’s idealism suffers the death of a thousand cuts when he makes compromises and softens his rhetoric into noncommittal generalities. The magnificent tension of the story arises from the question of whether Bill genuinely regrets the changes he’s making. As he succumbs to power and temptation, does Bill retain his inherent goodness, or does he willingly accede to “forces that overwhelm the individual”?

          Director Ritchie, who previously collaborated with Redford on Downhill Racer (1969), delivers some of his career-best work here, orchestrating complex scenes that simultaneously explore multiple dynamics, and his use of montage to simulate the excitement and pageantry of political events is impressive. The filmmakers also benefit from outstanding performances across the board. Yet it’s the subtlety of The Candidate that impresses the most, from the way Larner’s script evokes the fraught relationships between Bill and the people in his life to the way Redford communicates tiny nuances as they pass through his character’s mind.

          The Candidate runs a bit long at 110 minutes, and the picture could have benefited from a few more jokes to arrive at a more consistent tone. The movie is also, to be frank, a bit on the clinical side. However, these quibbles are insignificant in the face of how many things this truly great movie gets right. The Candidate is without question among the handful of truly essential films ever made about American politics, and it’s a career milestone for everyone involved.

The Candidate: RIGHT ON

The Great Waldo Pepper (1975)

          Director George Roy Hill was such a fervent airplane enthusiast that he persuaded two of his most acclaimed collaborators, screenwriter William Goldman and star Robert Redford, to join him in making this passion project celebrating the daredevils who flew biplanes at exhibitions across the country during the barnstorming era. (The trio’s previous joint venture, released in 1969, was a little something called Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid.) Set in the 1920s, the picture focuses on Waldo Pepper (Redford), a World War I veteran whose military service was unspectacular. Driven to prove he’s a world-class flyer, Pepper becomes a barnstormer, performing wild stunts for spectacle-hungry crowds that are equally thrilled by crashes and triumphs.

          During this early stretch of the film, when Pepper builds a friendship with fellow flyer Axel Olsson (Bo Svenson) and struggles through a fraught romance with Maude (Margot Kidder)—who hates the risks Waldo takes—Hill achieves two impressive storytelling feats. First and most obviously, he captures the joy of flight with terrific aerial photography. Secondly and more subtly, he captures the lonely quality of men who follow an inner call toward personal achievement. Redford is the perfect actor for communicating this notion; an iconoclast who has spent decades cultivating personal mystique, Redford understands self-definition.

          Considering that Hill could easily have translated his fascination with barnstorming into a lightweight adventure film—in addition to Butch Cassidy, he and Redford made the endearing 1973 romp The Sting (which was not written by Goldman), so frothy entertainment is undoubtedly what audiences expected from this particular paring of actor and star—it’s impressive that Hill elected to go so dark. In fact, some might argue he went too dark. Goldman has often told the story of how a preview audience turned on the movie during a shocking scene involving Pepper and a terrified, wing-walking stuntwoman (Susan Sarandon). Yet viewed beyond the context of its initial release, when audiences wanted Redford to play only golden gods, The Great Waldo Pepper is a nuanced and thoughtful film that unflinchingly depicts the costs of individualism.

          As the story progresses, for instance, Pepper endures a string of accidents that cost him his pilot’s license and force him to pursue work as a movie stuntman under an alias. Goldman’s writing excels in this last movement of the picture, since Goldman has often said the theme that touches him most is “stupid courage”—boldness in the face of certain doom. The Great Waldo Pepper isn’t a perfect picture, with some of its episodes connecting more strongly than others, but it’s a unique celebration of one filmmaker’s romantic visions, seen through the prism of a star and a writer who were eager to help their friend realize his dreams of soaring through the sky, cinematically speaking.

The Great Waldo Pepper: RIGHT ON

Three Days of the Condor (1975)

          While elitists often cite the collaboration of actor Robert De Niro and director Martin Scorsese as the prime example of a ’70s star/auteur mind-meld, it’s unwise to overlook a partnership that manifested in glossier movies—that of actor Robert Redford and filmmaker Sydney Pollack. While the films these men created together have never enjoyed the critical adoration of the De Niro-Scorsese pictures, the Redford-Pollack movies were, generally speaking, more popular with audiences and, in very different ways, just as thematically rich. Around the time De Niro and Scorsese were shooting their seminal psychological drama Taxi Driver, for instance, Redford and Pollack were enjoying the success of a slick escapist movie, Three Days of the Condor. Based on a novel by James Grady, and adapted for the screen by reliable popcorn-movie guy Lorenzo Semple Jr. and go-to Pollack rewriter David Rayfiel, Condor is a great yarn.

          Joseph Turner (Redford) is a CIA analyst whose days are spent reading books and documents for clues that might benefit the American intelligence community. Though he’s got the code name “Condor,” he’s not a covert operative. One day, Turner walks into his office and discovers that all of his co-workers have been assassinated. Someone in Turner’s unit uncovered top-secret data, so now Turner, as the unit’s only survivor, is a target. He spends the rest of the movie on the run, with ice-blooded European hit man Joubert (Max von Sydow) in pursuit. And since Turner isn’t sure he can trust his main CIA contact, Higgins (Cliff Robertson), he seeks refuge with a stranger, Kathy (Faye Dunaway). This being a Pollack movie, Kathy falls for Turner, so she gets pulled into his dangerous world even as Turner tries to unravel the conspiracy.

          As in most great thrillers, the mechanics of the plot are simultaneously crucial and disposable—we get enough detail to play along with Turner as he solves mysteries, but the actual information being pursued by characters within the story is inconsequential. The real fun comes from the moment-to-moment suspense of Turner trying to figure out whether people want to help or kill him. Aided by collaborators including master cinematographer Owen Roizman (The French Connection), Pollack does some of his best work here, keeping the story moving at a fast clip while still generating his signature romantic intensity. Redford plays to his strength of immaculately defining tiny shifts in mood and thought, his subtlety adding dimensions to the plot, and Dunaway is arguably warmer here than in any other movie. (Robertson, von Sydow and John Houseman are all entertaining, though their roles have fewer facets.) Exciting, sexy, and surprising, Three Days of the Condor is a great case study in how a well-matched actor and filmmaker can complement each other to produce highly enjoyable cinema.

Three Days of the Condor: RIGHT ON

The Hot Rock (1972)

          Lightweight and never quite as laugh-out-loud funny as it should be, The Hot Rock is nonetheless a fun caper flick featuring one of Robert Redford’s most effortlessly charming performances. The movie also boasts a thoroughly entertaining screenplay by William Goldman, the wiseass wordsmith who penned Redford’s breakout movie, Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid (1969). In fact, Goldman and Redford clicked so well whenever they collaborated, it’s a shame their friendship dissipated after behind-the-scenes strife during the development of All the President’s Men (1976). Anyway, The Hot Rock was adapted from a novel by Donald E. Westlake, whose special gift is creating likeable crooks and outlandish plots. The Hot Rock begins with career thief John Dortmunder (Redford) getting released from his latest stint in prison—although he’s a talented robber, he has a bad habit of getting caught. Dortmunder is picked up, after a fashion, by his brother-in-law, Kelp (George Segal)—Kelp stole a car he doesn’t know how to drive, so he nearly runs Dortmunder over.

          And so it goes from there: Dortmunder’s life becomes a comedy routine of incompetent criminality once he agrees to pull a job with the amiable but unreliable Kelp. The duo are hired by Dr. Amusa (Moses Gunn), the U.N. ambassador of a small African nation, to steal a gigantic diamond, but each attempt at nabbing the prize ends up a pathetic failure. Over the course of several weeks, Dortmunder and Kelp try stealing the diamond from a bank, a museum, a police station, and a prison, abetted by neurotic explosives expert Greenberg (Paul Sand) and reckless getaway driver Murch (Ron Leibman).

          Goldman and versatile British director Peter Yates keep things moving along smoothly, balancing jokes and tension during elaborate heist scenes, so while The Hot Rock never explodes into raucous chaos, it sustains a solid energy level from start to finish. Yates shoots locations beautifully, capturing a vivid sense of Manhattan as an urban playground for the film’s gang of chummy nincompoops, and the acting is lively across the board. Redford plays everything so straight that he grounds the film’s comedy in emotional reality (while still cutting a dashing figure), and Leibman and Segal complement his work with motor-mouthed hyperactivity. Sand contributes a quieter vibe of sedate weirdness, and Gunn incarnates exasperation with great poise. Overbearing funnyman Zero Mostel pops up for a featured role about halfway through the picture, but luckily he’s only onscreen for short bursts, so he doesn’t wear out his welcome.

The Hot Rock: GROOVY

Little Fauss and Big Halsy (1970)

          In Michael Feeney Callan’s 2011 biography Robert Redford, there’s a brief but illuminating examination of Redford’s involvement in Little Fauss and Big Halsy, a deservedly obscure flick costarring the gleaming blonde Californian and diminutive oddball Michael J. Pollard. According to Callan, Redford picked the project as his follow-up to Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid (1969) for perverse reasons of wanting to undercut his likeable image. And, indeed, Redford plays a right proper son of a bitch in this meandering movie about two losers who make their way through the Southwestern dirt-bike circuit. Halsy (Redford) is a narcissist who swindles everyone he meets, but rarely thinks past his next meal or sexual conquest. During his travels, Halsy seemingly befriends insecure white-trash troll Fauss (Pollard), but it turns out Halsy’s got an agenda—he injures Fauss during a race, then persuades Fauss to become an on-call mechanic rather than a competitor. Meanwhile, Halsy gets involved with a string of women and dangles the possibility that he’ll get Fauss laid.

          This strange movie becomes less and less plot-driven as it progresses, so the second half of the film comprises interchangeable scenes involving Fauss, Halsy, and Halsy’s main girlfriend, Rita (Lauren Hutton), a vapid hippie who eventually becomes pregnant. Although the story doesn’t go anywhere, Little Fauss and Big Halsyis moderately interesting for its offbeat texture. Most of the film was shot outdoors, so grim, sun-baked terrain becomes a visual signifier for the going-nowhere characters. Country-music legend Johnny Cash sings a number of original songs, which comprise the entire musical score. And then there’s Redford, playing one of the most extreme roles of his career—while showcasing his matinee-idol looks by appearing shirtless in many scenes, he also captures the reckless way self-centered studs strut through life.

          For instance, at one point Halsy slips out of a motel room the morning after a threesome, claiming he’s got no use for chicks who go both ways: “Once it’s cool, twice it’s queer!” Seeing Redford play a carefree monster is bracing, so it’s a shame the movie doesn’t rise to his level of commitment. Part of the problem is director Sidney J. Furie, who builds individual scenes competently but can’t seem to find a shape for the overall narrative, and part of the problem is the lack of star power complementing Redford. Bonnie and Clyde Oscar nominee Pollard presents a compendium of tics instead of a performance, moping and pulling weird faces, while former model Hutton is dull and whiny.

Little Fauss and Big Halsy: FUNKY

The Electric Horseman (1979)

          Enjoyed for its surface pleasures, The Electric Horseman is a diverting romantic adventure servicing such quintessentially ’70s themes as the dangers of rampant corporate control, the exploitive nature of mass media, the nobility of nonviolent rebellion, and the travails of rugged individualism—it’s a popcorn movie offering ideas in addition to star power and visual spectacle. The title character is Sonny Steele (Robert Redford), a self-loathing former rodeo champion who works as a spokesman for a brand of breakfast cereal. Shuffling through a degrading life of personal appearances, photo shoots, store openings, and the like, Sonny is perpetually drunk and rarely on time or prepared, so he’s on the verge of getting fired from his cushy gig.

          Meanwhile, the corporation that employs him has adopted as its mascot a retired racehorse called Rising Star, which is valued at $12 million. When Sonny arrives in Las Vegas for an event at which he’s expected to ride Rising Star during a garish stage show, he realizes that the magnificent animal has been drugged to ensure compliance, which offends Sonny’s long-suppressed nobility. Strapping on his lightbulb-festooned costume—hence the movie’s title—Sonny climbs onto Rising Star’s saddle and rides the horse right out of a casino and into the surrounding desert, stealing the animal with the goal of setting it free. The purpose of this grand gesture, of course, is redeeming Sonny’s sense of honor and self-worth.

          Yet because this is a Sydney Pollack movie—the fifth of seven pictures the fine director made with his pal Redford—The Electric Horseman also includes a love story. Hallie Martin (Jane Fonda) is an ambitious TV reporter who spots Sonny’s bad attitude well before he steals Rising Star, and then dogs him once his actions elevate Sonny to folk-hero status. Eventually, Hallie joins Sonny on the trail and they evolve from idealistically opposed sparring partners to simpatico lovers. As sometimes happens in Pollack’s pictures, the romantic angle feels forced and unnecessary, partially because it slows the momentum of the main narrative and partially because the script contorts itself to make Sonny and Hallie equally interesting. Although Redford seems completely comfortable in his Western-iconoclast role, Fonda struggles to mesh the authentic and ersatz aspects of her contrived character. Worse, since the real love story in the movie is between Sonny and Rising Star—by escaping the corporate system together, they redeem each other—the Hallie character’s presence is ultimately superfluous.

          Nonetheless, The Electric Horseman is filled with glamorous filmmaking and terrific acting. Redford dominates, naturally, though Fonda seizes strong moments whenever she can, and crusty Western types including Wilford Brimley and singer-songwriter Willie Nelson (in his first dramatic performance) lend credibility. On a fundamental level, The Electric Horseman is hypocritical horseshit—an expensive studio movie railing against money-loving corporations—but somewhere amid the hollow posturing is a sweet fable about freedom.

The Electric Horseman: FUNKY

The Great Gatsby (1974)

          While this much-maligned adaption of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s classic Jazz Age novel is highly problematic, it’s not the disaster its reputation might suggest. And while the movie’s biggest shortcomings are indecisive direction and poorly conceived leading roles, it must be acknowledged that the source material’s inherent ambiguity prevents easy translation to the cinematic medium.

          The basics of the movie’s storyline are intact from the novel. In 1920s Long Island, carefree young socialite Daisy Buchanan (Mia Farrow) endures a financially comfortable but loveless marriage to the abusive and adulterous Tom Buchanan (Bruce Dern). One summer, Daisy’s life is brightened by the arrival on Long Island of a favorite cousin, comparatively penniless Nick Carraway (Sam Waterston). Nick resides in a small cottage next to the palatial estate of Jay Gatsby (Robert Redford), a mystery man who throws lavish parties that he doesn’t attend.

          Jay befriends Nick as a means of arranging a meeting with Daisy, whom we learn was in love with Jay prior to her marriage. The Daisy/Jay romance was originally thwarted by Jay’s poverty, so in the intervening period he acquired great wealth through dubious means. A dreamer mired in the past, Jay hopes to steal Daisy away from her unworthy husband and reclaim the idylls of yesteryear. Fitzgerald’s novel is a meditation on the blithe manner in which the rich trifle with the lives of the poor, and the book explores such rich themes as ambition, jealousy, self-delusion, and self-destruction.

          The screenplay, credited to Francis Ford Coppola but reportedly tweaked by director Jack Clayton and producer David Merrick, simplifies Fitzgerald’s story in hurtful ways, accentuating some of the novel’s least interesting aspects—the seductive glamour of Roaring ’20s clothing, the silly revelry of Prohibition-era parties, the trashy extremes of a subplot involving Tom’s déclassé mistress, Myrtle Wilson (Karen Black). Clearly, when the adaptation of a book famed for its internal qualities gets mired in surfaces, there’s a major disconnect on some level.

          Furthermore, it’s no coincidence that Clayton didn’t direct another Hollywood movie for nearly a decade after The Great Gatsby: His storytelling is so awkward that he sometimes contrives complex tracking shots that land in the wrong place, with a key character obscured while delivering dialogue, and Clayton gets completely lost during party scenes, lingering on unimportant details like the flailing hem of a flapper’s skirt while she’s doing the Charleston.

          The lead performances are similarly unfocused. Farrow is far too stilted to evoke Daisy’s signature quality of intoxicating carelessness, and Farrow’s clumsy reactions during the most dramatic scenes recall the over-the-top mugging of silent films. Redford fares better, nailing several important nuances, though he seems like he’s in a different movie from everyone else—he’s striving for quiet depth while other actors settle for loud melodrama. Waterston finds a comfortable middle ground between the extremes of Farrow’s and Redford’s performances, and the scenes between him and Redford are the movie’s best.

          Dern is very good, too, though he’s boxed in by a one-note characterization, and supporting player Scott Wilson is quietly moving in a key role. As for Black, there’s a reason a punk band bears the ironic name The Voluptuous Horror of Karen Black—the operatic style she displays here is an acquired taste.

          The commercial and critical failure of this movie was enough to scare Hollywood away from Fitzgerald’s book for decades, as had happened previously with a reckless 1949 adaptation starring Alan Ladd; notwithstanding a bland TV version broadcast in 2000, Hollywood avoided The Great Gatsby until 2012, when flamboyant director Baz Luhrmann mounted a lavish new version (in 3D!) starring Leonardo Di Caprio as Gatsby.

The Great Gatsby: FUNKY

A Bridge Too Far (1977)

          Go figure that a movie about a military operation that was thwarted by excessive ambition would itself be thwarted by excessive ambition. Based on the doomed World War II campaign code-named Operation Market Garden, which was staged in late 1944 by Allied forces eager to maximize the gains of D-Day by ending the European component of the war with a push across Holland into Germany, A Bridge Too Far features one of the most impressive all-star casts of the ’70s, in addition to spectacular production values and a few powerful depictions of heroism and tragedy. Furthermore, the movie deserves ample praise for bucking war-movie convention by dramatizing a campaign that didn’t work. And, indeed, the theme evoked by the poetic title—sometimes, just one X factor stands between glory and ignominy—comes across in several key performances. Yet occasional glimpses of effective storytelling do not equal a completely satisfying movie, and A Bridge Too Farfails on many important levels when analyzed in its entirety.

          The movie is hard to follow, because it tracks too many characters in too many locations, and because, quite frankly, director Richard Attenborough fails to give greater dramatic weight to crucial moments. Everything in A Bridge Too Far is presented with almost exactly the same measure of gravitas, so Attenborough squanders interesting potentialities found throughout the movie’s script, which was penned by two-time Oscar winner William Goldman. Clearly, Attenborough and Goldman were both stymied, to a degree, by the sheer scale of the undertaking; producer Joseph E. Levine made it plain he wanted this movie to equal the 1962 epic The Longest Day, another all-star war picture based on a book by Cornelius Ryan.

          Yet while The Longest Dayhad the advantages of a triumphant subject (D-Day) and a receptive audience (moviegoers still embraced pro-military themes in the early ’60s), A Bridge Too Far is a far different creature—a story of battlefield hubris made at a time when America was still reeling from the traumas of the Vietnam War. So, even if the movie possessed a clearer narrative, chances are it still would’ve been the wrong movie at the wrong time.

          Having said all that, A Bridge Too Far has many noteworthy elements. The subject matter is fascinating, since Ryan’s book itemized the innumerable strategic errors made by the Allies in planning Operation Market Garden—beyond problems of scale, since the campaign involved things like an air drop of 35,000 paratroopers, the plan was so contingent upon component elements that if any one piece of the plan failed, the whole campaign would collapse. Therefore, the movie is a study of men who represent the margin of error that Operation Market Garden cannot afford—whether they’re Americans, Brits, or Poles, the soldiers in this movie try to achieve the impossible even when it’s plainly evident success is beyond their grasp.

          The most vivid moments involve Sean Connery and Anthony Hopkins as British officers trying to hold the Dutch town of Arnhem for days on end despite a crippling lack of reinforcements and supplies. Robert Redford dominates a key sequence in the third and final hour of the movie, playing an American officer who leads a seemingly suicidal charge across a heavily fortified river in broad daylight. Maximilian Schell makes an elegant impression as a German commander capable of mercy and ruthlessness, while Dirk Bogarde is appropriately infuriating as Schell’s opposite number on the Allied side, a British general who refuses to acknowledge the possibility of failure.

          Unfortunately, many promising characterizations are merely sketches: Actors Michael Caine, Edward Fox, Elliot Gould, Gene Hackman, Hardy Kruger, Laurence Olivier, Ryan O’Neal, and Liv Ullman each have colorful moments, but all are badly underutilized. And as for James Caan, his entire showy sequence could have been deleted without affecting the story, since his subplot feels like a leftover from a World War II movie actually made during World War II. Ironically, though, his are among the film’s most memorable scenes.

A Bridge Too Far: FUNKY