ARI SHAPIRO, HOST:
Robert Redford once said, to climb up the mountain is the fun, not standing at the top. Early this morning, this man who scaled the mountain of cinema for decades died at age 89. Redford was a golden child of Hollywood, starring in dozens of movies. But he was never content just being an all-American matinee idol. He became an Oscar-winning director, founded Sundance and advocated for environmental causes before that became a Hollywood cliche. To look back on Robert Redford's work and his legacy, I'm joined by Linda Holmes, host of NPR's Pop Culture Happy Hour podcast and film critic Bob Mondello. So good to have you both here.
BOB MONDELLO, BYLINE: Good to be here.
LINDA HOLMES, BYLINE: Hello, Ari.
SHAPIRO: Let's start back in the '60s. Redford became a huge star with "Butch Cassidy And The Sundance Kid," starring opposite Paul Newman. What version of Robert Redford did we see in that Western?
MONDELLO: Well, audiences at that point knew him as a handsome lug opposite starlets - Natalie Wood in "This Property Is Condemned," Jane Fonda in "Barefoot In The Park," which he'd also played on Broadway. That was a light Neil Simon comedy. So transitioning those partnership skills to a Western and to a what we would later call a bromance with Paul Newman was kind of a big jump as in the most famous scene from "Butch Cassidy And The Sundance Kid," when they're cornered on a ledge high above a river.
(SOUNDBITE OF FILM, "BUTCH CASSIDY AND THE SUNDANCE KID")
ROBERT REDFORD: (As The Sundance Kid) Ready?
PAUL NEWMAN: (As Butch Cassidy) No, we'll jump.
REDFORD: (As The Sundance Kid) Like hell we will.
MONDELLO: (Laughter).
HOLMES: Yeah. And as a buddy movie and as an adventure movie, this is a little bit subversive. I think without spoiling it fully, I'll just say the ambiguity of the ending - its kind of lack of a clear triumph - are not really what a contemporary audience would expect if you sat them down with a film like this, right? They would expect the two guys, like, trade some quips at the end. They had a long day. That's not what this movie is. And so in that way, it really is kind of - it was a little bit striking out from the norm.
SHAPIRO: Love your sensitivity to spoilers for a movie that came out in the '60s.
(LAUGHTER)
SHAPIRO: Moving ahead to the '70s, he was the centerpiece of so many huge movies. Can you just, like, go down a list of some of them?
MONDELLO: Well, there was "Jeremiah Johnson" in 1972. He sort of tamped down his beauty a bit with that beard. He was rugged in that one. "The Way We Were" in '73 - Pauline Kael said that he was never more easy on the eyes than when you saw him through Barbra Streisand's eyes in that one. "The Sting," also from '73, where he reprised his bit with Paul Newman, and it was his only nomination for best actor.
HOLMES: Yeah. And I particularly love a trio of thrillers that he made. "All The President's Men" and "Three Days Of The Condor" are kind of classics. But I would also mention "Sneakers," which is from 1992...
SHAPIRO: Oh, yeah.
HOLMES: ...Which is a really, really fun movie with an incredibly stacked cast. Sidney Poitier is in this, David Strathairn, River Phoenix, who was very funny in one of his last movie roles, and Robert Redford. He did a kind of a callback to "Three Days Of The Condor," in particular when he appeared in "Captain America: Winter Soldier," which was...
SHAPIRO: Oh, fun.
HOLMES: ...Very much influenced by those '70s paranoid thrillers. And the fact that Redford kind of stepped back into that part was, I thought, very cool.
SHAPIRO: Such a huge range. But he wasn't fully comfortable being a glamorous Hollywood star. How did he relate to that niche?
HOLMES: Well, you know, I think without reducing him to his handsomeness, he was good, at times, in sort of weaponizing that element of his physicality, right? In 1962, he was in an episode of "The Twilight Zone" called "Nothing In The Dark," where he played death. But part of what the episode is about is that death is not ugly or scary and you don't need to fear it because it comes in this very kind of charming young man package.
You could actually say a similar thing about "Indecent Proposal" - right? - which is a film from the '90s that's about a rich man, played by Redford, who pays a couple a million dollars to spend one night with the wife. And the insecurity of the husband in that film really requires Redford to be so charming and handsome that you kind of believe maybe she's genuinely tempted by him.
SHAPIRO: Yeah.
MONDELLO: Now, if Redford were moderating this conversation, he would, at this point, want us to talk about his directing and...
SHAPIRO: (Laughter).
MONDELLO: ...About Sundance.
HOLMES: (Laughter).
MONDELLO: Because he was really uncomfortable with his role as this beautiful actor.
HOLMES: Of course.
MONDELLO: And he said so. Here he is on Fresh Air, talking about that in 2013.
(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED NPR CONTENT)
REDFORD: So suddenly, you're seeing yourself in - kind of in a glamour category, and you're saying, well, wait a minute. You know, the notion is that, well, you're not so much of an actor. You're just somebody that looks well. And that was always hard for me 'cause I always took pride in whatever role I was playing, I would be that character.
SHAPIRO: OK, well, let's talk about who was he as a director.
HOLMES: Yeah, his directorial debut was a huge one, "Ordinary People" in 1980, which won best picture, and he won best director for this story about this kid played by Timothy Hutton.
(SOUNDBITE OF FILM, "ORDINARY PEOPLE")
TIMOTHY HUTTON: (As Conrad Jarrett) I'm supposed to take care of it?
JUDD HIRSCH: (As Dr. Tyrone Berger) And that wasn't fair, was it?
HUTTON: (As Conrad Jarrett) No. And then you say, hang on. Hang on. And then you let go.
HOLMES: Yeah, that's a really tough story. It's about a family that's experiencing a lot of grief, and it could be just a lot of crying and sobbing. And there's some of that, but I think the direction is one of the things that kind of keeps it under control.
MONDELLO: And it also made people think about psychiatry in a way they hadn't before, at least in the films. And he saw something in Mary Tyler Moore that no one had ever seen before him. And he followed up with "Milagro Beanfield War" and "A River Runs Through It" and "Horse Whisperer" and "Quiz Show," about TV quiz show scandals in the 1950s. And he got more Oscar nominations for that one.
SHAPIRO: And of course, you can't talk about Redford's legacy without talking about the Sundance Film Festival.
MONDELLO: That's right. He championed the kind of movie that he was too big to star in himself. His presence would have sort of morphed it into something else. He liked these independent, scrappy, experimental, edgy, issue-driven films. And he made space for filmmakers like Steven Soderbergh and Ava DuVernay.
HOLMES: Yeah, I think anybody would acknowledge that Sundance has its own, you know, big money relationships to Hollywood stuff at some times, but it has definitely been a place for movies to get discovered that would have had a hard time getting discovered before.
SHAPIRO: That's NPR's Linda Holmes and Bob Mondello remembering Robert Redford, who has died at age 89. Thank you both.
MONDELLO: Good to be here.
HOLMES: Thank you. Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.
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