The year was 1961, and “The Twilight Zone” had just cast a young Robert Redford for his looks.
Robert Redford, then just 25 years old, was already a professional actor. He’d been in small roles on hit TV shows like “Alfred Hitchcock Presents” and “Perry Mason,” and on Broadway. His feature film debut had been just one year earlier, in Joshua Logan’s adaptation of “Tall Story” (which also, by sheer coincidence, was the film debut of Jane Fonda).
His short role in the “Playhouse 90” production of “In the Presence of Mine Enemies,” opposite screen legend Charles Laughton, caught the eye of “Twilight Zone” director Lamont Johnson, who “thought he was amazing-looking” and believed Redford had “blazing eyes and that candor and that kind of American Beauty about him,” which would be well-suited to the character of a wounded, charming cop.
That episode, “Nothing in the Dark,” became one of “The Twilight Zone’s” most beloved installments. In part, yes, because it was an early performance by the future star of “The Sting” and “All the President’s Men,” but mostly because Redford is perfection in that role. The third-season story starred Gladys Cooper (“My Fair Lady”) as an elderly woman who’s afraid to go outside because she’s terrified of dying. When a police officer is shot outside her door, she takes him in, and he’s the loveliest young man she’s ever met. And, in a classic “Twilight Zone” twist, he turns out to be the living personification of Death itself.
Redford’s easy charm and classically stunning features were, in that moment, perfectly weaponized. He was playing the most frightening force in the universe, yet by the end of “Nothing in the Dark” he makes a convincing case that death is nothing to fear. If I were Death I’d have been flattered by the portrayal. Now that Redford himself has passed into the great beyond, it’s easy to imagine the Grim Reaper taking the hand of the actor who saw such good in them and saying “Mr. Redford, I’m a huge fan.”
Of course you’d be hard-pressed to find someone who wasn’t a huge fan of Robert Redford. He was also one of those great actors who had a loving relationship with the camera, and it’s obvious the camera loved him back. Redford walked onto a soundstage and no matter what lens was attached, those 35mm rigs automatically racked focus. He didn’t just have a handsome face, he had a face that was always thinking, and that pensiveness read on-screen. He starred in one of the best spy movies, “Three Days of the Condor,” and he didn’t play a hunky action hero. He played a bookworm who got in way over his head. And unlike a lot of films where movie star-types play intellectuals, he looked like he really had read every book in the library. Always processing. Always feeling.
Robert Redford played a lot of clever people. He was a brilliant con artist in the Oscar-winning mega-blockbuster “The Sting,” opposite his “Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid” co-star Paul Newman, who somehow matched Redford’s intelligence and sometimes had a little more swagger. Redford’s performance as Watergate scandal reporter Bob Woodward in Alan J. Pakula’s “All the President’s Men,” alongside Dustin Hoffman’s as Carl Bernstein, gave newspaper reporters their most dignified on-screen representative since Clark Kent. That film, released only two years after Woodward and Bernstein’s reporting led directly to President Nixon’s resignation, has aged better than almost any speedily produced biopic by sticking to the facts, and letting Redford and Hoffman cook.
He was a romantic leading man as well, with beloved roles in Sydney Pollack’s “The Way We Were” and “Out of Africa.” So universal was Redford’s romantic appeal that when he played a billionaire sleazebag offering Woody Harrelson a cool million to sleep with his wife, played by Demi Moore, the audience for the controversial erotic drama “Indecent Proposal” had to seriously think about it. I mean yeah, that’s not cool, but also… maybe, yeah.
Robert Redford was, of course, an accomplished director too. He won an Oscar for his debut behind the camera, “Ordinary People,” and was nominated again for the 1994 real-life TV scandal drama “Quiz Show.” His work as a director was sometimes impeccable, but he wasn’t always on his A-game. After his one-two punch of elegiac Americana, “A River Runs Through It” and “The Horse Whisperer,” he struggled to find financial success or critical acclaim as a filmmaker in his own right.
And while we’re here to celebrate Redford as an artist, we’d be remiss if we neglected to mention that it was Redford’s golfing drama “The Legend of Bagger Vance” starring Will Smith — along with Frank Darabont’s “The Green Mile” — that led Spike Lee to popularize the term “magic negro” to describe Hollywood’s embarrassing, recurring trope where angelic Black characters only exist to improve the lives of white people.
In later years Robert Redford took a variety of roles that challenged him, in one form or another. His performance in J.C. Chandor’s “All Is Lost” — a nautical disaster movie starring Redford and literally no one else — is one of the most incredible on-camera feats of the 2010s.
It’s hard to imagine now but Robert Redford was only nominated for one Oscar for acting, in the Best Actor category for “The Sting.” He lost to Jack Lemmon in “Save the Tiger,” but was also up against Marlon Brando, Jack Nicholson and Al Pacino in three of their most iconic roles. It was a tough year, fair enough, but the Academy somehow managed to ignore his amazing work in “All the President’s Men,” “The Natural” and “All is Lost,” and Redford’s repeated snubs — at least as a thespian — remains one of their most glaring oversights (which is saying something).
Of course, the youngest among us probably know Redford best for his performance as Alexander Pierce, a fascist who infiltrated the American government with his secret cabal of not-quite-Nazis-but-also-not-NOT-Nazis in “Captain America: The Winter Soldier” (remember when that plot seemed slightly implausible?). Casting Redford as the villain in a Captain America movie, when he himself would have been perfectly cast as the hero just a few decades prior, was a delightful subversion, and to his credit Redford took the role as seriously as any of the 1970s thrillers he starred in, and which the Russo Brothers took as their direct inspiration.
Sifting through Robert Redford’s career to find his best movie is a fool’s errand, in part because he made so many indelible classics, and in part because the answer is almost certainly “Sneakers.” Phil Alden Robinson’s post-Cold War tech thriller has one of the most stunning casts of the 1990s: Redford, Sidney Poitier, Ben Kingsley, River Phoenix, David Strathairn, Dan Aykroyd, Mary McDonnell, James Earl Jones. It’s also one of the best scripted thrillers you’re ever likely to see, about a team of security experts who get roped into a scheme to steal a codebreaker that could access any computer system, and who say incredibly witty things, and make incredibly smart decisions. It’s a film without meaningful flaws. And although it was largely overlooked in its day, it’s now one of the most beloved films of its ilk, and rightly so.
We’ll miss Robert Redford, on camera and off. He was instrumental in reinvigorating, rebranding and expanding the Sundance Film Festival into the game-changing celebration of independent cinema it became, and still mostly is today. And he probably never got enough credit for being one of the best actors of his generation, which may have something to do with his movie star charisma, but may have more to do with how easy he made every difficult creative decision look.
His best films are a master class in acting, and often directing. His worst films — and any actor and director who works as long and as prolifically as Redford is bound to have a few — were never phoned in.
He was as good as a movie star gets in this industry, and usually a lot better.
