From All the President’s Men to The Way We Were - ranking Robert Redford’s top 10 films.
If Robert Redford had one truly enviable knack as a star, it was in making his bread-and-butter performances – those that might simply have paid the rent – into splendidly smooth examples of his professionalism.
He seldom seemed to strain. Heavyweight drama was rarely his metier; he preferred to be light on his feet – nimble, dodging danger in suspense thrillers, barely even hunting for plaudits. Everyone must have assumed he’d make the perfect, blithe Jay Gatsby – but the 1974 adaptation, lavishly budgeted by Paramount, turned out to be a too decorous, rather dead take on Fitzgerald’s novel.
For that reason, it hasn’t made my pick of Redford’s finest films. Neither has Out of Africa (1985), even though it was ostensibly a triumph, a Best Picture Oscar-winner, no less. The fact is, it’s simply not Redford’s film – it’s Meryl Streep’s, and John Barry’s, far more than it is his – and he’s patently miscast as a British aristocrat.
The best of Redford’s performances, then (and we exclude his substantial directing work from this rundown) are united less by wild swings or actorly reinventions than by his uncanny cruise control. What he epitomised best was grace under pressure.
Harking back to his 1970s prime, Redford made a sprightly on-screen comeback with this Tony Scott espionage thriller. He’d given Brad Pitt an early breakthrough when he directed him in A River Runs Through It (1992), and here pivoted to playing his mentor in houndstooth blazers – a CIA veteran inching towards retirement, who spends his last day at Langley masterminding Pitt’s extraction with wit and guile.
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Few stars of Redford’s generation were paired romantically on screen with so many strong women, from Meryl Streep to Faye Dunaway to Michelle Pfeiffer and Jane Fonda. But here he met his match in Barbra Streisand. They shake hands in 1937 as students with radically different politics – he’s an affable WASP, she’s a firebrand. They love to hate to love each other as the world sets itself on fire, in Redford’s second (and second best) of seven collaborations with director Sydney Pollack.
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Everyone predicted a Best Actor Oscar nomination for Redford here, which didn’t materialise – a snub to which he reacted with typical sangfroid. This one-man survival drama used him better than any other film this century, as a self-reliant sailor whose boat is damaged by a shipping container, leaving him adrift. As an actor, Redford had a rare gift for letting the viewer inside his character’s head – crucial here in a piece with such minimal dialogue.
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A personal favourite with a generally delectable ensemble – but proof, too, that Redford’s dexterity in a light comic caper didn’t dwindle in middle age. He made security expert Martin Bishop – a team leader with a shady past – into one of his most genial, oddly durable heroes, who sparks delightfully with the likes of Sidney Poitier, Mary McDonnell and James Earl Jones. The film is a rewatchable pleasure, as addictive and satisfying as a good quick crossword.
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A whopping hit – indeed, far and away the biggest box office attraction of 1969 – this is the film that established Redford as Hollywood’s new golden boy. Of course, it was really his pairing with Paul Newman, 11 years his senior and already a megastar, what done it. This rose-tinted western paired them as train robbers with raindrops dancing on their heads, ending famously with a freeze-frame on their blaze of glory.
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Many baseball fans rank The Natural as their favourite film about the sport – though it scores equally as an essay on Redford’s supremely photogenic self-assurance as a movie idol. Those golden locks were never lit more lovingly at magic hour (by wizardly cinematographer Caleb Deschanel), than in this honeyed portrait of a fictitious baseball great, which could easily be mistaken for a biopic.
Streaming on Neon or available to rent or buy on Amazon Video and Apple TV+.
Redford and Newman were reunited – to even better effect – this time as Depression-era con men who play a wicked long game against Robert Shaw’s vicious mob boss. Redford got his only Oscar nomination for acting here, and perhaps it seems like an easy-breezy choice for that accolade: proof, simply, that he’d reached a peak as a popular performer. He’s supremely dapper in Edith Head’s pin-striped suits.
Only in Hollywood do “bookish” CIA researchers look like Redford, but that’s no dent in Sydney Pollack’s crackerjack spy thriller, which makes you mourn for all the nail-biting performances he might have given Hitchcock, had their paths crossed. After he comes back from lunch to find an office massacre – and takes Faye Dunaway hostage to hide out in her flat – we’re relying on Redford near totally to sell the berserk plot, which he somehow manages.
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Redford’s curation of his career and image in the 1970s was exemplary, and Michael Ritchie’s film was one of his smartest choices: a deft political satire about an idealistic governor’s son talked into opposing a Republican senator. Little by little, he smooths off his edges, to maximise voter appeal and inch towards victory, in the process becoming an eerie stooge with no convictions at all.
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Redford’s portrait of Washington Post investigative reporter Bob Woodward, who (with Carl Bernstein) blew Watergate wide open, is obviously only part of the picture here, but he’s utterly convincing. This account of their scoop – a very big deal in 1976 – is the most Redfordian film he ever starred in, and the best. With its taut dramatic urgency and seriousness of political purpose, it pointed him forward to a directing career which would train a microscope on American values time and again.
Streaming on Neon or available to rent or buy on Amazon Video, Apple TV+ and YouTube.