AS the 1960s turned into the 1970s, it wasn’t cool for star actors to be good-looking.
The style was more a scuffed, grizzled, bleary, sweaty, paunchy and shlubby realness. The fashion was for leading men like Gene Hackman, Jack Nicholson, Woody Allen.
Even a very beautiful man like Paul Newman had a kind of rugged, daylit quality. But Robert Redford was very different.
Here was a supremely beautiful movie star who went on to direct, produce and then be the guardian and gatekeeper of commercial-indie US cinema at his Sundance Institute. And he was always an outlier.
When movie audiences thrilled to George Roy Hill’s western Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid in 1969, they knew that in breakout star Redford they had an almost indecently attractive male, however much he might dress it down with buckskins and moustache, playing the devil-may-care outlaw Sundance Kid himself.
His sardonic charisma and sexiness shone through. And when he cleaned himself up for other roles, teaming up again with Newman for the jazz age con-men caper The Sting in 1973, the effect was electric.
Neatly trimmed and shaved, Robert Redford was just outrageously handsome, incandescently handsome, he was handsomeness on legs. His photograph was in the dictionary next to “handsome”.
In Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, Paul Newman might be permitted to entertain Katharine Ross with his wacky stunts on a bicycle, to the accompaniment of Raindrops Keep Fallin’ On My Head. But it was blond bombshell Redford who was actually going to have sex with her.
Redford was a throwback to the era of Douglas Fairbanks and Tyrone Power, the Hollywood era of gasp-inducing matinee idols and swoonworthy dreamboats, absurdly handsome men whose beauty seemed to have been nurtured in some Hollywood petri dish.
The American movie business was reputedly trying to imitate some of the dash and freewheeling style of the French New Wave directors – and Redford became, for a while, the Bardot of the American new wave, but with a self-awareness and a comic self-deprecation that made him irresistible to women and men.
He was a comic performer with wonderful flair, but never, in my view, very well served by serious pictures such as The Great Gatsby (1974) in which he played Fitzgerald’s enigmatic plutocrat, or The Way We Were (1973), in which he is the shallow Wasp in love with Barbra Streisand’s Jewish intellectual.
In those films, for me, Redford would sometimes appear to retreat into himself, into his own misty-eyed aura, like a very lonely and beautiful woman.
His best film of that time is surely Michael Ritchie’s superb political satire The Candidate, a movie released in June 1972, 12 days after the Watergate break-in. Redford plays Bill McKay, an idealistic young Democratic candidate for the US Senate, and the movie shows him on the campaign trail inexorably trimming his standards and watering down his principles as he gets closer and closer to winning.
Redford’s pure handsomeness itself achieves a sublimely satirical quality in the film; politics is supposed to be show business for ugly people, but Redford’s physical beauty is symbolic of how the ruling class sees itself – and a symbolic of the bland, specious plausibility of mainstream political ideas. In All the President’s Men (1976) he was Bob Woodward to Dustin Hoffman’s Carl Bernstein – another “buddy” pairing of the sort he and Newman made fashionable in 1970s cinema.
It was a heartfelt, liberal movie in which you knew who the good guys were, but without the edge and cool ambiguity of Ritchie’s The Candidate.
As the years went on, there was something rather too controlled and preserved about Redford’s performing style, although he remained an above-the-title A-list star.
He played opposite nuclear scene-stealer Meryl Streep in Out of Africa (1985) and inevitably got royally upstaged; in the 90s, he was still the romantic lead in Up Close & Personal opposite Michelle Pfeiffer, while in Indecent Proposal he was the wealthy businessman who makes a rather preposterous “proposal” which appeared to offer audiences a rather contrived dilemma in which feminism is neither here nor there. - September 17, 2025
