ROBERT
REDFORD (1936-2025)
By the late 1960s and early 70s, Robert
Redford, who died last week at the age of 89, had established himself as the
biggest star in Hollywood. But he had bigger aspirations: he made his directing
debut with “Ordinary People” in 1980—tellingly not starring himself despite a
perfect role for him—winning both the best picture and best director Oscars and
then created the Sundance Film Institute and Festival, which for the past 40
years has been a leading outlet for independent filmmaking.
After five years of work in television,
including playing Parritt in the TV version of “The Iceman Cometh” (1960),
Redford quickly became a popular actor, working with top directors such as
Robert Mulligan (“Inside Daisy Clover”), Arthur Penn (“The Chase”) and Sydney
Pollack (“This Property Is Condemned) and scoring a box office hit opposite
Jane Fonda in “Barefoot in the Park” (1967).
While dismissed early in his career as just an attractive blond, Redford
emerged as one of the 1970’s best actors.
While I’m less enamored of the films that made him a superstar—"Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid,” “The Sting” and “The Way We Were”—it’s hard to deny that any actor of his generation was as convincing in both roles as a heart-melting love interest and as a man struggling to understand his place in the world.
Between the hits, he was much more
interesting in “Downhill Racer,” “Jeremiah Johnson” and “The Candidate.” In the
mid-70s he peaked with pitch-perfect performances as Turner, a CIA agent under
siege in “Three Days of the Condor” and as tenacious journalist Bob Woodward in
“All the President’s Men.” Redford had a special relationship with director
Pollack, starring in six of his films, including “Three Days” and his last
high-profile film, “Out of Africa.”
Even before directing, he was a force
behind the scenes, especially with “All the President’s Men,” the greatest film
he ever appeared in, pushing Woodward and Carl Bernstein to agree to turn their
Watergate reporting into a movie.
After starting his directing career in
1980, he acted in just nine films over the next 20 years, but that includes
“Brubaker,” “The Natural” (his aging slugger Roy Hobbs has become iconic) and
“Out of Africa.” And while he only directed nine pictures in his career, he
made two great ones, “Ordinary People” and “Quiz Show” (1994).
He didn’t score many good roles this
century—Redford turned 65 in 2001—but he earned high marks for his nearly
wordless one-man performance in “All Is Lost” (2013) and was outstanding in the
underrated “An Unfinished Life” (2005).
Redford was an underappreciated figure in
modern film history: Beyond his film roles or his directing efforts or his role
in the indie filmmaking movement (where he mentored numerous young filmmakers),
his face, reflecting both his sexual allure and quiet thoughtfulness, became as
iconic an image of his era of any performer of his time. As an actor, he wasn’t
Nicholson, Pacino or De Niro, but he was more beloved and irreplaceable to the
collective that made the ‘70s a reflowering of American cinema. In the
tradition of Clark Gable and Cary Grant, Redford will be remembered as one of the
essential 20th Century figures of movie romanticism.
DOWNTON
ABBEY: THE FINAL CHAPTER (2025)
Set just a few years after “A New Era”
(2022), this closing installment—if you believe the title—of the beloved
British television series is highly entertaining for fans of the show.
Otherwise, it offers a fashion show of 1930 clothing and morals.
I wrote this when the last film was
released: “Lady Mary (Michelle Dockery), now running the house as her father
Robert (Hugh Bonneville) has “retired” from being a wealthy landowner, holds
forth back at Downton as a film company arrives to shoot a silent drama.”
Believe it or not, writer-creator Julian Fellowes uses almost the same central
plot in “The Final Chapter.”
Turns out Lord Grantham continues to
struggle with handing power over to his daughter, complicated by her divorce
(still a high-society no-no in 1930) and her uncle’s (Paul Giamatti)
mishandling of her American grandmother’s estate.
The picture opens with a travelling shot
of the West End, beautifully recreated in CGI, where the family is taking in
the latest Noël Coward musical. They meet the world-famous writer-actor (a
scene stealing Arty Froushan) through their former butler Barrow (Robert
James-Collier), who now is the companion to dashing stage and screen actor Guy
Dexter (Dominic West).
While the gaping hole left in the story by
Maggie Smith’s death (on screen in the last film, in real life in 2024) is
impossible to fill, any devotee of the series will be pleased to see all the
cherished characters move on to the next stage of their lives.
NIGHT
OF THE JUGGLER (1980)
Chronicling the dangers of New York City
was virtually a movie genre in the 1970s, starting with “The French Connection”
and “Shaft,” followed by “Across 110th Street,” “Superfly,”
“Serpico,” and “Mean Streets.” The “Death Wish” movies turned the city into a
hellscape, while Martin Scorsese’s “Taxi Driver” seemed to blame the Big Apple
for turning a cabbie into a psychotic.
“Night of the Juggler,” a largely
forgotten picture from the end of the cycle, offers a journey through the
blight of New York while following an intense hunt for a child kidnapper.
James Brolin, a solid but rather staid actor through the 1960s and 70s, gives his most interesting performance as Sean, a former police detective whose teenage daughter is mistaken for an heiress by a malcontented psycho, superbly played by Cliff Gorman (“The Boys in the Band” and, on Broadway, “Lenny”). After Gorman’s Gus grabs Kathy (Abby Bluestone), Sean chases in vain the pair on foot and by taxi all over the city before he slowed by a police detective (“The Godfather’s” Richard Castellano) and a disgruntled former partner (Dan Hedaya).
Unlike so many films of the era, “Juggler”
avoids moralizing or overhyping the situation, led by Brolin’s unrelenting
Sean, who does his best to keep a cool head. It’s well directed by James
Butler, a veteran of episodical television.
These days, Brolin is better known as
Barbra Streisand’s husband and Josh Brolin’s father. Back then, he was a
familiar face as Dr. Kiley, associate of “Marcus Welby, M.D.,” the popular TV
series, which ran from 1969 to 1976.
A restored print of the film, which
was released earlier this month and given special screenings in Los Angeles, is
now available for streaming. For free, you can watch the unrestored version on
YouTube.
HIGHEST
2 LOWEST (2025)
The pieces of this surprisingly
uninvolving Spike Lee kidnap melodrama, a remake of a much-admired 1963 film by
Akira Kurosawa, play out like they were stitched together with tape and
staples, showing its seams despite the dominating presence of Denzel
Washington.
Washington, in his sixth, and least
interesting, picture with Lee, plays egotistical record executive David King—what
kind of music he produces is never made quite clear—in the midst of pulling off
a tricky buyback of his music business. Then his son and the young man’s best
friend, while attending a basketball camp, go missing and King receives a call
asking for $17.5 million ransom for his son.
I’m being generous when I write that the
first part of the movie has the gravitas of a Hallmark movie. While the camera
lingers over the King luxurious apartment, looking over the Manhattan skyline,
the dialogue lacks any understanding how people talk to one another.
Emphasizing the shallow script is a sentimental piano score that sounds like
something from a wedding reception.
The supporting performances all feel
forced, overly rehearsed including Ilfenesh Hadera (very good as the wife of mobster
Bumpy Johnson in Hulu’s “Godfather of Harlem”) as King’s wife, the usually
reliable Jeffrey Wright as King’s driver and close friend and the trio of
hapless police officers dealing with the kidnapping.
The plot grows more ludicrous as the
cops ignore obvious angles, expecting to catch the plotters during the money
drop. You don’t have to be a genius detective to know who would have an axe to
grind with a record exec.
The new film follows the basics of the
Kurosawa movie, “High and Low,” which stars Japanese acting legend Toshiro
Mifune as a shoe company exe faced with a kidnapping gone wrong.
Like the original, at the heart of “Highest
2 Lowest” is King’s moral decision in dealing with the kidnapper, to do the right
thing or not. But as the story continues, the director pushes the criminal’s (A$AP
Rocky) point of view—in two offensively profane rants—attempting to mitigate
his actions, or, at least, give light to the moral righteousness of his
actions. I really don’t know.
Like so many of the director’s recent films,
he leaves viewers with a mixed message.
THE
FAT MAN (1951)
A popular radio program that was based on
a Dashiell Hammett character serves as the launching point for this amusing
low-budget detective yarn. Hammett’s “Fat Man” seems to be based on his “Continental
Op” investigator and, in part, on Kasper Gutman in “The Maltese Falcon.”
(Early stories of both Hammett and Raymond
Chandler contain bits and pieces of plot and characters that appear later in
their more famous novels.)
J. Scott Smart, who had small film roles
in “Kiss of Death” and “Some Like It Hot,” reprises his vocal performance in
the flesh, bringing a self-assured, quick-witted persona to the role. He’s more
Nick Charles than Sam Spade.
As Brad Runyan, who travels with a personal
chief (Clinton Sundberg), he becomes involved in the unexplained death of a
dentist attending a convention.
The plot plays out through the memories of
various characters remembering in flashbacks the criminal and romantic life of
ex-con Roy Clark (up-and-coming star Rock Hudson), whose partners-in-crime plan
his demise.
The women in his life are played by Julie
London, better known as a nightclub singer and recording artist who had a long
career in television and Jayne Meadows, who later became the sidekick (and wife)
of comedian Steve Allen.
Oddly, the mystery leads the Fat Man to
the circus and a clown played by the legendary Emmett Kelly, both in and out of
makeup.
Behind
the camera for this programmer is William Castle, whose early career (“Johnny
Stool Pigeon,” “Hollywood Story,” among others) deserves more attention than
his higher profile work in horror films in the late 1950s and throughout the
‘60s. Here, Castle is greatly aided by cinematographer Irving Glassberg (“Bend
of the River,” “The Tarnished Angels”).
HONEY
DON’T! (2025)
After
three decades of sharing credit, brothers Joel and Ethan Cohn decided to go
solo a few years ago. Joel directed a moody, superbly acted black-and-white
version of “The Tragedy of Macbeth” in 2021. Ethan, very much on the other
hand, directed “Drive-Away Dolls” (2024), which I didn’t see, and “Honey Don’t!”
a Robert Rodriguez knock-off overflowing with gruesome murders and gratuitous
nudity played for laughs.
The actress of the moment, Margaret
Qualley, who also starred in “Drive Away Dolls,” plays a sharp-tongued,
no-nonsense private detective who takes an interest in a young woman who, it
seems, died in a violent car accident.
The rest of the story involves a
slow-witted cop (Charlie Day), a religious guru (Chris Evans) who sleeps with
women in his congregation and a policewoman who becomes Honey’s lover (Aubrey
Plaza).
If I didn’t know this was made by the
filmmaker half responsible for some of the best motion pictures of the last 40
years, I would assume it was a first-time director who spent the last decade
watching slasher movies and taking college courses in screenwriting. Filled
with sarcastic one-liners and half-hearted performances, the film quickly grows
tiresome.
Qualley, who shows up in a couple of the
movies a year (2024’s “Kinds of Kindness” and “The Substance,” this year’s
“Happy Gilmore 2”), first drew attention with a small role in “Once Upon a
Time…in Hollywood.” She appears so at ease on screen that she barely seems to
be acting. Plaza, who resembles Qualley to the point that she could pass as her
older sister, is stuck with an underwritten, way-to-obvious role that evolves
into a very unconvincing ending.
I’m already looking forward to a Coen
reunion.
THE
DOUBLE (2011)
Streaming services are lousy with political
thrillers with cliché-riddled scripts, overly intense acting and the requisite
drone shots sweeping over famous D.C. buildings. I stumbled onto this one on
Tubi, hoping that the presence of Richard Gere and Martin Sheen, stars of the
1970s now white haired but still hanging in there, would elevate this tale of
Russian spies.
While at its center is the old chestnut
of a young, eager agent (Topher Grace) partnered with reluctant, irascible
veteran (Gere, of course), the journey to the surprising final act was better
than most.
Sheen plays the CIA chief who brings
Gere’s Paul, a long-retired spy, back into the fold after the murder of a U.S.
senator looks like the work of an old Soviet foe of the agent. He’s partnered
with Grace’s Geary, who has made a career as an expert on the 1980s pursuit of
the Russian mobsters.
The writing, by director Michael Brandt
(executive producer of the three “Chicago” first-responders series) and
co-writer Derek Haas, lets an interesting character flail, revealing too much
too soon about Paul and not enough by the end. Even worse, they allow more than
an hour go by without a scene between Gere and Sheen. For me, a little bit of
Grace (“That ‘70s Show” and, more recently, “Waterfront”) goes a long way.
Sheen, now 85, started working on soap
operas and other TV shows in the early 1960s before his breakthrough, playing a
returning WW II veteran, in “The Subject Was Roses” (1970). Working steadily in
both features and TV, the actor’s high points in include the young criminal on
the run in “Badlands” (1973); two superb 1974 TV movies, as the sympathetic
deserter in “The Execution of Private Slovik” and as Robert Kennedy in “The
Missiles of October”; Capt. Willard in the outlandishly brilliant “Apocalypse
Now” (1979); and capping it off with his President Bartlett in the critically
acclaimed TV series “The West Wing.” Along the way are another dozen memorable
roles in his continuing 60-year career.
The 76-year-old Gere remains, like his
successor Brad Pitt, an enduring movie sex symbol, an old-fashioned screen star
who makes even mediocre material better. His best recent work was as a pushy
political meddler in “Norman” (2016) and as an ethically challenged stock
trader in “Arbitrage” (2012).
PHOTOS:
The iconic Robert Redford, who passed away on Sept. 16.
James Brolin in “Night of the Juggler.” (Kino Lorber Studio)
The colorful lobby card for “The Fat Man.” (Universal Pictures)
Richard Gere and Martin Sheen in “The Double.” (Image Entertainment)
