Robert Redford – Robert Redford: Almost an American hero

A few days ago, “an immoral offer” with Robert Redford ran on television. A film from 1993 that I have never wanted to see – precisely because it had been so successful. Now for some reason. A no longer young multimillionaire buys sex (after all for a million dollars!) With a young woman he wants – can have because you can buy everything in this world. And because this is undisputed, he makes his offer that he finds fair, the young – indebted – married couple in all openness. “Am I buying?” Asks the young woman (Demi Moore) outraged. “Never!” The husband, a young talented but unsuccessful architect, encourages her. And then they fall into a long silence. Have you never been unfaithful – and now a million for one night? Eyes closed and through? They decide – and almost break it. You can literally destroy human relationships overnight. Because wanting to buy things that you can’t buy is obscene.

Robert Redford has the ungrateful role of the overly rich man who is bored that nobody can resist his money. But the amazing thing: he alludes to his own role. Check out his cynical game with disgust, which he finally breaks off with a resigned movement in the end. Behind the facade, the aging man feels that the young woman he had wanted to buy but has now started to love will always be despised.

Without Robert Redford’s clever distance to the role and itself as a success man, it would have actually become uninteresting one -dimensional history. One doubts not only, but also the rules that this world works. And that runs through all about 50 more or less large film roles that Redford played from 1960 to 2018.

Where does this reserve come from what others naively call their career? The early death of the mother had thrown the highly grown, blond and sporty boy off the track in Santa Monica, born in Santa Monica. The 19-year-old Redford had just received a scholarship at the University of Colorado because of his baseball talent. Now this world breaks down. He no longer plays along, refuses to all expectations, but in a self -destructive way. He begins to drink and is expelled by the university, trump through Europe, becomes street painter in Paris and Florence, returns to the USA, wants to become a stage designer, then visited the American Academy of Dramatic Arts from 1959.

He plays theater on Broadway, also gets film offers – he makes one film after the other for seven years, but everyone is flops. After all, he gets to know about the Korean War of Sydney Pollack, who is also an actor at “Behind enemy lines”.

Then finally the breakthrough in 1967. Redford had already played on Broadway in Neil Simon’s comedy “Barefoot in the Park” and now this is filmed with Jane Fonda and him that is hardly too reversing. A chamber game for the cinema is the great chance for the minimalist Redford. A truly strange couple: the life -hungry teenager and the young lawyer trimmed for reason in a New York attic. Sometimes you have the feeling that Redford only looks at his lively partner for most of the time instead of playing. He may have his last chance here, but demonstrated with sovereign serenity: I am not dependent on you. It works in this constellation.

Suddenly he is no longer considered a cash poison in Hollywood, but as a star. He would almost have been occupied in “matriculation test”, but then director Mike Nichol’s doubts came: This sporty, good -looking young person should have difficulty finding a friend? Instead of Redford, the then unknown Dustin Hoffman got the role of the shy college graduate without a fixed goal in life. And in 1969 Redford, with Paul Newman, the genre of the Western parody with “Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid” successfully made it successful. Two hippie bandits play their tricky game with the law-until they are at the end of an entire army of shooting police officers, jumping towards him-and freezing the picture in the middle of the jump. Maybe there is a saving miracle for you?

Robert Redford almost had now become a brand in Hollywood’s film industry: “The highlight” from 1973 is a still surprisingly freshly looking film about a refined fraud in the competition. Just as visual as subtle “The Great Gatsby” according to F. Scott Fitzgerald’s novel, to which Francis Ford Coppola wrote the script. The love of a half -criminal -rich man to a young woman he tries to conquer – that already has something of “an immoral offer”. And Redford also remains a deeply ambiguous, almost fatalistic figure in the middle of the outer glamor.

Detired, well -made cinema – that way it could have continued. But in the 1970s, Redford was looking for politically ambitious fabrics from directors, for a scale other than just wanting to be successful on the box office. He meets his old acquaintances from times of common failures, Sydney Pollack, who now mostly works as a director. Together they realize a number of unusual films of great hardness, with which they dismantle the American self -image as lies. In 1972 Redford in “Jeremiah Johnson” was a trapper who flees from civilization to Wilden Rocky Mountains – a dropout out of bitter conviction. The loss, or worse, the betrayal of former ideals will show us with Pollack – together with his partner Barbra Streisand – in “As we were”.

Finally, with Pollack and Redford, in “The three days of the Condor” we look into the insane brain of the American secret service, in which a whole department disguised as a literature institute is liquidated to hide an error in the system. One escapes by chance – and is mercilessly hunted. The end – also regarding the future of American society – remains threatening. This is also true, again with Pollack as a director, for “the electric rider” in 1979, in which a Rodeo-Cowboy simply rides away-because in the bright entertainment circus, his horse threatens to be hid.

Redford’s political attitude is clear: he turns against all authoritarian tendencies in the USA, now in a film alongside Dustin Hoffman, who once took away the coveted role in “The matriculation test”. “The incorruptible” by Alan J. Pakula is a special kind of matriculation examination. The film reconstructs the research of two journalists from the Washington Post, which was able to demonstrate the burglary commissioned by President Nixon in 1972 to the Democrat campaign office-the Watergate affair ultimately forces Nixon to resign.

In a number of films, Redford is now successfully directing himself, such as in “The Horse whisperer” from 1998, founds its own film production and initiates the annual Sundance Festival to promote the independent film. He was believed that he was always staring at Hollywood’s star stroll (although he himself was one of the greatest stars of Hollywood), his commitment to the author’s cinema, as well as that for the preservation of nature, especially for the protection of the sea, which he produced his own documentary series.

His last big film is a small film, rather a special kind of author film. At the end of 70, he played a sailor in “All is Lost” in 2013. A man alone in a damaged sailboat at the sea. What a chamber game with full physical and mental commitment on a large stage – but without any audience. Because he is all alone outside. If he doesn’t help himself, nobody will help him. A film without a dialogue, but with all the more existential noises. The old man struggles on the falling boat – as with Hemingway – with himself and the primeval power of the sea for a full 106 minutes.

What a farewell idea of ​​a century actor who was also an impressive personality. On September 16, Robert Redford died in Sundance at the age of 89, Utah died in her sleep.