Sundown with Robert Redford

There's not a connection between Robert Redford and our mother that means anything outside of our family. But the movie icon's passing days after our own beloved superstar left us brings up all kinds of memories, like going to see a movie with Mom in which Redford waltzed down a Las Vegas street in an electric outfit. Or watching Butch Cassidy and The Sundance Kid and/or The Sting and having the best kind of eternal debate -- Robert Redford or Paul Newman? (Ultimately, I think Mom came down on the Redford side, but she loved them both.) She also enjoyed a good romantic film -- be it comedy especially if Neil Simon was involved (like Barefoot in the Park) or drama especially if Barbra Streisand was involved (like The Way We Were). 

So I'm thinking about them both at the moment, even though my favorite Redford films are mostly in a different ballpark than Mom's. I've been lucky enough to be in attendance at two New York City events featuring Robert -- a retrospective on his career and a look at one of his last roles, The Old Man and the Gun with Sissy Spacek. I thank Mom heartily for the introduction to one of my favorite actors. 

So now I'd like to present my top films of Robert's -- there will be plenty of "these were his best movies" lists going around, these are just the ones I love and watch the most. And this blog is the first thing I've written on Mom's laptop, which feels entirely appropriate.

All the President's Men: 

This will obviously be on a lot of best-of Redford lists. Robert made this one happen after buying the rights to Carl Bernstein and Bob Woodward's book on Watergate, and helped transform it into a movie about the investigation that led to Richard Nixon's resignation. This film represents a lot of things for me beyond being my favorite Redford film. It's also my favorite movie about the industry I've chosen to work in for more than four decades. It's a microcosm of life in the '70s. It somehow retains tension throughout, even though you know how it ends. The thing I always think gets lost when it comes to the film is just how good Robert's performance is in the movie. He plays Woodward with an air of naïveté while retaining the journalist's drive and desire to get a story that feels like it's over his and Bernstein's heads at times. There's a scene that hits perfectly in which Woodward is on the phone talking to two different sources and he calls one by the other's name because his head is just spinning. That's the kind of detail that gives the movie gravity and sustains it.

The Hot Rock

It's a precursor to all the Oceans movies that came afterward with four men trying to pull off a diamond robbery that keeps getting thwarted -- a lot of the time thanks to their own mistakes. Redford plays Dortmunder, freshly out of prison and immediately thrown back into a life of crime. He's smart, but he's not infallible, and that goes double for the guys he chooses to associate with -- brother-in-law George Segal, Paul Sand and Ron Liebman. They get the rock out of a high-security museum, sorta, then leave it behind at a police station, fly a helicopter to try and retrieve it and ultimately swipe it from a bank deposit box. None of these attempts are typical measures and it always seems like things just won't roll their way. The words "Afghanistan banana stand" become code for knowing and appreciating the habitual crime.

Downhill Racer

Redford doesn't always play the good guy, it just kind of feels that way. And by "good guy," I don't mean on the up and up, I mean taking on more of a villainous role. As the Sundance Kid, he's certainly not on the side of law and order. Same with The Hot Rock above. There's an interesting dichotomy that comes into play, though, when you really shouldn't like his character because you go into the movie wanting to like Robert Redford. In this film, he portrays cocky David Chappellet, a skiier brought onto the U.S. team when another athlete is injured. The reason he didn't make the squad in the first place is that he's not really a team-first guy. But the squad needs him, and he is good at what he does. Chappellet clashes mightily with his coach (Gene Hackman) and he's not exactly a good boyfriend. It makes for an interesting trip down the hill.

Sneakers

This is kind of a buddy caper movie with Redford in the lead as a security pro in charge of a group of scene stealers (David Strathairn, River Phoenix, Sidney Poitier and Dan Aykroyd). Martin Bishop and his fellow hacking experts are blackmailed into stealing a black box for the government ... but is it really for the government? This collection of pros -- with Martin's former flame (Mary McDonnell) in tow -- will surely figure it out. It plays out as sort of the flip side as The Hot Rock, but with a similar sense of humor and more of an expectation that this crew can handle whatever obstacles arise.

Legal Eagles

I call this one a guilty pleasure, but I don't really feel guilty about it. Redford plays district attorney Tom Logan and gets himself into hot water -- something his boss seems to have been waiting for so he can send him packing. But an opposing attorney (Debra Winger) takes a shine to him and his daughter (Jennie Dundas) loves him, so he can't be that bad, right? More proof: When Tom can't sleep, he tap dances while eating ice cream. So when he does something even dumber -- sleeping with a suspect who becomes a client (Daryl Hannah) after he joins forces with Winger's Laura Kelly, we can forgive his trespasses while waiting for him to best another icon who recently passed (Terence Stamp) and hear an actual guilty pleasure, Rod Stewart's hit song, "Love Touch."

The Horse Whisperer

There are a lot of romantic Redford flicks out there. The one I like the most was also directed by him. In my mind, Tom Kelly is the character I most closely associate with Robert. Tom speaks with actions more than he does with words, but when he does voice his opinion, it resonates all the more. Kelly may seem to relate to horses better than he does people, but the latter just needs to be as open to "hearing" what he has to say the way horses do. So when city girl Kristen Scott-Thomas brings severely injured daughter (Scarlett Johansson) and her maimed horse to his ranch for fixin', everyone winds up changing for the better. It takes a lot of time and patience, but even the most broken characters can be healed.

Brubaker

I remember seeing this one with my mother when it came out. And it's not your garden-variety Redford movie, some of the more violent images have remained with me for a lifetime. His Henry Brubaker goes into a prison as an inmate to get the lay of the land, and then it's revealed that he's the new warden. So he knows exactly what needs to get done, but it's definitely not that easy. My affinity for this one gets an added boost because we have a kitten named Brubaker. And he was named that, by me, because our favorite cat rescuer said the orange kitten they had just taken in had eyes that reminded her of Robert Redford. Of course we wound up adopting him.

Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid

Newman is super fine in this movie, but Redford makes it for me. But there's really no need to pick between them because the pairing -- as well as the duo's subsequent one in The Sting -- works like gangbusters. The real-life besties (their escalating car prank story is just as hilarious as tricks played in any movie) just work off each other so well that I'd be willing to have them just read the phone book on screen, let alone dive into this well-suited tale of the two outlaw cowboys. In fact, I take back what I said earlier, my favorite love story with Redford is this bromance. I don't need raindrops falling on my or Katharine Ross' or anyone else's head, just set me up with these two long tall ones. 

The Old Man and the Gun

Redford went back to the well for one of his final roles as Forrest Tucker, a 70-year-old bank robber and escape artist. It's like watching one of Roberts early ne'er-do-wells rounding the last bend as Forrest tries to awkwardly make amends while still getting his jollies as a career criminal. That alone is interesting enough, but then there's another component that makes the story even more compelling. This charmer unfortunately was his only teaming with Sissy Spacek. Man, they played off each other really well. I wish that collaboration happened a lot sooner and we could have enjoyed more moments of simple perfection with them together.

Quiz Show

For the final choice of this top 10, I'm picking my favorite directorial effort of Redford's. He didn't act in this one because he focused all his energies on the beautifully filmed and lavish spectacle that tells the story of the infamous Twenty-One game-show scandal of the late '50s. Robert does an incredible balancing act between the three leads -- Rob Morrow, who is investigating the fixing of game shows; John Turturro, a contestant who benefited from said fixing but harbored resentment when he was told to take a dive; and Ralph Fiennes, the bright-eyed handsome successor who got swept up while becoming the show's biggest winner. Add to this an incredible performance by Paul Scofield as Fiennes' father, who can't understand the country's fascination with game shows nor his son's fatal mistake. 

I could go on, Three Days of the Condor was next, but ... Afghanistan banana stand.

Hackman was THE man

I love acting. The idea of it, the craft behind it, the way it is immortalized and how it can hit home. When the Golden Globes aired in January, I had this fleeting thought about being able to talk with every single person at every single table about a project they did that means so much to me. So the concept of saying "favorite actor" is something I don't take lightly. Gene Hackman just may be my favorite actor of all time.

The way he got inside his characters, good or bad, happy or most often sad, has always resonated with me. There was always more to a Hackman character than what was on the printed page. He was able to just go deeper in both dramas and comedies, and even in a superhero franchise. So picking just 10 favorite movies is an impossible task. These are my 10 today (with an addendum from Sestra Leah), tomorrow the list could surely be different. I suspect it will change every time I watch a movie he was in. 

 1. The Royal Tenenbaums (2001): I'm very confident about making this Wes Anderson film my top choice. This is a performance for the ages, a real standout amongst the idiosyncratic beings that tend to saturate Anderson's quixotic universe. In Hackman's hands, title character Royal Tenenbaum was not only the fulcrum of that family, but he also gets to the core of the writer/director's vision. The character was so inherently flawed, his decision-making faulty and his heart sometimes inscrutable. But because of Hackman's performance, you just keep rooting for Royal, even when he says and does really appalling things. That sounds like a daunting task, and over the years, we've gleaned that it wasn't an easy shoot for the parties involved. But what they gave us must have fed off that antagonism, it serves the film and perhaps makes it even more than it would be otherwise. There's chemistry between Hackman and every other actor in the film -- from the splendid Anjelica Huston as his estranged wife, Etheline, to the endearing Kumar Pallana as his plucky pal, Pagoda. Even scenes of Royal running around town with grandchildren Uzi and Ari (Jonah Meyerson and Grant Rosenmeyer) rise above the garden-variety nature of such cinematic montages, with a callback to that scene eventually putting the perfect bow on this gift that keeps on giving. Three more Hackman performances were released after The Royal Tenenbaums, but I consider it his crowning glory.

2. Superman: The Movie (1978): Hackman is the Sestras' Lex Luthor. The my "fill in the name of a character who has had many incarnations" sentiment is one that gets wildly argued and defended in modern-day culture. We first saw Hackman in Superman, and he was everything to the film and the ongoing franchise. When you have Christopher Reeve being so stalwart and true as both Kal-El and Clark Kent, you need a villain who is exactly the opposite. Hackman's Lex Luthor was over the top, sure, but he really needed to be. If he was just a bad guy doing bad things, yeah, you'd root for the superhero but you might not actually be invested in him. Lex even tortures the people closest to him -- Otis (Ned Beatty) physically and Miss Teschmacher (Valerie Perrine) psychologically. He's a comic book villain come gloriously to life in technicolor, and he set the stage for all the baddies who invariably came after him.

3. Hoosiers (1986): Sports movies are a dime a dozen, especially ones of the underdog variety. But this one rises above the rest and it's largely due to Hackman. His coach Norman Dale has a checkered past and he doesn't want to run the high school basketball team the same way it's always been done in the small town of Hickory, Indiana. These aren't recipes for success, but definitely a blueprint for a good movie. Dale incrementally makes headway -- starting to win games helps, of course -- but the road to the state championship doesn't gloss over the details and it makes every shot even more meaningful.

4. The Conversation (1974): Surveillance expert Harry Caul is another perfect outlet for Hackman's talents, because there's a lot of internalization involved in the story. The wiretapper is hired to monitor the convo of two people walking through a busy New York City park, but through the painstaking process, he starts to piece together parts of a murder plot. With his own personal history weighing heavily upon him, Caul grows more and more concerned about his role in the outcome of the job. It's a gritty '70s movie that will unsettle you at the very least.

5. I Never Sang for My Father (1970): A lot of us may face heartbreaking realities with parental units as we get older. Hackman's performance as Gene Garrison is not only recognizable in that regard, but also offers a measure of comfort and validation of your own feelings. The film's early squabbles over a parent's need and desire to be independent hit close to home as we look to provide care for those who once did so invaluably for us. The late quarrels with dad Tom Garrison (Melvyn Douglas) make me thankful my main parental relationship has been nothing like that, and ultimately this is just a searing story in which the ultimate truth is about being mindful of the overlap.

6. The French Connection (1971): Hackman won the first of his two Academy Awards for playing Popeye Doyle, and it was the ideal matchup of actor and character because Doyle is a dedicated detective with a heck of a lot of baggage. He breaks rules, he drinks a lot, he's not exactly politically correct -- even in the '70s when that wasn't quite as triggering as it is now, it was pretty evident that Popeye isn't exactly a police poster boy. It's another dynamic Hackman performance, and it comes complete with an edge-of-your-seat car chase that was unconventionally filmed without the proper permits, and even to this day, elicits a lot more fear and excitement than those of the CGI variety.

7. The Birdcage (1996): I'd include Hackman just for the outrageous sight of him dressing as a drag queen, but it's everything that gets his Senator Keeley to that moment that makes it even more fun. See, the embattled conservative politician has traveled to Miami with wife Louise (Dianne Wiest) to meet the future in-laws -- so they think -- of daughter Barbara (Calista Flockhart). Little does he know (or really suspect) that Armand (Robin Williams) and Albert (Nathan Lane) are gay and Albert is masquerading as the mom of Val (Dan Futterman). Yes, chaos ensues to the point that the only escape is to become everything his narrow mind was against.

8. The Poseidon Adventure (1972): Disaster movies were all the rage in the '70s, and this one predates Titanic on the sinking vessel front. A luxury liner on its final voyage is befelled by a mammoth tidal wave that literally turns everyone's world upside down. As Reverend Scott, Hackman is the only one with the foresight to know the only chance of possible rescue will come by passengers making their way to the ship's hull. Only a handful of fellow travelers -- including Susan (Pamela Sue Martin), Belle (Shelley Winters) and Rogo (Ernest Borgnine) -- agree to this plan and they make their way through the doomed ship, dwindling in numbers while facing various perils.

9. Marooned (1969): I like a good space movie. This is almost one of those, bolstered largely by an all-star cast. We know the reality of Apollo 13, but what's only been hypothesized about is what if a rocket that needs to fire for the craft to return home just doesn't do it? Buzz Lloyd (Hackman), Jim Pruett (Richard Crenna) and Clayton Stone (James Franciscus) are the spacemen left in space -- and Gene has the meatiest role because Buzz understandably gets more unhinged as time goes by and the futility of rescue or repair becomes apparent. Space program chief Gregory Peck seems cool as a cucumber, of course, he's home on terra firma, so he can do things like worry about the future of the space program, even before the astronauts' fate has been sealed.

10. Loose Cannons (1990): Including this one as a guilty pleasure, not because it's among the best movies Hackman was ever in, but because I do enjoy watching it. Again playing a cop, Mac Stern is forced to team up with Ellis Fielding (Dan Aykroyd), a detective who developed extreme dissociative identity disorder after an undercover drug operation he was part of went disastrously wrong. The flick is mainly an opportunity to show off Aykroyd's penchant for impressions of pop-culture characters, but it's Hackman's reaction to him -- as well as Dom De Luise as turned witness Harry Gutterman -- that makes it such a treat. It's a crime this buddy cop movie couldn't get arrested.

Ten movies -- not really enough to explain the scope of my affection for Hackman. It's the tip of the iceberg. I didn't even get to Mississippi Burning and Scarecrow, Downhill Racer and Twice in a Lifetime, Night Moves and The Package. Even when Hackman was not the center of attention, he commanded it. He upped already respectable antes on (off the top of my head) Young Frankenstein, Postcards from the Edge, No Way Out and Unforgiven by giving them extra gravity and resonance. He made everyone around him better. I'm off to watch more ... so I can revise this list tomorrow.

And here's Sestra Leah with more on Hackman's Superman stature:

On a larger scale, Gene Hackman’s Luthor is our generation’s Lex. It probably helped that I didn’t read a Superman (or Action Comics) comic book prior to seeing the Superman movie in 1978. (The same strategy later worked for me with “my” Batman in 1989.) When I first saw Lex Luthor, it was Hackman in his 1970s-suited attire. Luckily, he’s not supposed to be a fashion icon, he’s a criminal mastermind! I enjoyed watching his Lex Luthor get thwarted time and again. He truly seems surprised when he loses. It’s probably good he doesn’t have sway over throngs of followers in the movie, but you’d think he could convince more than a bumbling fool and a lovestruck bombshell to be his accomplices. You don’t even get to see the worst of Luthor in the original cut of Superman. Did you know he tried to kill Eve Teschmacher by feeding her to a lion? If someone ever claims they tried to kill you because they "love you," run! Too bad she didn’t keep running; Eve ended up helping Lex escape from prison in Superman II. (Sorry, Otis.)

We missed out on what Hackman could have brought to the table for Superman III, thanks to the behind-the-scenes shenanigans between producers Alexander and Ilya Salkind and director Richard Donner. Gene (and other actors) took sides in the drama, which resulted in several of his final scenes in the original Superman II being “played” by a stunt man. Speaking of Superman III, instead of Lex, we were stuck with Robert Vaughn’s Ross Webster, a two-dimensional character created solely for the movie, even though there were more than 40 years of comic book villains to choose from. It’s like the Salkinds (and replacement director Richard Lester) knew they made a mistake. Hackman was somehow convinced to come back to the franchise for Superman IV. Sure, it’s not at the top of anyone’s list but it brought “our” Superman and “our” Lex Luthor back together for one last over-the-top adventure. I’ll take that pairing over Brandon Routh/Kevin Spacey, Henry Cavill/Jesse Eisenberg and (probably) David Corenswet/Nicholas Hoult any day of the week. Plus, it gave us the pairing of Hackman and Jon Cryer (think teenage Otis) who would end up playing my second favorite Lex Luthor on the CW’s Supergirl TV series. I hope Jon intentionally followed Gene’s lead.