Robert Redford and the American Façade

Redford likes that the movie raises more questions than it answers, leaves its three storylines dangling in irresolution, and doesn't let any of its characters off the hook, whether it's the pacifist professor who has inadvertently led his students into a combat zone, or the reporter forced to choose between abetting the government propaganda machine and watching her career go down in flames. None of that seems likely to curb accusations that Lions for Lambs is a piece of Democratic agitprop, an anti-war PSA in art-movie clothing. (Reviewing the film after its London Film Festival premiere last month, Variety opined that Lions "uses a lot of words to say nothing new.")

"I'm sure it will be perceived as everything from pretentious to sanctimonious," Redford says with an air of resignation. "What may get missed is the fact that, when I got involved with the film and decided to do it, the first thing I thought was, we can't be riding on the issues that are discussed in this film because those issues will be yesterday's news by the time the film comes out. How can you beat the scandals that are coming out of Washington daily? You can't top that with a black comedy!"

Though you wouldn't guess it to hear him today, the Charles Robert Redford who turned up on the streets of Paris at age 18 with vague notions of becoming an artist was not nearly so politically engaged. A prankster and carouser, he'd dropped out of the University of Colorado and sailed to Europe on a student visa. In Paris, he took up residence in a kind of student commune, where his flatmates challenged the naïve, handsome American in a way he'd never experienced before. It was, according to Redford, "the beginning of my real education.

"They'd ask me how I felt about certain things, and I didn't know," Redford recalls. "It was during the Suez crisis, when America deserted the French and it was a disaster, and I didn't know what they were talking about. I felt so put down that I decided to really focus on the politics of my country, but it was done from another place. It was done from reading French, Italian and German newspapers and talking to students and hearing different opinions. I cobbled together a point of view that was from other points of view." By the time he landed back in America two years later, "I was filled with experiences of real-life situations and the myths of this country. I guess that's where it all started."

Redford went to New York, enrolled at the American Academy of Dramatic Arts, and by 1960 was appearing in bit parts on Broadway and on TV in the likes of Maverick, Perry Mason, Alfred Hitchcock Presents and Playhouse 90. His movie break came in the form of a supporting role in the low-budget 1962 Korean War drama War Hunt. (His co-stars included Sydney Pollack, who would go on to direct Redford in six films.) By 1967, when he reprised his stage role for the film version of Neil Simon's Barefoot in the Park, he was a bankable star. Two years later, Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid didn't just catapult Redford into the Hollywood firmament — in one of those marvelous tricks of the flickering light, the role imparted some of its romantic, rebel-outlaw mythos (and a lifelong nickname) to the actor himself.

The Redford who appears in a lavish 1970 Life magazine spread titled "Robert Redford Riding High," literally riding high on the back of a horse against a dramatic Utah mountainscape, is scarcely recognizable as the suburban SoCal youth who, barely a decade earlier, wasn't quite sure what he wanted to do with his life. Photographed skiing, snowmobiling, and relaxing with his wife, Lola, and their two children at the home and ski complex that would become known as the Sundance Resort, he is an Olympian vision — a movie-star deity — with an accompanying canonization by film critic Richard Schickel (a friend of Redford's) to seal the deal.

"There are times when it is simply intolerable to have him breezing in and out of your life ... passing through from someplace he makes sound marvelous to someplace he will make sound wonderful," writes Schickel in a particularly perceptive take on the feelings of infatuation and resentment that great movie stars can inspire. "These moments of envious bedazzlement generally occur when you are in a temporarily weakened condition — when all the children have been on penicillin for a week and aren't getting better, when your accountant has just called to tell you your tax bill was a little stiffer than he had originally estimated. In such dreary contexts, Redford stands there with his trim, tan, healthy exterior wrapped around a nervous system entirely innocent of booze, cigarettes and Miltowns, and something inside you harrumphs disapprovingly. Damn fool ought to watch his step."