Nothing In The Dark

You know, it’s the damnedest thing – just the night before, last Monday, I watched Field of Dreams for the first time in a long while, and it reminded me that my favorite part of it is Burt Lancaster’s description of a dream that even the reincarnate hitchhiker version of himself wouldn’t achieve.

A fellow legend of apocryphal baseball ephemera, an erstwhile actor in a Rod Serling joint among many other things that mattered, Robert Redford passed away last Tuesday morning at 89. To echo the masses, we all moved up one slot in the world’s handsomest people rankings at his TOD.

I know for a fact that my first-ever exposure to Redford’s work was via a short clip from Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid on the movie-forward disc that accompanied our family’s first purchase of a Windows 95 desktop[1]. I don’t know if there is a single piece of dialogue that my brothers and I have sampled in each other’s varying directions – at least in my lifetime – more than the two minutes preceding their jump into the river.

Cassidy: Kid…the next time I say let’s go someplace like Bolivia, let’s go someplace like Bolivia!

The Kid: NEXT TIME!

You know the rest, or IYKYK, or IYDKNYK, player.

You know how you like Mad Men and especially enjoy the camaraderie between Roger Sterling and Don Draper? Put another way: What’s cooler than being cool? Being literally Paul Newman and Robert Redford, who always appeared to be having the most fun making movies that anyone has ever had.

Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid is one of the flat-out coolest movies ever made[2]; The Sting one-ups it in spades. Dying in a blaze of glory is one thing, but showing up Robert Shaw at the very last is…whew. Like that? Yeah: do that[3]. Stop everything and watch The Sting right now if you haven’t seen it, and even if you have.

Anyway. He’d come from Santa Monica, naturally blonde and bespotted at 21 with the right set of circumstances to develop the genial freckles in an old age that never really came for him, and after hitting around with Pancho Gonzales, Robert Redford went to New York to make it on radio, Broadway or in limited TV soundstage work, right at the time when the latter was beginning its headlong march west.

This one’s for the basketball heads still inhabiting human-written basketblogs in the year of our LORD 2025: Robert Redford and Jane Fonda made studio debuts in the same film, an adaptation of a Broadway show he’d been in, albeit she was in a starring role, and he was a basketball player with no lines.

He was Gatsby; he was The Candidate; have you seen The Way We Were?? He was all of the things a guy that looked like he did on film could be, and each of his roles manifested something like a conscience to the viewer. Oh, sure, he was great in All The President’s Men, a movie on its way to being not just irrelevant but unintelligible to next-gens for a number of reasons[4]. He was the kind of guy who you would cast in Indecent Proposal in order to make that whole thing work, at least to the degree that a major studio would produce and release a film like that in 1993.

In the midst of becoming one of the most cash-cow actors of all-time, Redford also managed to remain an incredibly respected human being, founding the Sundance Film Festival for the love of a different game and becoming a champion of many of the same causes his pal Newman upheld: the environment, LGBTQ+ groups and indigenous peoples found a friend in Robert Redford.

Watching Field Of Dreams so closely to Redford’s passing drew a contrast to Redford’s Roy Hobbs in The Natural: Costner’s Ray Kinsella failed his relationship with his father and uses Shoeless Joe Jackson as a bridge back to that; Redford’s Hobbs just mashes some dingers after his dreams of becoming a pitcher derail for various reasons, and he makes up for it with his own son IRL without having to drag Moonlight Graham out of a renewed sense of optimism, or at least a lessened sense of resignation.

The Natural deviates from the Bernard Malamud source material in one, key way, prophetically, given the omnipresence of gambling predation for both consumer and athlete[5]: Hobbs declines the bribe that sets in motion the climactic, lightbulb-bursting homer that sends the New York Knights to the postseason[6].

I understand that Redford was basically a baseball guy in the same mold as Costner, and that The Natural can be kind of an overwrought depiction of the early- to mid-twentieth century made in service of how great that cast is[7]. Getting a passion done in one movie, though, is a skill. What more of an aspiration does anyone need in whatever field they’re in (not private equity) than Redford as Hobbs blessing us with this: “When I walked down the street, people would’ve looked and they would’ve said there goes Roy Hobbs! The best there ever was in this game.”

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He acted as the embodiment of Death in one of the best episodes of the original Twilight Zone series, an early TV role that allowed him to reflect the humanity he’d carry through much of the rest of his public and private lives. End-of-life care matters!

As Death, he asks: “Am I really so bad? Am I really so frightening? …What you’re afraid of is the unknown. Don’t be afraid.”

As both Death and the son of the woman he’s asking to join him in the afterlife[8], he says: “Mother, give me your hand …What you thought was the end was only the beginning.”

Maybe. Just maybe, there might be something to that. Robert Redford stuck me as somebody who believed in things – maybe some things beyond us, but at least some things beyond ourselves. If that on its face is an eyeroll-inducing notion, look at yourself. Better yet: look at him. We’ll all be better off for it.

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[1] Cinemania 96 hive, where you at??

[2] It also serves, in part, as the set-up for maybe my personal single favorite one-liner Curb Your Enthusiasm joke. “I only saw Sting II.” “What kinda idiot sees Sting II and not Sting I?”

[3] “Always drink gin with a mark, kid.”

[4] The attempted (and failing) dissolution of journalism at the state’s behest, for one; the lack of journalistic standards or integrity is the other, with a touch of AI garbage and the idea that anything one disagrees with is “fake news,” which is a bedrock of right now; that said, even my mom agrees to the universal truth that Robert Redford is one of the best-looking people ever to exist.

[5] Rest in peace, while we’re here, to Michael Madsen and Joe Don Baker, both of whom passed this calendar year and both of whom you might forget were even in that movie as antagonists. It’s enough to think about Harriet tying Roy Hobbs down and cutting his ear off while listening to Stealers Wheel instead of {{whatever she was actually up to}}.

[6] Yankees fandom (read: sports fandom, but) is an increasingly tenuous trait to try and maintain, but something in me still has to appreciate that Redford – a lifelong Red Sox fan because of his love of Ted Williams, made extremely obvious in the movie – kept Malamud’s New York-based Knights as the protagonist team. Ben Affleck would’ve gone even farther out of his way to make it known that this was not the Yankees.

[7] Part of the reason why it all looks that good, aside from the people involved? You guessed it: cinematographer Caleb Deschanel. Yup: their father. A further aside is that their mother, Mary Jo, is arguably best-known for playing Annie Glenn, John’s wife, in The Right Stuff, a film that, like The Natural, also featured Barbara Hershey.

[8] WHOOPS, spoiler alert for an episode of television that is sixty years old~~