What’s Aged the Best?
The widescreen cinematography
In the discussion (8)
Approx. transcript time · 00:48:52Read transcript
- Young Redford is a first nomination: Downhill Racer and The Candidate are loved, Downhill Racer came out a week after this film, which studios would never allow today, and Hollywood has spent fifty years trying to manufacture another Young Redford, with Brad Pitt in Thelma and Louise the example that worked; the mysterious handsome guy whom women want and men want to hang out with is the hardest thing to find in an actor.
- Finding another Redford is harder still because the kinds of movies where he would be discovered are rarely made now, more likely on Netflix than in the seventh installment of a superhero franchise; Redford did appear in a Marvel movie as the Secretary of Defense and turned up in Endgame for about a minute after rumors that The Old Man and the Gun would be his last film, so he is not ashamed of a paycheck.
- Redford's first three big film roles were written by Neil Simon, William Goldman and James Salter, writers who understood his quiet pullback; Goldman wrote four more Redford movies afterward, and then Redford turned on him with a revisionist history of All the President's Men that was debunked on the internet.
- In All the President's Men, the stretch where Dustin Hoffman grabs his copy and he finally confronts him is unbelievable Redford; he also produced it, and that film is named his Apex Mountain, with Ordinary People a close second, since in 1976 he was probably the biggest star in the world with the juice to fund his own movie.
- Widescreen: the film had a crappy run on square TVs through the 70s, 80s and 90s because it is shot super wide, and the super posse sequence is gorgeous on the right TV and transfer where the 1982 broadcast version was cutting and panning; Conrad Hall shooting and Edith Head doing the look are perhaps the best cinematographer and costume designer of their generation on one movie, with George Roy Hill again.
- The Butch, Etta and Sundance dynamic could have gone wrong in many ways but the chemistry works even though Butch and Etta are not dating, in the bicycle scene and her line about what would have happened if she had met him first; it is believable.
- The scene where Etta is first met is held for what has aged worst; the love story is between Butch and Sundance, and Etta, though a key figure, recognizes that, which is why it never turns into a weird fight over her, since they are loyal to each other over anyone else.
- Old-school dynamite hooked up to a safe, something movies no longer show, and the dialogue, where not a word would be changed, are also nominated; the final pick is the widescreen, having lived through thirty years of watching it another way, with agreement plus love for Redford and the Swingle Singers.