Robert Redford - Michael Feeney Callan [109]
Another contender was Serpico, based on the true story of a Manhattan cop’s fight against police corruption. Redford liked Frank Serpico but hesitated when Serpico secured an agent. “That’s when all the nonsense of deal making and points positioning took over. It was a shame, because I was interested in Frank as a human being, and his story of the little guy against the institution was exactly what I loved.”
Fred Zinnemann wanted him for Universal’s The Day of the Jackal, based on Frederick Forsyth’s novel about a plot to kill Charles de Gaulle. Redford thought not. “Freddie Fields said I was crazy, because it was Zinnemann, the surefire box office hit. But I couldn’t accept it. There was no depth to the story. I needed a journey into the character’s psyche and motivation. It wasn’t there. He was just a psychotic killer, and the story described his maneuvers to try to kill de Gaulle. It had a ‘So what?’ feeling for me.”
Redford found what he wanted in a project written by Bill Goldman, The Hot Rock. On the face of it, it’s hard to see why this makeweight movie appealed. But the fee—$400,000 from Fox—explained much. “The real reasons were domestic,” says Redford. “Amy was new in our lives. I wanted to be in Manhattan for the summer, close to Lola and the baby. I wanted to get my bearings because the feeling I had was similar to the aftermath of that first Hollywood spell, after This Property Is Condemned, where I sensed I was spending too much time away from home.”
Peter Yates, the project’s director, was a Royal Court stage-trained En-glishman, who, like Sidney Furie, had worked on Cliff Richard musicals. Three years before, he’d made his brilliant transition to American cinema with Warners’ Bullitt, a model police thriller laced with action scenes that made San Francisco seem like an arcade game. Yates saw Redford as “one of the great cinema treasures, like Clark Gable. It’s a matter of science, that kind of screen beauty, something to do with ratios and millimeters, like the Mona Lisa’s smile.” The men liked each other, though Redford was aware of a cross-cultural chasm: “In the middle sixties everything English was good. But that presented many problems, because the cultural essences and the patois are different. By the 1970s, people were beginning to think twice about this Brit invasion.”
Goldman’s script, based on Donald E. Westlake’s novel of the same name, was a tall tale of a crack team of thieves, led by ex-con Dortmunder, who are commissioned to steal from a museum a diamond of importance to an African potentate. It had been written primarily for George Segal, who would play the locksmith Kelp, second in command to his brother-in-law, Dortmunder, the role offered to Redford. Pakula thought this was “the worst possible thing Bob could have done at that moment, because the eyes of the world were on him, and that plot was just the sort of facile garbage you see on television every week.” But Redford—a George Segal fan—was keen: “The story was about a gang of thieves, emphasis on gang, so there was the joy of playing in an ensemble team for the first time since the American Academy. I enjoyed that camaraderie,” he says.
Structure, Goldman wrote in his memoirs, is all, and indeed structure, and Quincy Jones’s jazz track, was all that held the movie together. The rest was a repetitive (four attempts to steal the diamond) Pink Panther–esque muddle lightened by the casting of Zero Mostel and Paul Sand. In an apparent attempt to recapture the magic of The Sundance Kid, Goldman’s script piled on the witty lines: surveying the explosive devices needed to blow their way into the museum, fellow conspirator Sand offers Redford an unusual Molotov cocktail. “It’s a kinda European type,” he says. “I learned it at the Sorbonne.” Demonstrating another kind of bomb, Sand tells him, “I learned this one at Berkeley.” “You must like to study,” Redford quips.
“I suspect Goldman was trying to outdo the Sundance Kid,” says Redford,