Robert Redford - Michael Feeney Callan [202]
Havana became an overlong (almost six-month) shoot that The Washington Post blamed on “overstudied” plotting. In classic Pollack style, the script was being constantly reworked by Rayfiel, but it could not, said Michael Ritchie, get away from the fact that it was really a rehashed and uncredited Casablanca. “It was quite brazen, actually. In Casablanca Bogey is nuts about the sexy Swede, Ingrid Bergman, who’s married to the underground leader Paul Henreid. In Havana it’s Bob mad about the sexy Swede, Lena Olin, who’s married to the rebel leader played by Raul Julia. Even the musical atmospherics are copied, with Casablanca’s Dooley Wilson replaced by vintage Sinatra. I think the hard laboring was caused by Sydney and his writers striving too hard.” Redford blames the shadow of Out of Africa. “I think that movie set the bar too high, in Sydney’s mind. He was trying hard, too hard, to make Havana something it couldn’t be.”
Redford had wanted Jane Fonda to play Roberta, but Pollack insisted on Olin, who had come to prominence in The Unbearable Lightness of Being and Enemies: A Love Story. In Redford’s view, Fonda would have presented “a perfect foil” to leaven his creation of the flinty, edgy Weil; as it turned out, Olin’s Scandinavian theater-trained aesthetic worked too often against his loose, shoot-from-the-hip, part-improvised style, “which is not to say she wasn’t a fine actress.”
Pollack contended that the friendship stayed intact while the frustrations over Redford’s work habits grew. “It was not the punctuality problem this time, but his refusal to do the homework was a killer. For example, Jack Weil’s dexterity with cards was essential. So I employed an expert to groom him and I begged him to practice. But he wouldn’t do it. An hour or two was all he’d put in. His attitude was, ‘I can play poker, man! I’ve been playing poker for forty years!’ ”
Redford insists he did the homework. “But we’d got to the point where I, too, was a director, and I sometimes saw the shot differently. He knew that, and maybe it caused tensions. Also, I was not interested in his controlling my relationship with the leading actress, as he’d tried to do on Out of Africa. I was comfortable in my own space.”
In the judgment of many, Redford insidiously took control to the point that Havana became his. Alongside the other Redford-Pollack collaborations it stands alone in mood and inflection, with Redford’s stubborn individualism stamped clearly throughout. The underlying philosophies, the moral values, the societal judgments, the wit seem comprehensively his. David Rayfiel states that Redford had small but meaningful writing input, adding depth to characters beyond his own. “He didn’t subvert it but he had a vision of its tone, and Sydney didn’t challenge that.”
The handful of wry lines written by Rayfiel as the movie’s epilogue were among Redford’s favorites. Weil saves Roberta’s life but cannot remove her from the coming revolution. He returns alone to Key West. In the last scene he walks down to the ocean in a bleak sunset. The year is 1960. “It’s a new decade,” he says in voice-over. “I’m doing okay these days. But it’s not the same. I sit with my back to the wall, watch the entrance. You never know who’s going to walk in. Somebody blown off course? This is hurricane country.” The strife of existence and the moral ambivalence it commands, says Redford, are what Havana is about. “It’s that glorious gray area so rare in Hollywood films. When Jack Weil meets Roberta, he