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him, that the attachment was honest and edifying. “But I wasn’t sure that theater could sustain me, either. Like television, it was on the slide. The swing was toward the pop hit formula. I tried to look beyond Broadway for inspiration and found plenty to admire in actors like Richard Burton, Albert Finney and, especially, Paul Scofield, who enchanted me that year in A Man for All Seasons. But at that point, even in England, these great actors were being badly served. I felt, and still believe, that theater is the center of the universe for actors. It’s intimate, and therefore it’s a force for honesty. You sit and say to your audience, at arm’s reach: ‘Sit down, let me tell you my story. I am a salesman with a home and a family.…’ You earn their trust one by one. But I was a realist as much as I was an idealist. I knew I wouldn’t be able to feed my family on the scraps thrown to me by Arthur Miller or Edward Albee, and I knew Neil Simon wouldn’t produce a Barefoot every season. So I had to move on.”

The cinema, after his meditations on The Treasure of the Sierra Madre, was always the good option and by the summer, he had a workable movie offer. Paramount, excited by Barefoot’s success, proposed a good project, Situation Hopeless … but Not Serious, with Alec Guinness. In one fell swoop, Rosenberg resolved the Sanderses’ contract and Redford was free to proceed as he wished. The Paramount movie would be shot in Europe. “I got excited,” says Redford. “Europe had thrilled me and I wanted to go back, to get that stimulation. It was serendipity again.”

In October 1964 Redford left Barefoot and flew to Munich with Lola and the kids. He started writing in his diary again, carefully logging the developing opportunity. The movie was based, he was pleased to record, on actor Robert Shaw’s 1960 novel, The Hiding Place, “a wonderful work” that had already been twice adapted for television, most recently as a Playhouse 90 episode with James Mason and Trevor Howard. It is the story of two American airmen, Captain Hank Wilson and Sergeant Lucky Finder (Englishmen in the book), from opposite ends of the social divide, who are incarcerated in a basement in Nazi Germany by a storekeeper, Frick, who enjoys their company so much that he refuses to tell them the war is over. Guinness would play Frick; Mike Connors, star of the police television series Tightrope, would be Finder; and Redford would play Wilson. The director was Gottfried Reinhardt, son of the famous Max. Reinhardt’s wife, Silvia, was script consultant. “And there I had problems,” says Redford, “because Shaw’s original work was rock solid. Silvia danced around with it unnecessarily, as is the Hollywood custom, to validate her fee.”

Silvia’s main redevelopment was to further Americanize the story, something Robert Shaw was reluctant to agree to. The drama was tilted toward comedy or, as the work was routinely described around Paramount, satire. Shaw’s novel was a wry, serious narrative that The Times of London had commended for its “high dramatic value.” Redford’s journal reveals fast-developing gloom. Ten days into shooting at the Bavaria Studios in suburban Munich, he wrote that the director was an overfunded boor, his wife a sexually playful attention seeker. Worse, Guinness was “cold in manner, overcontrolled, [a man who] does it all by numbers.” Today Redford says, “It was my first experience of working with English actors, who appeared, at that time, more involved with craft than movies. They worked ‘out to in,’ as opposed to ‘in to out,’ and that was hard for me. Alec was a good actor, but he had it all worked out for himself before he got to the set, which left nothing for the spontaneity I’d learned to love under Mike Nichols’s direction. For me, as a new actor, the lack of opportunity to connect was demotivating.”

Mike Connors believed the problem was with the Reinhardts and their failure to come to grips with the material. “This type of yarn was Guinness’s perfect territory,” says Connors. “The story of the cellar with these captive ‘pets’ was pure Ealing comedy. It