Robert Redford - Michael Feeney Callan [71]
The part on offer to Redford was Jake Rogers, the son of the oil magnate. Redford called Meta Rosenberg. “I’ll do the film, but I want to play Bubber Reeves,” he told her.
Rosenberg was shocked. “You’re out of your mind,” she told him. “That’s the small part. That’s the guy on the run who we hardly see till the end.”
“But it was the better part,” says Redford today. “It carried the movie, because Bubber’s fate determines the moral values of the community. Bubber makes the movie’s point. The role was also the renegade, done-down kid, and that was easy for me, since I’d considered myself an outsider to convention for a lot of my teens.” Rosenberg reluctantly called Spiegel, who conceded and cast James Fox as Jake instead.
Arthur Penn had seen Barefoot on his friend Mike Nichols’s recommendation. “Bob came to read at Sam’s house,” said Penn, “and he was super confident. I was wary because Barefoot left no impression on me. I was prejudiced, too, because the guys I preferred were the Actors Studio people. And I was also prejudiced because I thought he’d be better as Jake, despite what he wanted. But I was smitten. More than anything it was his physical impact. He was right. He automatically fulfilled the role of Bubber Reeves, the convict, because Bubber, for me, was a representational figure who symbolized the purity that was lost after Kennedy’s assassination. He becomes a golden martyr. And Bob, the golden, confident guy, was exactly right for it.”
In Foote’s play, Reeves is a convict bent on revenge against the sheriff who locked him up. Lillian Hellman softened him, and Penn decided to introduce a strong parallel between Reeves’s fate and the killing of Lee Harvey Oswald. “It seemed natural to me,” he said. “There was a fortuitous intersection of recent events in American life and elements in Hellman’s script. The murderer-patsy, the Texan locale and the statewide bloodlust hooked in my mind with the national paranoia after Dallas. I thought about how Oswald had never been legally tried, that it was the court of public opinion that got him. Then The Chase became a commentary on our gun culture. Reeves is someone who’s been abused and fallen off the edge of society. When he escapes from the state prison farm and a man is accidentally killed, the small-town community that bred him wants him dead because he’s the target for their life rage. That became very poignant to me.” Hellman’s final script disappointed Penn, however, “because it seemed more obsessed with the fetish behavior of too many minor characters—though it was still laden with potential.”
Jane Fonda, cast as Bubber’s wife, Anna, was curious about Redford and keen to work with him. She was a year younger than he, and her own relationship with acting had been bumpy. She had reluctantly tried it at Vassar before deciding, like Redford, instead to study art in Paris. The passion to act finally took hold when she played alongside her father in a production of The Country Girl in his hometown, Omaha. She was still, she says today, “pathologically hesitant,” until Lee Strasberg persuaded her into the Actors Studio and onto Broadway in a couple of so-so plays. Henry Fonda’s friendship with Josh Logan led to her being cast in the movie version