Robert Redford - Michael Feeney Callan [72]
Spiegel told Fonda he’d chosen Redford because of his effect on women: “He was cast, Sam said, because of the reaction of women in the studio offices. They went all atwitter when he came in, and Sam judged that as the audience litmus. It was a fair criterion because I saw it myself. There are attractive people everywhere, but then there is that thing called charismatic attractiveness, which Bob had. A couple of years later, when we were making The Electric Horseman together, I witnessed it full force. A woman approached him at Caesars Palace in Vegas and said, ‘Hello,’ and then literally fainted at his feet. That kind of power is rare. Elvis had it, and Rudolph Valentino, and very few others.”
Fonda, who previously only knew Redford as a face on the audition trail, found herself in thrall. “I didn’t expect to fall so much under his spell. Looks apart, the first attraction was his humor. I was too much into myself to relax, and he drew me out because he was funny. Beyond that, I found echoes of myself in his darkness. The nature of the script, of whom we were portraying, also pushed us into deep waters. Like the characters in the script, we both had awkward childhoods. I had the same complicated relationship with my father that he had with his. I’d learned about how stardom happens, and my feeling was that he was bound for stardom. At the same time I saw a schizophrenic side: that he wanted this acting life while all the time resenting it, which is what I felt. Neither of us analyzed too openly, which was another thing we had in common. But the undercurrents of understanding were there, and they helped keep me going because, despite outward appearance, I was so personally very unsettled.”
Redford was keen to work with Fonda, keener still to work with actors he admired who’d had Method training in New York. The role, however, was a fragmented one that meant a lot of prisoner-on-the-run physical movement, directed by the second unit, along the Russian River in northern California, with only a couple of dialogue scenes. Penn’s shooting schedule was five months; Redford worked just five weeks, only two of which were in the company of Brando, Fox and Fonda. “To some extent,” says Penn, “his was the most challenged role, because while he’s on the run in the early part, he’s a cipher. The action is like a chess game with the people in the town and their responses to the fugitive. Then in the last act, the last forty minutes of the film where Bubber returns to his hometown to face the mob, he is there in your face, explaining himself and his raison d’être, very suddenly and dramatically. Brando has dominated the picture till that point, then Bob is on equal airtime.”
In the first act, the town’s moral dissipation is counterbalanced by Brando’s Calder, the Socratic sheriff who refuses to kowtow to either the feudal power brokering of E. G. Marshall’s Val Rogers or the bloodlust of the mob. He holds the moral center, convinced that Bubber is a victim of circumstances. Then Bubber shows up, hiding out at the auto scrap yard by the wharf. When Anna comes to Bubber, leading Calder