Robert Redford - Michael Feeney Callan [75]
Ray Stark, meanwhile, deliberated, calling endless meetings with Natalie, using extravagant home soirées as ersatz think tanks. Redford hated these afternoons chez Stark, peopled with odious glitterati served by liveried butlers, where Stark invariably referred to him as Sydney or Jim. On September 9, Redford bolted for Utah, where, in a phone call to Meta Rosenberg, he issued an ultimatum: “Either Stark shoots the movie Sydney Pollack’s way now, or they can go sue my ass.”
“It was down to Bob and me in the end,” said Pollack. “Bob trusted me, just me, and we developed that mother together till we found something that was shootable. Not necessarily Tennessee Williams, but shootable.”
This Property Is Condemned is set in Dodson, Mississippi, in the grip of the Depression. Owen Legate, played by Redford, is a railroad agent who arrives to lay off workers. Staying at a local boardinghouse, he begins an affair with Alva (Wood), the proprietor’s daughter, a flirt who is also seeing laborer J. J. Nichols, played by Charles Bronson.
Filming started in October in New Orleans. If, as is often suggested, Pollack molded Redford’s romantic iconography, the process began here. This Property Is Condemned had all the components of Williams—anguished hearts, gothic gloom, vivid backdrops, vibrant exchange—but there was much else besides. Henry Jamesian restraint, moody camera work and poignant music were the evolving Pollack staples, and they were used, unremittingly, to power up the romance. And it was, undeniably, romance that held the film together—subtle, substantial romance that drew force when counterpointed against grander-scale social conflict, a device that Pollack and Redford would return to in The Way We Were, The Electric Horseman, Out of Africa and Havana. “I had the feeling Bob and I were starting something,” said Pollack, “because the uniqueness of the way we worked was something else. We were like composers, the music writer and the lyricist, putting together an effect, and that was what we set up there on the screen with This Property.”
Despite all its problems, despite the fact that Tennessee Williams insisted on removing his credit, This Property Is Condemned succeeded in many areas. It came in on time and just dimes over budget. Though Stark was equivocal, Pollack was satisfied and Redford and Wood liked it. Audiences, too, seemed to like it. However, Newsday called it “a horrendous soap opera” and The New Yorker blamed Wood. But Variety praised Redford’s “total acting [through] voice, expression and movement,” and in the New York Daily News Kathleen Carroll concluded: “[Redford] can’t help but succeed now in the romantic leading man category.”
Nothing would come so easily. During the shooting in New Orleans, John Frankenheimer, Pollack’s friend, had visited, having just seen an early assembly of Inside Daisy Clover. “Frankenheimer said it was extremely daring of me to do what I did,” says Redford, “but I hadn’t seen the finished film and didn’t know what he was talking about. I asked him and he said, ‘Well, it takes guts for a start-out guy like you to play a flagrant gay character.’ I told him that I didn’t play a gay. I played Wade Lewis, the narcissist. And he said, ‘You’d better take a look at what they have on release.’ ”
Redford was furious about what he saw as out-and-out perfidy. He told his tale to anyone who would listen. Mike Nichols listened, and agreed that Pakula and Mulligan “really fucked him over royally. Nothing to do with Bob’s homophobia or lack of it. What he created on-screen they corrupted. They took out parts of the story as he’d filmed them and stuck on a voice-over telephone scene where some character tells Natalie in plain English, ‘Didn’t you know Wade is gay?’ It was a complete turnaround for the story in his mind, and it upset him deeply.”
By Christmas, Redford was wrestling with other problems. He had returned from Germany hopeful of career and family stability. But