Robert Redford - Michael Feeney Callan [86]
Redford liked Polonsky, but he believed the years in the wilderness had ground down his confidence. An article in Variety criticized Polonsky’s approach to movies: “He is not a director who works through his actors. Thesps are simple tools to his vision … their presences more than their abilities are used.” Redford agreed: “There was plenty of interchange of ideas but there was no improvisation. Connie Hall, who was Katharine Ross’s husband, was a very experienced cinematographer, but he was also an artist with a heavy authorial viewpoint. He saw Abe stumbling and he stole the movie from under him. I loved the script. I loved what the movie aspired to, but it evolved outside [Abe’s] control into something else.”
It was a pity, because so much of the movie was earnest and ambitious. Setting it on the real-life Morongo Indian Reservation, Polonsky clearly portrayed the separate, competing communities ravaged by prejudice. Coop, the law enforcer played by Redford, courts the compliant government superintendent Dr. Elizabeth Arnold, played by Susan Clark. This affair parallels Willie Boy’s forbidden courtship till Willie Boy kills his girl’s father. Coop is then swept into a crazed posse hunt and, in the end, is obliged to go alone after Willie Boy in hopes of saving him.
The similarities to The Chase drove Redford’s enthusiasm. “The last forty minutes were the reason I chose to do the movie,” says Redford. “There were only a few lines of dialogue in that last act, because it was all about the hunt. It had real tension, like [Fred] Zinnemann’s final showdown between Gary Cooper’s marshal and the villain Frank Miller in High Noon. It was totally original. Then Universal panicked: Who would watch forty minutes of mime? So, exactly as happened with Arthur Penn and Spiegel, they took the edit away from Abe and pared down the final act to eight minutes and redid the ending. In the screenplay, the tension resolved in the exhaustion of the protagonist and antagonist: they have hit the wall; they are burned out. Coop finally respects Willie Boy’s tenacity and won’t kill him. Willie Boy fatalistically accepts Coop’s right to kill him. It was a powerful impasse, a brilliant ending, but the studio wanted a Jeff Chandler black-and-white shoot-out, so that’s the way it was done. When I saw it, I was shattered. It was spoiled. I just had to let it go.”
In the run-up to Willie Boy, Redford started preparing his skiing movie, which was now called Downhill Racer. “What I hoped for with Willie Boy and Downhill were movies that illuminated the human condition. For Downhill, the first thing was to get rid of Oakley Hall’s source novel, which was après-ski stuff. I decided I wanted to examine the illusion of greatness in winning at all costs. I like the gray area, the bit where the duality of human nature shows through.” At Wildwood, a series of long, late-night script meetings addressed every aspect of the movie-to-be. Redford deliberated awhile before choosing writer James Salter, whose short fiction he admired, to develop his concept. “It became a grand-scale thing in increments. I decided it would be a social commentary about competitive sports. Then I decided it would be part of a trilogy that looked at American life. After the skiing movie, we would make a movie about political life, and then a movie about big business. All with the same theme: the Pyrrhic victory of winning.”
The trickiest part of getting Downhill going was outmaneuvering Bluhdorn, who was determined