By Stuart Mitchner
New York had all the iridescence of the beginning of the world.
—F. Scott Fitzgerald, “My Lost City”
Didn’t anyone at Paramount bother to read the novel?
—Robert Redford on The Great Gatsby
During his September 15, 2014 public conversation with Maureen Dowd at the Kennedy Center, Robert Redford (1936-2025) briefly commented on his experience playing the title role in The Great Gatsby (1974), a part he’d campaigned for: “I felt restricted. And yet, that was sort of the point … that the character … was somewhat restricted by the fact that there was an artificial part to him because he wasn’t really who he was.” I can imagine Fitzgerald wincing at Redford’s labored struggle to define Jay Gatsby’s self-created charisma, that mixture of elegant mystery and casual menace.
As it happens, Redford’s next film, Three Days of the Condor, a thriller I’ve avoided for 50 years, turns out to be one of Hollywood’s great rabbit-out-of-the-hat surprises. Besides featuring an interesting performance by Redford (movingly mirrored by Faye Dunaway), it’s a film that anyone who loves New York can relate to as a 50th anniversary tribute to 1975 Manhattan, when the Twin Towers were two years old and still standing.
The Wonder City
Perhaps Redford still had untested traces of Gatsby in his system when he transitioned from death in a Long Island swimming pool to a CIA field office disguised as the American Literary Historical Society, where he and his co-workers read books, comics, magazines, scanning everything into a database to be cross-checked against real CIA operations. Dating from 1902, the elegant Beaux Arts building at 55 East 77th had already been there for 30 years when Fitzgerald wrote “My Lost City,” as had the Ansonia Hotel on the Upper West Side, where Redford narrowly escapes assassination at the hands of his supervisor from the CIA’s New York headquarters in the World Trade Center.
Code-named Condor, Redford’s Joe Turner has his baptism by fire when he returns to work carrying takeout lunches for his co-workers only to find that they’ve been slaughtered while he was around the corner at the Lexington Candy Shop Luncheonette, which, in fact, opened in 1925, the year The Great Gatsby was published, thus sharing a centenary with Fitzgerald’s masterpiece. From 1925 to 1975 to 2025, the Wonder City thrives, evolves, and endures.
Redford Empowered
Meanwhile, the death-in-life shock of the office massacre has galvanized Redford, he’s got his actorly hands full, no time to worry about being constricted or conflicted — before he can begin to comprehend the bloodbath in his workplace, he’s nearly blown away himself by his own boss, in case he ever doubted that the termination of his colleagues was an inside job. At the same time, director Sydney Pollock continues his Hitchcockian showcasing of New York landmarks by sending his embattled hero scrambling for cover in the spherical maze of Frank Lloyd Wright’s Guggenheim Museum.
Redford and Dunaway
At this point in The Week of Watching Redford, my favorite moment occurred a decade later than Three Days of the Condor in Pollock’s epic Out of Africa (1985), when Redford’s Denys gives Meryl Streep a frothy shampoo while reciting the closing lines of Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s Rime of the Ancient Mariner (“He prayeth best who loveth best all creatures great and small”). That said, it’s hard to conceive of a better, more powerfully personal scene than his abduction of Faye Dunaway’s Kathy Hale in Condor, which works as well as it does because she is so intimately attuned to the soft-spoken urgency with which he takes command of her apartment, even including her art (she’s a photographer); she’s simultaneously frightened and fascinated, cowed and charmed.
On one level the scene could be outlined according to an actor’s studio exercise: imagine that your home has been invaded by a neatly-dressed, soft-spoken, mysterious, movie-star-handsome stranger whose manner is so warmly, intimately ingratiating that instead of being terrified, you’re dangerously infatuated.
It’s all about the power of Redford’s presence, not the face alone but the voice and his earnest expression as he begins to notice the lonely, moody photographs on every wall of the room, her own work, wherein the CIA “reader” reads and is drawn in by her vision of life and the way it seems to reveal her deepest self, her very soul. Although his survival remains the motive force, he’s intrigued, making eye contact, moving still closer, while even though she appears to be only tenuously holding herself together (Dunaway is quietly amazing in this scene), she surprises herself by suddenly admitting, stirred by his spontaneous interest in her work, “Sometimes I take a picture that isn’t like me, but that is like me, it has to be,” and after a weighted pause, “I put those pictures away,” as if they contain revelations “too deep for tears.” Reading her, fascinated, he says, with thrillingly understated intensity, “I’d like to see those pictures.” To which she softly, delicately replies, “I don’t know you that well.” And now he’s within kissing distance, holding her with his eyes, asking “Do you know anyone that well?” and drawing him closer even as she seems to repel him: “I never show anyone the pictures I take of myself.” His voice tense, almost trembling, he asks, “Is there anyone you would show them to?” Now it’s a two-way seduction, even as you sense that he has her, this stranger with a gun, speaking intimately, sensitively, drawn to her even as he’s charming her, she gently takes command, shown in close-up as she says, “I don’t think I want to know you very well. I don’t think you’re gonna live much longer.”
So many great film noir lines come to mind when Dunaway delivers — thoughtfully, yet almost casually — that devastating remark (the first is from Gilda, when Rita Hayworth tells Glenn Ford, “I hate you so much I think I’m going to die from it”). It was during this scene that I began to realize how brilliantly Redford could have played Gatsby, so close to the book that you wouldn’t need Fitzgerald’s art to make you know how it would feel to be him and to be in his presence. Another thing that comes to mind is the way Redford achieves a similar effect toward the end of The Candidate (1972) when for the first time in the campaign, the title character lowers the political volume and speaks to the voting public as up close and personal as Redford speaks to Dunaway: it’s the turning point, the moment he wins the election, reprising the cliché as if no one had ever said it before, “I’m with you. We’re in this together.”
Obviously, a week of watching Redford movies, some for the first time, isn’t enough to begin to appreciate his abilities. In the last hour of Out of Africa, it’s hard to imagine that any actor on the planet could match his uncanny rapport with Streep, the intimacies they share, the shampoo scene just one among many.
Buildings and Life
Riding Jersey Transit home from Manhattan at rush hour one day after the destruction of the World Trade Center, I kept seeing the people standing in the aisle as buildings, human skylines that made some kind of sense of the still incomprehensible catastrophe of 9/11. Who’d ever have thought that two massive towers of no particular distinction compared to the Chrysler and Empire State buildings would become bizarrely beautiful in death? I always felt the WTC to be an imposition, a marring of the classic skyline of lower Manhattan. And for years after the fall it was jarring to see them again on television (as in Tony Soprano’s homeward drive that opened every episode of The Sopranos) or in numerous films from the 1970s like Wim Wenders’s The American Friend. Of course there was no way Sidney Pollock could have known that he was resurrecting a murdered building for posterity, any more than he could have known he would be bringing Robert Redford to life in the aftermath of his death 50 years after Condor was playing in theatres nationwide. What he clearly did know was that this location-driven thriller was giving him a chance to make manifest a vision of Fitzgerald’s lost city for all time.