The movie Robert Redford called the “worst letdown” he’d ever seen: “I couldn’t abide this”
For anyone who loves cinema, few things are worse than a disappointing movie. Sitting down full of excitement and expectation to check out a film and then being left crushed by what unfolds on the screen is a devastating feeling, and one Robert Redford has never forgotten.
If anything, the dissatisfaction he experienced as a youngster watching what turned out to be one of the most controversial pictures ever made helped define his career; from that moment on, Redford was committed to realism, which might explain why he always favoured stories rooted in the real world.
Sure, he made action-packed westerns, spy thrillers, and genre films that existed in a heightened reality, but he wasn’t the sort of A-lister who’d run away from CGI critters, dodge a hail of bullets, or flee in terror from a natural disaster, although he did finish his big-screen career with a role in the Marvel Cinematic Universe.
Redford avoided the parts, productions, and tropes that most of Hollywood’s biggest stars tackle at least once, and it didn’t do anything to stop him from becoming one of his generation’s defining stars. He forged his own path through the business, and it worked, which is all down to Disney’s Song of the South. Technically, anyway.
Like most kids, Redford wasn’t sitting down in front of experimental, existential work from boundary-pushing auteurs, but he still knew what he liked. “I’d always had a problem with authenticity,” he explained. “When I was very small, my dad would project 8mm films of Tom Mix on a sheet in the living room. I bought into all of it.”
Once he’d grown out of that phase and Mix’s many westerns were consigned to the rear-view mirror, his tastes evolved. “But when I got older, it bothered me that Gene Autry couldn’t walk right and John Wayne couldn’t ride right. The worst letdown was Disney’s Song of the South, because it was phoney, because you could see the wires. I couldn’t abide this.”
Since its initial release, when it made a killing at the box office and secured an Academy Award nomination for ‘Best Original Song’, it would be an understatement to say that time has not been kind to Song of the South, which the ‘Mouse House’ has never released on home video or streaming due to the overwhelming backlash towards content that could generously be described as dated, if not blatantly racist.
For Redford, it was a turning point. The combination of live-action and animation didn’t capture his youthful imagination, and even his more fantastical favourites needed to be at least somewhat plausible. “If you’re giving me fantasy, give me Scaramouche, Captain Blood, the kind of full-on stuff Rafael Sabatini created, not the half-baked version.”
Could it be an exaggeration to say that Song of the South was directly responsible for Redford’s career-long aversion to filmic flights of fancy? Possibly, but then again, maybe the movie he called the “worst letdown” he’d ever seen really did inspire him to keep things as realistic as possible when choosing his roles.
