Sydney Pollack names his most overlooked movie: “Nobody liked the film when it came out”
Clint Eastwood is the benchmark for actors who also direct, having become an indelible icon on either side of the camera. Of course, he was hardly the only one in his generation who dabbled in multiple disciplines, and Sydney Pollack was comfortably one of the best among the chasing pack.
As a filmmaker, he won Academy Awards for ‘Best Picture’ and ‘Best Director’ for Out of Africa and secured additional directorial nods for Jane Fonda’s breakthrough in They Shoot Horses, Don’t They? and Dustin Hoffman’s Tootsie. Some of his other efforts include Robert Redford’s political thriller Three Days of the Condor, Tom Cruise and Gene Hackman’s The Firm, and Al Pacino’s favourite Al Pacino movie, Bobby Deerfield.
On the producorial side of the equation, Pollack backed ‘Best Picture’ nominees Michael Clayton and The Reader, as well as Ang Lee’s Sense and Sensibility, Anthony Minghella’s The Talented Mr Ripley, Harrison Ford’s Presumed Innocent, and Michael Caine’s The Quiet American, all of which were either critical or commercial successes, and in many cases both.
That doesn’t even cover the strictly on-camera efforts that saw him play roles in films like Robert Zemeckis’ Death Becomes Her, Stanley Kubrick’s Eyes Wide Shut, and Jim Carrey’s The Majestic, so it would be entirely apt to say that Pollack’s filmography as an actor, director, and producer as a whole was more than comparable to anybody of his era.
Obviously, they don’t all get to be winners, and even Pollack’s lucky charm couldn’t prevent him from being eviscerated. He’d worked with the legendary Redford on Out of Africa, Three Days of the Condor, Jeremiah Johnson, The Way We Were, and This Property Is Condemned in a fruitful creative partnership that spanned decades, but their luck ran out when 1990’s Havana landed with a thud.
The leading man’s professional gambler is enjoying a life of luxury in the titular Cuban city, where he plans to bet everything he has on a high-stakes poker game. However, when the newfound object of his affection gets arrested for her political beliefs alongside her husband, Redford’s Jack Weil mounts a risky operation to try and secure her freedom.
The score did land an Oscar nomination, but that’s as high as Havana managed to fly. It bombed at the box office and left critics and audiences feeling nonplussed, and he didn’t think it was deserved. “Nobody liked the film when it came out,” Pollack admitted to Film Talk. “I think it’s a good film, but that doesn’t count.”
“My personal opinion about my movies is not what’s important,” he continued. “What’s utterly important is what the world thinks of it. At the time when it came out, Havana wasn’t a popular movie at all. It had a few critics that liked it, that felt it was underrated.” Unfortunately for Pollack, they were very short in supply, leaving it to sink towards the bottom rung of his filmography.
He’s been involved in many classics in various capacities, but it would take a staunch – some might say deluded – Pollack superfan to try to argue a convincing case for Havana being one of them, regardless of the filmmaker’s opinion on the movie.
