The 1974 movie line that defined the rest of Robert Redford’s life: “I love that moment”
In terms of movies, the late Robert Redford was the kind of triple threat that has rarely been replicated in Hollywood. Ridiculously good-looking, a generational acting talent and a gifted director, he could, and did, do anything he wanted on the big screen.
But there was one role that he wanted above almost any other, that being Jay Gatsby, the titular hero of F Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby, which in 1974 was being developed by the British director Jack Clayton with a screenplay by Francis Ford Coppola.
In some ways, the historical romantic drama was the perfect role for Redford, who was constantly trying to escape the idea of his being a blonde male stereotype and identified closely with the part of the enigmatic millionaire with hidden depths. He had the advantage of just having made a hugely successful romance the previous year with Barbra Streisand, The Way We Were, which picked up six Oscar nominations, and once Warren Beatty and Jack Nicholson had passed on Gatsby, Redford was in.
Alongside Rosemary’s Baby star Mia Farrow, he excelled in the 1920s-set story of Gatsby’s doomed quest to win back his married former lover at all costs, and although the movie wasn’t a complete hit with critics, audiences took to it, making it one of three box office successes for Redford in the same year with The Sting and a rerelease of his other one-two with Paul Newman, Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid.
One line in particular from Gatsby resonated with Redford, who would later recall to Collider, “In the film Nick Carraway, who was an observer to Gatsby, sees that Gatsby is obsessed with things of the past, his love of Daisy [Buchanan], but it’s no longer the past. Gatsby has thrown this big party and is really keen for her to come and says afterwards to Carraway, ‘I think everybody had a good time, don’t you?’ And Carraway says, ‘But Gatsby, you can’t repeat the past’. Gatsby replies, ‘You can’t repeat the past? Of course you can’. I love that moment.”
The movie won two Oscars, but they were for costume design and music, and in some ways, the past was indeed repeated in 2013, when Leonardo DiCaprio took on the lead role in Baz Luhrmann’s lavish update, which again got mixed reviews from critics and again won two Oscars, one of which was for ‘Best Costume Design’.
There was much examination of the different ways that the two great actors, Redford and DiCaprio, portrayed Gatsby. While the latter went for a highly emotional and intense portrayal with plenty of energy, Redford’s was more introspective, a wounded war veteran with a wistful sadness.
It pushed him on to, literally, greater heights, as the following year he made another film set in the 1920s, the aviation drama The Great Waldo Pepper, and then one of the most gripping, but somewhat overlooked New Hollywood thrillers of the 1970s, the terrifically paranoid Three Days of the Condor.
He took that to its limits the year after that, however, in possibly the best film he ever made, the peerless All the President’s Men with Dustin Hoffman, the real-life story of journalists Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein working feverishly, and at huge personal risk, to unpick the Watergate Scandal, which would eventually lead to the resignation of President Richard Nixon.
