Now I've Seen Everything Dept.: Alfred Hitchcock (Addendum: Television)

"Murder in the Home Where It Belongs"
 

It's amazing to me that at a time when he was doing, arguably, his best work for the movies, Alfred Hitchcock was also helping to manage this popular anthology series for television.

 

Yes, he had able accomplices—his long-time secretary/assistant Joan Harrison who'd worked with him on his British films and early American ones, and Norman Lloyd, who was repaid for having been dropped off the Statue of Liberty in Hitchcock's Saboteur to be the show's "jack-of-all-trades" acting (5 episodes), directing (19), and producing, (184!)—but the output of the television show was prodigious, the quality amazingly high, and the talent attracted in terms of writing and acting astounding*. Watching all of them surprises in how many actors from Hitchcock's films appeared, how many future stars show up (here's two: Steve McQueen and Walter Matthau), and familiar names that would go on to directing careers (William Friedkin's first directing job was for "The Alfred Hitchcock Hour").**  Hitchcock was so impressed with the technical crews that he economized by using them (rather than more expensive movie crews), when making his classic Psycho (he had, after all, mortgaged his house to get the funds when studios proved to be a little squeamish to finance it due its macabre subject matter).

 

Today would have been his 127th birthday.  

 

 

"Revenge" (AHP, S1:E1, 1955) The first aired episode could just as well have been the pilot to sell the network on the series, and Hitchcock chose to direct it himself. He cast Ralph Meeker (who'd never worked with the director) and Vera Miles (who'd starred in The Wrong Man and was Hitchcock's second choice—after Grace Kelly—to star in Vertigo) as a couple in turmoil when the wife is molested after the two have moved to a California trailer park after her nervous breakdown.

 

It's brilliant casting. Hitchcock had already seen how Miles conveyed mental trauma in The Wrong Man and her vulnerability immediately gains an audience's sympathy. And Ralph Meeker was the favorite "hot-head" of the Movies, always able to make unsympathetic characters relatable and sympathetic ones dark. And he was still able to convey a native intelligence to what he was doing. One could see why his character does what he does in "Revenge"...even if it does turn your stomach a little...that and the "dubious" psychology and sociology of the piece. 

 

 

"Breakdown" (AHP, S1:E7, 1955) Joseph Cotten, (who'd starred in Hitchcock's Shadow of a Doubt and Jamaica inn), reunites with the director for this tense nail-biter about a man who ends up pinned in his car after a motor accident, paralyzed from the neck down. Unable to move or speak, he suffers indignity after indignity, finally ending up in a police morgue.

 

This one is good from start to nerve-wracking finish and one can understand Hitchcock's attraction to it. A lifelong neurotic, Hitchcock had a fear of (and an innate ability to convey) vulnerability and helplessness, and this simple premise (despite some disregard to medicine's ability to detect life) falls right into his trembling wheelhouse.

 

One would think it's an easy role for Cotten to play (and he's helped by quite a bit of use of freeze-frame, so he doesn't betray breathing or eye-blinks), but his voice-over of the character's inner thoughts during the crisis is extraordinary and effective. 

"The Case of Mr. Pelham" (AHP, S1:E10, 1955) Tom Ewell stars as a man with a bit of an identity crisis. Albert Pelham is a well-to-do executive with a fairly mundane, if habit-filled life. But, lately things have gone a bit askew. People he doesn't know recognize him. He's told of experiences that he never did. And he's starting to think he's going crazy.

 

Or...he has a double, who is gradually infiltrating his life...and maybe trying to take it over. He could be dissociating. Or someone is targeting him. So, is the problem with him, or some outside agency? And, what can he do about it, if anything?

 

Ewell had just come off his success with The Seven Year Itch and his "not exactly handsome" everyday ordinariness comes into play, even if the performance is less comedic and more dramatic. There's a cartoonishness to Ewell, even when he's being serious, and that duality keeps one guessing until the end.

 

This is one of the two episodes for which Hitchcock was nominated for an Emmy Award for directing.

 

"Back for Christmas" (AHP, S1:E23, 1956) Metallurgist Herbert Carpenter (John Williams, of Dial 'M' For Murder and To Catch a Thief) and his wife Hermione are planning to leave their impeccable long-established British home for a job that he's taking in America. Of course, the wife assures everyone that they'll be "back for Christmas"—Herbert's been busy in the basement digging a wine cellar for their return. But, the new job will leave the task unfinished and the two busy themselves with the details of their extended trip and buttoning-up the house for their extended absence, an exercise that the fussy Hermione obsesses over and makes the prickly Herbert fume.

 

But, even if it is the twenty-third episode of the first season, one must realize that if anybody in the episode is digging a hole anywhere, someone else is going to end up in it.

 

Williams often played officious and downright stuffy, but it's fun to see him play nastily passive-aggressive. He would have made a great Basil Fawlty.

"Wet Saturday" (AHP, S2:E1, 1956) It is a very soggy day for a murder. Especially for the well-reputed, but rather eccentric Princey family. It seems young Millicent has murdered Mr. Withers the schoolmaster with a croquet mallet when he told her that he was getting married...to someone else. 

Oh, bother. What to do?

Simple. Frame someone else for the murder! It's a good thing the Princey's good friend, Captain Smollett (John Williams) stops by. Being the only practical one on the family, the elder Mr. Princey (Sir Cedrick Hardwicke) constructs an elaborate frame to make sure all the (manufactured) evidence points to Smollett, to make sure a) the body is never discovered and b) that Smollett never talks about it.

It's a veddy British black comedy, quite droll in the writing and execution (if I can use the term), while also being quite absurd, not unlike the Princey's, themselves. No Hitchcockian directorial flourishes, just solid story telling with a dark sensibility.

"Mr. Blanchard's Secret" (AHP, S2:E13, 1956) A mystery writer (Mary Scott) begins suspecting her neighbor, Mr. Blanchard, has murdered his wife. A Hitchcock-directed rebuttal to the director's own theatrical film Rear Window, the somewhat-slight storyline is a cautionary tale about "peeping" and "Kravitzing" your neighbors. Everything she sees leads her to suspect that Blanchard's wife is dead based on circumstantial evidence and her own over-imagination. Maybe it's because she's a mystery writer mid-book and steeped in the worst in human behavior. Maybe she's just paranoid (Blanchard's unneighborly attitude doesn't help). But, it all escalates, despite the attempts of her more cautious husband (Robert Horton, top-billed, despite his lack of screen time) to dissuade her.

The episode is memorable for Scott's non-stop manic performance, and for a sequence where she imagines the murder, with slashing shadows that suggest Hitchcock's roots in German Expressionism and over-the top enactments (it IS conjured up in her fevered imagination, after all), that suggest the ham-acting in the movie parodies on "The Carol Burnett Show."

"One More Mile to Go" (AHP, S2:E28, 1957) A simple story, really. A man murders his wife, and must dispose of the body without being caught. David Wayne, mostly known for lighter fare, plays the murderous husband with a bit of a madman's glint in his eye. With his jaw set, Wayne carries off the cold-bloodedness and paranoia particularly well, with a hang-dog look.

So, what makes this one special? It begins with a bravura sequence with no dialog for the first 8:30 (or until the second commercial break) before the first line of dialog is heard. The first shot...after a perfunctory establishing shot...itself lasts 2:10, and is shot through windows that muffle the sound of the argument that preceded the crime.

 

Hitchcock was a fan of "pure" cinema (or "cinemah" as he pronounced it), where a movie-goer could discern what was going on if the sound suddenly quit, and just had to rely on the picture (he did, after all, start his career in silent pictures). 

The second half of the episode is pure suspense, as Wayne's murderer (who is driving at night to dispose of his wife's body hidden in the trunk of his car) gets pulled over for a busted tail-light that the cop insists be fixed at a service station...tonight.

Watching the episode may make you think that lots of it resembles the third reel of Psycho.

"The Perfect Crime" (AHP, S3:E3, 1957) Hitchcock never worked with the horror-icon Vincent Price (probably because Price was typecast for villainous roles), except for this one half-hour episode.*** It must have been a lovely time on the set, as both men had puckish, dark senses of humor.

The premise is that it is 1912 and two men considered at the top of their field, brilliant amateur detective Charles Courtney (Price) and a defense attorney John Gregory (James Gregory), are having a perfectly amiable chat about "the perfect crime" and the circumstances of a past case in which both men were involved. 

But, it's never that simple. Is it?

 

Hitchcock employs three silent flashbacks with voice-over narration to show three different versions of the "past case" from different points of view, and the acting in a verbal cage-fight, with Price at his prideful, plummy best and Gregory, coarse and blunt, is great to see.

"Lamb to the Slaughter" (AHP, S3:E28, 1958) One of the more famous episodes and one of the simplest episodes of the entire series. Hitchcock keeps it basically to one set, with Barbara Bel Geddes (who'd been featured in the director's Vertigo), in almost every shot, playing a policeman wife, who is shocked to find that he returns home from his shift to announce that he's divorcing her, leaving her for another woman. Before he can pack, she murders him by bludgeoning him with a frozen leg of lamb she had taken out for his dinner.

Hitchcock may have been inspired by the darkly witty script by author Roald Dahl. There are no fancy angles or Hitchcock flourishes, just simple, straight-forward direction that focuses the attention and establishes dynamics between characters, and, thanks to Dahl's darkly humorous script, has one of the best "cappers" in the entire series. 

 

It's one of the best remembered episodes of the Hitchcock show and the second episode for which Hitchcock received an Emmy nomination for directing.

"Dip in the Pool" (AHP, S3:E35, 1958) William Botibol (Keenan Wynn) isn't excited about his cruise vacation to Europe with his wife Ethel (Louise Platt). He has a gambling addiction and there isn't much action on-board ship other than the swaying of the ship through the waves. But, his interest picks up when he learns that the ship does a wager amongst its high-rollers, the subject being how many nautical miles the ship travels each day of the voyage, depending, of course, on weather conditions and the choppiness of the water. 

 

Botibol is hooked. He takes the vacation money and bets it all on a figure using "insider information" and his own boastful brio.

 

But, don't bet against Mother Nature. Not even Hitchcock can direct it. 

 

"Poison" (AHP, S4:E1, 1958) Based also on a Roald Dahl short story, "Poison" tells the story of Harry Pope (James Donald) who wakes up in his tent in Malaya, realizing that a poisonous snake has crawled into his bunk and is sleeping on his stomach. He can't move, lest he disturb the snake's sleep and gets bitten. Trouble is the only guy who can help him is his partner (Wendell Corey from Rear Window), who is more amused at Pope's plight than anything, gloating that Pope is probably too drunk that he's hallucinating and that if he does get bit, his share of the business will go to him.

 

As in "Breakdown," we're back to that theme of vulnerability and helplessness, and Hitchcock's camera placements emphasize Pope's dilemma and his partner's upper-hand. 

 

Wes Anderson remade this for his Roald Dahl Netflix series with Benedict Cumberbatch and Ben Kingsley, in 2023.

Hitchcock's bizarre first shot in "Poison"

 

 

"Banquo's Chair" (AHP, S4:E29,1959) "Blackheath, near London. October 23, 1903. 7:03pm." Retired Inspector Brent (John Williams, once again) arrives at the home of Major Cooke-Finch (Reginald Gardner), current resident of a house that was the scene of the Blackheath Murder, a crime that has gone unsolved. Brent, who'd worked on the case, has always had his suspicions and has arranged a dinner there to crack it and bring the killer to justice. How he does it is based on trickery, entrapment, deceit, but, he pushes on.

 

It's also based on his lead suspect (Kenneth Haigh) being so unhinged that parlor tricks could force a confession out of him.

 

It's something of a stiff episode, with a conceit that the major looks towards the camera in bewilderment, speaking to himself whenever Brent says something surprising. In legal terms, that might be called "leading the witness."

 

Hitchcock does some nice things in it, employing some of the claustrophobic shots he had used in an episode of "Suspense" to suggest mental instability, but the last shot is rather smirk-inducing, employing the same "well, I'll be blinkered" shot that had been used before.

 

"Arthur" (AHP, S5:E1, 1959) Film star Laurence Harvey (The Manchurian Candidate) works with Hitchcock for the first and only time in his career, playing the titular character, who narrates the tale in the first person addressing the audience, and, at one point, even breaking the neck of a chicken (off-screen, of course), setting the stage for the tale of a prideful man, proud of his business raising poultry, who's something of a sociopath.

 

Whets the appetite, doesn't it?

 

His production plant is completely automated, something he takes extraordinary pride in, and so he lives his life a contented bachelor, processing chickens, and their feed from the cradle to the grave, isolated and all the happier for it. Snapping necks is merely a fringe benefit.

 

Complications arise, as you would think. And it's another one of those episodes that provides an idea of what to do with a dead body. Harvey, who had always relished roles of ethically dubious characters, chews the scenery (and a chicken dinner) delightfully. The episode could make one go Vegan.  

 

Nice little role by Patrick MacNee.

Arthur (Laurence Harvey) applying his trade.

 

 

"The Crystal Trench" (AHP, S5:E2, 1959) One immediately sees the care put into this episode over other episodes: the cinematography is lush, the actors international (star James Donald had just appeared in The Bridge on the River Kwai), and the model-work and background shots are cinema-quality (well, yes, as they're borrowed from Hitchcock's own The Lady Vanishes). But, one shot tipped me off that it was Hitchcock-directed—when one character suggests his romantic interest in the presumed-widowed Stella Bannister (Patricia Owens), Hitchcock shoots her non-reply in cold profile.

 

"The Crystal Trench" tells the story of obsessive love with Donald's narrator recalling the first time he met Stella in September, 1907, and of how she was entranced by her husband Michael. Michael is killed in a climbing accident and his body lost, but Stella remains steadfastly true to her marriage, staying friends with the narrator but rebuffing any entreaties of marrying him.

 

This one seems extra special to Hitchcock with its story of obsession to the point of madness and of devotion to the point of denial.

 

"Mrs. Bixby and The Colonel's Coat" (AHP, S6:E1, 1960) One of the least of the Hitchcock-directed episodes, about a two-timing wife (Audrey Meadows), who tells her devoted dentist-husband (the ubiquitous Les Tremayne) that she's visiting her sister when she's actually visiting an out-of-town lover. Her infidelity and taste for the finer things in life prove to be a private undoing.

 

Based on another Roald Dahl story (but with a script by the prolific Halsted Welles, who wrote the Western 3:10 to Yuma and contributed six scripts to "Alfred Hitchcock Presents"), it's not as macabre or grisly as some of the popular episodes. Unless you're a mink, of course.

 

It does have a delicious "comeuppance" scene with triple consequences.

 

"The Horseplayer" (AHP, S6:E22, 1961) Hitchcock reunites with his Notorious star Claude Rains, who stars as Father Amion, whose parish church suffers from a leaky roof, requiring $1500 to fix. But, the daily collection plate yields paltry amounts and the Bishop can't relinquish the funds. What's required is a miracle, which comes in the form of Mr. Sheridan (Ed Gardner, if the voice sounds familiar but not the name it's because, Gardiner was the creator and star of the old radio show "Duffy's Tavern" where he played "Archie the manager") who leaves a fresh $10 bill whenever he appears. The good Father asks about the generous donation and Sheridan reveals that he bet on horse-races but always lost...until he saw the sign on Amion's church that said "Come to Pray." Prayer changed his fortunes at the track and he repaid his good fortune at the church's donation basket. Amion has moral qualms about this, but the temptation is too much and he absconds with church funds for Sheridan to bet in order to pay for the roof repairs.

 

The episode speaks to Hitchcock's Catholic faith and the strictures it demands and the resulting guilt when succumbing to "the near occasion of sin", and the episode isn't too flashy but dramatically efficient, and there's something nicely layered about Rains' frequent looks to Heaven—is he beseeching God or cursing the condition of the roof?

"Bang! You're Dead" (AHP, S7:E2, 1961) An absolute nerve-jangler of an episode with a very simple premise: young Jackie Chester (Billy Mumy) is a 5-year old boy who likes to put on a cowboy hat and play shoot-em-up.

But, when his uncle comes to stay after an extended trip to Africa, Jackie finds his uncle's pistol, and it's a lot better than his toy one. Unbeknownst to the elder Chester family, Jackie has taken the real gun, loaded it with real bullets (just like his toy one!) and is wandering the neighborhood, taking aim and *pew-pew*-ing anyone who gives him a second glance. It's only a matter of time before the real gun kills somebody "real dead." The uncle and Jackie's parents realize what has happened and spend the episode frantically looking for the kid, while Hitchcock amps up the tension, slowing down time with close-ups of the trigger getting closer and closer to firing.

The episode is so tense, and potentially commonplace (kids being the curious, non-consequential monsters that they are), that Hitchcock chose to throw out his usual droll end-commentary and speak seriously.

"On rare occasions, we have stories on this program which do not lend themselves to levity. "Bang! You're Dead" is a case in point. We only hope that this play has dramatized for parents the importance of keeping firearms and ammunition out of reach of children. Accidents of this type occur far too frequently nowadays and the tragic fact is that with proper precaution, it could be avoided. That is all for tonight. Please join us next week when we shall return with another story. Until then, good night." 

"I Saw the Whole Thing" (AHHour, S1:E4 1962) A traffic accident seen through a Rashomon-type kaleidoscope.

 

John Forsythe (from The Trouble with Harry and Topaz) returns to the series as a crime writer who is accused of a hit-and-run accident that leaves a motorcyclist in the hospital near death. Five eyewitnesses swear that they each "saw the whole thing" (and Hitchcock makes the point by zooming in on each of them at the time of the incident and freeze-framing on them—a quick technique that I don't recall Hitchcock ever using in anything he'd done previously or since—unless you count some of the shots of "Breakdown"), their testimonies going to the police and leading to the arrest of Forsythe's mystery writer. Forsythe's writer (for some reason) decides to defend himself against the charges as his own attorney and the majority of the episode entails his unraveling of the five eyewitnesses' "expert" testimony. Once thing is undeniable. Forsythe's car was the vehicle involved in the hit-and-run.

 

In a last ditch effort to prosecute, the DA calls the writer to the stand...and Forsythe's character repeatedly takes the Fifth, leaving him with a contempt citation and a jury leaning against "reasonable doubt."

 

It's a bit too much "Perry Mason"-lite and the story feels a little slight to stretch to an hour (especially with its twist-reveal!), and the story doesn't so much have you guessing as leave you confused throughout ("why the heck is he doing that?"). 

 

Perhaps Forsythe projects too much American competence to pull it off. Maybe if was his fault, after all.

Well, you're ALMOST seeing the whole thing...

  

While he was working on the "Alfred Hitchcock Presents" series, the director had a couple opportunities from his network to see what he could do with an hour-long format (before he could convince them to do "The Alfred Hitchcock Hour." Both of them are notable for different reasons. 

Suspicion: "Four O'Clock" (S1:E1, 1957) Hitchcock had directed some episodes of "Alfred Hitchcock Presents" by this time but the half-hour format (excluding the commercials which he regularly took jabs at in his droll commentaries...which also took time away) was frustrating his story-telling techniques, and those of his directors. "Suspicion," however, was an hour-long show and Hitchcock signed on to one of the first episodes to direct.

 

The film has minimal dialogue up to the second commercial break, merely relying on the director to tell the story visually about a watch and clock repairman (E.G. Marshall), setting up a time-bomb to blow up his wife and her lover (and his house!) to avenge their infidelity. It's a relentless nail-biter with a soundtrack cruelly composed of ticking clocks to amp up the tension. And the closing minutes are as crazy as anything Hitchcock has directed, with tight close-ups, editing that isn't so much quick as relentless, and a denouement that borders on the surreal.

 

Look for Harry Dean Stanton as a hoodlum who complicates things.

 

 

Startime: "Incident at a Corner" (S1:E27, 1960) Just one week after completing the filming of Psycho, Hitchcock took the same crew and made this one hour episode of "Ford Startime" in a story that doesn't quite fit the dark purposes of either "Suspense" or his own series. But, it did allow him to work with his television crew in color for the first time, and work in the hour-long format that was still a couple of years from being realized in "The Alfred Hitchcock Hour." 

 

Hitchcock starts by showing one "incident" three times from three different angles: a 68 year old school crossing guard, James Medwick (Paul Hartman) puts out his stop sign and the head of the Parent's Safety Council (Leora Dana), ignores it and turns the corner to park and enter the school. Medwick and the woman, Mrs. Tawley, get into a spitting tiff about her getting sighted for ignoring a stop sign, something witnessed by one of the school's teachers, Mr. Batle.

 

Just a simple disagreement. Until Medwick is fired from his temp-work on his birthday by the school principal...something about an "anonymous complaint" ("can't say who...") that Medwick is "too fond of little girls." The old man is devastated, but his granddaughter (Vera Miles, right off the lot from Psycho) and her fiancee (George Peppard) are determined to fight the smear campaign and get the old guy's job back. And, incidentally, his reputation.

 

The episode drips with irony as people get defensive, self-righteousness, and get into hissy-fits over who did what to whom (and 'for the sake of the children"), with both sides being wrong at some point. And the ending's a bit on the neat side of "oh, well, things happen (chuckle)" that left me with a grousing final thought. 

 

The lesson being, if someone really wants to smear a person's reputation, they should wait until they're too dead to defend themselves and write a badly-researched biography.

* I was watching one night when I saw an episode starring director/actor Sydney Pollack (okay...but that was early days in his career) only to have my jaw dropped when the episode turned out to be based on a story by Philip Roth!

** The only thing that is a little nagging about binge-watching it is that pretty soon the anthology series gets a little...episodic. Last minute twists and deus ex machina's show up all too frequently and take the piss out of the suspense that had gone before. 

 

*** Hitchcock and Price (and Gregory) apparently got along very well.

Now I've Seen Everything Dept.: Robert Redford

Robert Redford died today at the age of 89. I'm re-running this directing-career retrospective.

"Golden Boy"

Throughout his career, as actor, producer and director, Charles Robert Redford, Jr. has seemed to choose projects that were personal and conflicted. You look at movies he starred in like Downhill Racer and The Way We Were and The Candidate, with their gilded, privileged (we use the word "entitled" these days), clueless protagonists, and you see the man playing the parts rebelling against the "easy" "golden boy" persona, trashing it, criticizing it, while also, to be truthful, personifying it. Redford was just too much the California golden boy, smart and handsome, to have it rough getting parts in movies or on stage—so he picked carefully.* He chose anti-heroes in Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, Jeremiah Johnson, and Tell Them Willie Boy Is Here. And although his acting range was limited, his determination to challenge himself, and his boyish good-looks-image early in his career is also reflected in his choices as a director. Carefully, precisely, he picked material that wasn't easy...and true to form scored gold with his very first effort. He must have been very pleased, then probably questioned why he won it and became very determined to do something completely different. 

Redford has never been complacent, even when he's made very complacent movies. One gets the idea that he goes into each movie, sparkly-eyed, wondering how much damage he can do with the project, upsetting the status quo.


Ordinary People (1980) Intimate family drama of coping with tragedy in the hopes of trying to stave off another one. Strong cast with Donald Sutherland (whose amazing work in this is too-often neglected), Judd Hirsch, Elizabeth McGovern, and Academy Award winners Timothy Hutton and Mary Tyler Moore.  Everybody's great, but Moore got the most attention for her fine work as a wound-too-tight grieving mother, whose grief over losing one son in a boating accident, threatens to destroy the life of the surviving son. Casting "America's sweetheart" as a control-freak exposed the vibrating neurosis at the heart of Moore's comedic acting that could turn hysterical in dramatic turns. Redford also won Best Director that year, and the film—his first—took home top honors as Best Picture, too.

It proved both a blessing and a curse, it took Redford eight years of careful choosing to find a second effort that might top the first.

The Milagro Beanfield War (1988) Milagro, New Mexico is about to die and only the residents of it object.  A farming community, it depends on water for irrigation, but Big Business and their glad-handing lackey politicians agree to divert water only for development.  That means the water in a ditch running by the beanfield of Joe Mondragon (Chick Vennera) can't be used for it.  Coming across a valve that diverts water from his father's property, Joe kicks it, breaking it, and flooding the field. Hilarity, irony, and civil disobedience ensue.  Redford probably wasn't the right guy to make this one, an adaptation of John Nichols' best-selling novel, as, at this point in his career, his attempts at fanciful film-making come across as deadly earnestness. And so, though it wants to be a kind of cautionary folk-tale, it comes across as heavy-handed preachiness. Plus, for all the attempts at ethnically correct casting, it's a little top-heavy with Anglo stars (Christopher Walken, Daniel Stern, John Heard...Melanie Griffith???) in an attempt to generate income, which, in its way, is Hollywood's version of swamping a town under. Redford would become surer with a lighter hand, but still manage to be heavy-handed later in his career.

A River Runs Through It (1992) Redford directs—and narrates—this superb adapatation of Norman Maclean's late-in-life debut novella. The story of two Montana brothers (Craig Sheffer,** Brad Pitt), sons of a Presbyterian minister (Tom Skerritt, never better) who, despite ever separating fortunes, are united in their love of the land...and fly-fishing. Sheffer plays the good, dutiful son living a correct life as a teacher and courting a proper girl (Emily Lloyd), while Pitt (looking eerily like a young Redford) takes his chances on a roustabout's life in sensationalistic journalism. It's a story of conflicts that disappear on the river, as the brothers and their father compete, learn and share secrets for "the perfect cast" that will simulate Nature enough to lure a fish. It's life-lessons in miniature, writ large but humbly, but the interpretations by the two brothers of finding their bliss could not be more different.

Simple story simply told. With McLean's way with words managing to make a successful transition to the projected image and a shimmering soundtrack.

Quiz Show (1994) Redford started his acting career right at the end of "The Golden Age of Television," so he knew the milieu of this fact-based story about the "21" game show scandal. Wasp-ish golden boy Charles van Doren became a TV sensation across the country with his winning streak on a popular prime-time game show during the 1950's. What the public didn't know was that the game was rigged in Van Doren's favor in order to generate drama and higher rating numbers, so he was getting the answers and being coached on how to act as if he was struggling to remember them. Ralph Fiennes plays van Doren, John Turturro the contestant not attractive enough to compete (according to the producers), Rob Morrow as the investigator looking into the chicanery, but the best scene is between Fiennes and Paul Scofield as the elder Mark van Doren, a poet laureate who is incensed by all the easy fame his son has achieved. Redford's direction is more self-assured in this, taking on more of a jazzy editing rhythm than the simple, careful presentations his earlier films had.

The Horse Whisperer (1998) The first novel of Nicholas Evans starts with an intriguing idea, resolves it, then splashes down into turgid soap-opera material that completely negates the earlier tense story of healing the wounds, psychological and physical, of a girl and horse, received in a horrific riding accident involving a 18-wheeler. The girl loses a leg and becomes problematically depressed, the horse is scarred and hysterical, and the girl's mother—a preoccupied fashion magazine editor (Kristin Scott Thomas, probably based—again—on Vogue's Anna Wintour) can't cope. She hires a "horse whisperer" (Redford) to deal with both, frustratingly, because he insists on his rules, his terms, dragging the family to a remote Montana location (the film is beautifully filmed by the eclectic Robert Richardson), where conflicting emotions get churned up. Evans has the characters act on them. Redford, knowing that all parties in the story, are disciplined and have histories, just ends the story before the romance novel aspects start. Smart choice, that. It was Redford's first time directing himself in a movie, and the first major role of a young actress named Scarlett Johansson.

The Legend of Bagger Vance (2000) Imagine that. Redford abandons reality for a moment to dabble in Myth and Folklore, sort of the Golf Whisperer. It's a Tall Tale twice removed: an old duffer (Jack Lemmon) has a heart attack on the golf course, and recalls the story from his childhood of Savannah's favorite son golfer (Matt Damon) who goes to WWI and loses his way, then is coerced into a celebrity golf-match to help publicize a course owned by an old flame (Charlize Theron). Already the narrator may be unreliable due to health and the distance of time, but it's a good variation of the Western tale of the war vet who comes home and regains a family after losing himself.  Sure, Bagger Vance (Will Smith) may be a little bit Obi-Wan, (a Golf Whisperer, actually) and the kid (J. Michael Moncrief) a little "Say it Ain't So, Joe," but Redford's take is funny, sad and sublime, a far better film about golf and the struggle with self than, say, Tin Cup. Redford's direction is sure, not staid, taking chances and occasionally doing something amusing with it. And for a golf movie, there's a haunting after-image of the purely artificial golf course as a living entity that affects play, and that the director emphasizes with a persistent sound-design that accentuates Nature. Really much better than its reputation.

Lions for Lambs (2007) Redford's first film post-"9/11" is a polemic mis-fire that feels like a sociology lecture.  As it is, directed carefully by Redford, with Big Stars Tom Cruise (who produced), Meryl Streep, and himself, it feels talky, staged and stacked in the favor of one side over another—negating any persuasion the movie might actually create. All the anti-Bush sentiment Redford built up over the Iraq/Afghanistan War and it's "selling" to the American public must have boiled over in the deadly earnestness (that phrase again!) in which this film is presented. It could have used a bit more humor—even gallows humor would have sufficed. One leaves with the Daniel Dennett quote (that Jim Emerson had prominently displayed on his Scanners movie blog): "There's nothing I like less than bad arguments for a view that I hold dear." 

The Conspirator (2011) A production of The American Film Company, which strives to present accurate portrayals of American History.*** In this case, History feels a lot like the Present.  

Redford's next film is a true-life historical drama based on one of the great miscarriages of justice done in the name of national tragedy and patriotic fervor: the trial and hanging (the first of a woman by the U.S. Government) of Mary Surrat after the assassination of Abraham Lincoln (her crime was that she owned the boarding house where the would-be assassins met) It's clearly meant to be addressing the knee-jerk trash-canning of basic principles of jurisprudence in the face of the 9/11 attacks ("Military tribunals" and indefinite incarcerations without charges), but, doing so while taking a lesson from the failure of Lions for Lambs, cushioning it with an example from the past. Whatever the reason, it is one of those stories you wonder why it had never been made before.

The Company You Keep (2013) A combination of The Fugitive and Absence of Malice makes for a film that might be a little too complicated for its good—but it at least allows the casting of Shia LaBoeuf (as a mercilessly ambitious cub reporter) to offset the age of most of the actors in the cast (including Redford) who are playing 1960's radicals hiding from the law. Hmm. Throw Sneakers in there, too. The more radical members of the Weather Underground go Undercover after a bank robbery thirty years previous that included the murder of a guard. One of the group, Sharon Solarz (Susan Sarandon) is arrested and the FBI begins to crack down on other members of the group, particularly Redford's Jim Grant who, under the name Nick Sloane, had not participated in the robbery. The FBI's not particularly concerned with the details as members of the task force (Terrence Howard, Anna Kendrick) are concerned with being left flat-footed with no progress on the case for thirty years.

There is a definite lack of suspense here and one finds the LaBoeuf character a bit superfluous (and annoying—as do most of the characters), but legendary scenarist Lem Dobbs manages to keep the radicals' portion of the script taut and weighted with irony and melancholy, if one does get confused one in a while with all the aliases flying by. But, what a cast: Redford, Sarandon, Nick Nolte, Stephen Root, Sam Elliott, Richard Jenkins, Brendan Gleeson, Chris Cooper, Stanley Tucci, and Julie Christie. It may not mean anything to younger viewers—but, then, neither do the events about something called a "Vietnam War" and "student radicals"—as the rebels find themselves having to deal with the consequences of adapting those very values they were fighting against in the first place. Not a bad little conceit.

* Mike Nichols, who directed Redford in the Broadway production of Neil Simon's "Barefoot in the Park," wanted Redford to play Benjamin Braddock in The Graduate, as Ben is described in the book as a golden-haired California boy.  But Redford balked, saying that a privileged handsome kid wouldn't be so sexually awkward.  So, Nichols hired schlumpy Dustin Hoffman instead...away from playing Nazi playwright Franz Liebkin in Mel Brooks' The Producers.  Brooks was only too happy to help.  Mrs. Brooks, Anne Bancroft, was also starring in The Graduate.

** The young child actor who plays Craig Sheffer's character as a boy is one Joseph Gordon-Levitt.

*** A noble goal but maybe not a profitable one—come to think of it we haven't heard anything from them lately (Parkland is one of theirs).