Brandon’s Reviews > Robert Redford: The Biography > Status Update

The over-sized war bonnet scene cut from The Candidate suggests several things: indigenous satire, Redford’s anxiety over his iconography or both. The war bonnet is not the kind of mistake McKay would make (237).

Ritchie: thematic over descriptive: ”it was to Bob’s eternal credit that the form, the theme, if you like, of this movie was the center. Very few productions I’ve been involved with developed with such evaluative power” (235).

The Candidate’s budget, drawn up by Ritchie and production manager Walter Coblenz, was agreed to at a rock-bottom $1.5 million, with no off-the-top fee for Redford, who accepted because he wanted to get on with it, shot in documentary style, “with the camera frame jumping around” (233).

Larner: “In my experience, liberals “don’t sell out. They get carried away….They fix on a belief and are confronted by the Niagara Falls of reality. They hear the sound of the rushing water but don’t see it. Then, before they know it, they are over the falls, and they evolve into something else” (231). Sounds similar to Welles’ greatest tragedy.

Oops. The above analysis is Redford’s after talking with Sen. Bill Bradley.

“…From 1972 onward the cream of the rebels rose to the surface: Tom Harkin, Pat Schroeder, Gary Hart, Jerry Brown—great political minds who concentrated on working the system against itself while Nixon was busy getting us involved in Cambodia” (229).

Bradley: While Nixon was…in China working his realpolitik,…guys slid in underneath and were the brains behind the National Environmental Policy Act, the Energy Production and Recovery Act, everything that matters in calling a country a country…(229).

Redford on non-debate inspiring The Candidate: “It’s not about substance, it’s about presentation, about perception of reality, which allows for manipulation” (229).

Ritchie contends Wildwood was the enclave where “secret” Redford lived. “He was really an author. His writing credit wasn’t on Downhill or Jeremiah…but he really was an author as much as David Rayfiel, or even Salter. I always felt that was denied him, but he was in a no-win situation, because he had all this luminous stardom and neither the public nor critics have much patience for author-stars.” 228

Losers who survive: Jeremiah Johnson, according to Newsweek: “These new heroes are often losers whose heroism is measured not in their ability to triumph, but to survive.”