This Lesser-Known Robert Redford Film Is as Relevant Today as Ever

Robert Redford was always around, but I never saw him, let alone met him. At every large Democratic gathering that I've attended in my career, he was a kind of ghost, a rumor, but a presence nonetheless.

Beyond his career as one of the last authentic matinee idols, a fine actor and director, and the creator of the Sundance Resort and Field Institute that revived independent film, Redford was a political actor for those causes he adopted, especially concerning the environment and, by extension, indigenous rights.

One of the lesser-known films on his CV is The Candidate, a shrewd examination of the birth of mass media politics in the 1970s. In it, Redford portrays Bill McKay, the activist son of a crafty former California governor, who runs against a veteran senator. As the campaign grinds on, we see the process sanding down the sharp edges of the young McKay until, in the final scene in the film, on the night he has scored his upset win, McKay looks up at his campaign guru, played by Peter Boyle, and says, "What do we do now?" I'm not sure, 50-odd years on, that we know the answer to that yet.

In the best of his films, Redford played off his looks as a working stiff, albeit in very specialized jobs. In All The President's Men, his Bob Woodward was a grunt on the metro desk of The Washington Post. In The Sting, he was a workaday grifter forced into a high-level con. In Three Days Of The Condor, he worked for the CIA, but only as an analyst who read books until an internal plot turned him into a natural field agent. He was an everyman in his own distinct way, and he gave an honest day's work. That's not a bad way to be remembered.