Five Robert Redford movies you absolutely should see at least once

For 20 years or so, movie stars didn’t come much bigger than Robert Redford, who has died aged 89.

He spent the best part of a decade as a jobbing television actor, but from the late 1960s, he became a fixture on the big screen, where he conveyed an easy masculinity.

He was never threatening, always competent, mostly morally upright. Whatever the murky qualities of the character he was playing – bank robber, playboy, maverick political candidate – he somehow managed to also come across as a beacon of wholesome goodness, albeit with an edge.

There are many Robert Redford pictures worth revisiting for a glimpse of what an old-fashioned movie star looked like before CGI and green screen took over. What follows is a short list, far from exhaustive, but just enough to whet the appetite. Let it be the start of your Redford journey, but by no means the end.

The Old Man & the Gun (2018)

Redford had announced in 2016 – in an interview with his grandson – that The Old Man & the Gun would be his last acting role, and he was good to his word; although he appeared in Avengers: Endgame, that role was shot before this one. Redford plays ageing bank robber Forrest Tucker, an incorrigible charmer who finds himself torn between the thrill of the heist and the appeal of a quiet life on the farm with a woman (Sissy Spacek) he meets while hiding from the police. Based on a remarkable true story, it was directed by David Lowery, with whom Redford also made the gorgeous kids’ film, Pete’s Dragon (2016).

Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid (1969)

It’s impossible to talk about Robert Redford without touching on two movies, and this is one of them, the film that effectively launched him as a star. Paul Newman plays Butch, Redford the Kid, and together they are wisecracking, laconic train robbers at the tail end of the American Wild West. Though it may be more style than substance, the movie was a huge success and an early example of morally ambiguous heroes in a buddy movie that married action and comedy. It also has a great theme song (Raindrops Keep Falling on My Head) and one of the best and most memorable final shots in all of cinema.

All the President’s Men (1976)

And this is the other one. Redford plays Bob Woodward and Dustin Hoffman is Carl Bernstein in this telling of The Washington Post’s investigation of the Watergate scandal that ultimately brought down US president Richard Nixon. Redford didn’t just star in it, though; he was instrumental in it being made, having bought the rights to Woodward and Bernstein’s book for $US450,000 (an astronomical figure in 1974). He also got involved in the script. Originally written by William Goldman (writer of Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid), it was rewritten by Bernstein and his then girlfriend, Nora Ephron (who would go on to write When Harry Met Sally and Sleepless in Seattle), retooled by Redford and director Alan J Pakula, but ultimately credited to Goldman, who won an Oscar for it. Whatever the difficulties of its birth, the film became a massive success and was the most powerful recruiting tool for investigative journalism until Spotlight (2015) came along almost 40 years later.

Ordinary People (1980)

Redford wasn’t just a leading man, he was a director himself, helming 10 films, including the excellent Quiz Show (1994). He first stepped behind the camera for Ordinary People in 1980. A film about a wealthy family dealing with grief, with Donald Sutherland and Mary Tyler Moore as the parents and Timothy Hutton as their adult son, it wasn’t a bad debut, either. Redford won his only Oscar, for best director, for the film (it also won best picture, best adapted screenplay, and best supporting actor for Hutton).

All Is Lost (2013)

J.C. Chandor’s movie is built around what may be the single most heroic performance of Redford’s career – as a solo round-the-world yachtsman who wakes up to find his yacht has been holed by a drifting cargo container thrown overboard by a raging sea. For 105 minutes, Redford mutters and curses his way through every imaginable difficulty in a bid to stay afloat. The only discernible word he utters is an F-bomb of frustration. It’s a remarkable performance in a remarkable film that stands not just as a relentlessly tense survival drama but equally an allegory for refusing to go quietly into that long goodnight. Brilliant.

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