Robert Redford is "The Candidate"
Friday, September 13, 2013 at 10:29AM Team Experience is looking at key Robert Redford films as we approach the release of his lauded Oscar-buzzing comeback "All is Lost". Here's Tim Brayton on one of his milestone films.
In addition to being one of the great timeless sex symbols in Western culture, Robert Redford is noted for the passion of his activism: for art, as in the creation of the Sundance Film Festival and the exposure it gave to American independent filmmaking; and for politics, as seen in the joylessly obvious message movie Lions for Lambs. But let us try as hard as we possibly can not to hold that against him, and instead rewind all the way back to 1972. For it was in that election year that Redford acted in the first of many explicitly political movies of his career, The Candidate.
The title says it all: there’s a Senate campaign to wage, and a candidate to flog, and that candidate, Democrat Bill McKay, is embodied by the most photogenic, blondest, whitest actor of the early ‘70s. Which is as much to say that the casting alone goes a long way towards explaining why the movie works, will all apologies to Redford’s skill. [more...]
