Film: The Way We Were, with Barbra Streisand and Robert Redford

I realise that most of my secretsquirrelsays reviews are negative with the exception of some books about Frank Sinatra and a couple of single episodes of TV series, such as Law & Order: Skate or Die and Cold Case: Honor. For some reason, I am easily provoked to ridicule and criticism by bad media although admittedly some of the films do fall into the 'so-bad-they're-good' category, eg Ferocious Planet and Dark Storm. 

So, now for something completely different. For some time now, Sony Movies Classics has been showing The Way We Were (dir. Sydney Pollack, 1973), the Barbra Streisand/Robert Redford masterpiece, with the heart-rending theme (written by Marvin Hamlisch, sung so beautifully, emotionally, by Ms Streisand) and I've been torn between a) really wanting to watch it again but being frightened it might be too upsetting and b) avoiding it in case I found it disappointing. I must have watched it on TV I don't know how many years after it was made. Finally, I took the plunge and this review is the result.

Incidentally, Hamlisch also wrote the music for The Sting, another Redford vehicle and Pollack also directed Redford in Out of Africa, which had its own hauntingly pretty theme by the unsurpassable John Barry. 

What can I say? They simply don't make movies like this any more. I realise that's American speak (and they would also make ‘any more’ one word, which is simply wrong) and I should write 'They no longer make movies like this' but it just doesn't have the same oomph. And they don't make movie stars like this any more either. All of it is perfect. But let's start with the song. From the first notes on the piano, Barbra humming, within seconds, my sister and I are in floods of tears. Transported to a different time. We nearly have to give up watching, we're so distraught. Some people will know the Gladys Knight version of the song but that's about as different as you can get. When Barbra sings 'If we had the chance to do it all again/Would we?/Could we?', the 'Could we?' is a teasing, genuine proposal. Why not?

This is the power of music, the power of film, whose effects, when combined adroitly, as they are here, and in Born Free (John Barry again) and A Summer Story (Georges Delerue), increase exponentially. Even, I don't know, ten/fifteen years since we last watched it, it's so laden with our memories of watching the film, the first time, the last time, the incredible love affair, knowing the progress of it and its denouement, what we know happens in the film and everything that has or hasn't happened in our own lives in the intervening years, all the way through to Carrie (Sarah-Jessica Parker) and Mr Big (Chris Noth) in Sex and the City, when Carrie quotes Barbra as Katie: 'Your girl is lovely, Hubbell.'

This is evidence of how pervasive, persuasive, this type of storyline is, how it's repeated in other dramas, that most of Carrie's friends immediately know what she's referencing although I think it does have to be explained to one if I remember correctly. The characters and the situation have entered a sort of universal lexicon of love stories. It is a love story, and unashamedly so. A rom without the com.

Ok, Redford and Streisand as college students when she was 36 and he over 40, is a bit of a stretch.

BUT Barbra Streisand is simply outstanding as Katie, utterly on point throughout. I don’t think anyone else could have played this part. She has the mix just right and her face is so expressive. Rumour has it that she had a crush on Redford at the time, which could only have helped.

And Redford is perfect for Hubbell, embodying the all-American male, preppy, what we would now call WASP, a jock, a prom king type (with his queen played by Lois Chiles), for whom 'everything comes easy', as he tells it in a story he wrote that he is forced to read out in class. This type of character has become part of Redford's persona. Jocular, witty, warm but also a little too perfect to be approachable. His charm is effortless, his charisma magnetic.

Incidentally, also re-watched Redford in The Great Gatsby (a 1974 adaptation of the F. Scott Fitzgerald novel), in which he plays, on the surface, a similar type, and this I found incredibly tedious. The characters are unremittingly shallow.

My favourite part of the movie is the motif that recurs when they re-encounter each other. A deja vu shot of a particular gesture. Katie reaches to guide Hubbell's fringe out of his eyes with such tenderness and love. The first time is before anything has begun between them, the second near the end of the film. Their relationship has died but the affection they feel for each other remains. 

This film does what Evelyn Waugh's and TV's Brideshead Revisited did so consummately, conjures up nostalgia for a certain relationship and a certain time. The days of our collective youth, whenever they occurred. Think E. M. Forster's Maurice (the book and the film) and this sentence from the last page.

"Out of some eternal Cambridge his friend began beckoning to him, clothed in the sun, and shaking out the scents and sounds of the May Term."

It's what I call a 'what-could-have-been' moment. A dream, a fantasy. A road not taken.

* * * *

[Arthur Laurents adapted his own novel for the screenplay and the film is also about politics, the fear of Communism, manifesting itself in the blacklist; the HUAC and activism but a bit like Hubbell, you can tire of causes, however worthy. It's still a love story first and foremost.]