"Both were a byword, too, for male beauty, fully alive to the almost laughable impact of their handsomeness, yet ill at ease, now and then, with their perches on the pedestal. "You're always dressed right, you always look right, you always say the right thing. You're very nearly perfect." So says Jane Fonda to Redford in "Barefoot in the Park" (1967), in which they play newlyweds. "That's a rotten thing to say," he replies."
"The pressure of perfection starts to tell on Redford's character, Paul, who winds up drunk, in Washington Square Park, in broad daylight, tipping garbage over himself. Do we really believe in that loss of control? There's something embarrassing in his effort to look wacky and wild; already, in the springtime of Redford's career, he seems more at home embodying self-command."
Robert Redford stood as the archetypal elegant, blond leading man whose polished Hollywood image masked a private, lonely reserve. He and Paul Newman portrayed genial partners in films such as Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid and The Sting, where charm softened criminality into playful capers. Offscreen, both actors presented athletic, philanthropic personas while retaining a degree of inscrutability that intensified public fascination. Roles such as the frustrated newlywed in Barefoot in the Park and an anxious private in War Hunt revealed tensions between cultivated perfection and moments of emotional exposure, with Redford generally more at home in controlled self-command than in unguarded vulnerability.
Read at The New Yorker
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