Abstract
In the early 1970s, the controversial anti-communist Hollywood witch-hunts of the 1940s and 1950s finally received their first overt treatment in the popular romantic melodrama The Way We Were (Pollack, 1973). Starring Barbra Streisand (Katie Morosky) and Robert Redford (Hubbel Gardiner), the film is about an unlikely romance between a fiery Jewish radical and a handsome and privileged Wasp, and the conflict between careers, personal relationships and political principles in blacklist era Hollywood. By downplaying the political story, however, it was not the frank, revealing and long overdue story of political paranoia and destroyed careers that many critics had hoped for. The film was a major hit, nonetheless, owing to two major factors. One factor was the presence of two of America’s most popular movie stars and their compelling on-screen chemistry. The other was the film’s shrewd accommodation of contemporary concerns, namely, the social wars of the 1960s and the explosion in identity politics in the 1970s. These concerns were expressed in the film’s story, themes and, crucially, through the conflicting cultural meanings of Streisand’s and Redford’s star personae.
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Notes
- 1.
After I completed archival research for the book in Los Angeles, the Sydney Pollack papers became available at the Margaret Herrick Library, Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, Beverley Hills, California. The collection contains various script drafts, letters and memos. Unfortunately, I was unable to make the return trip.
- 2.
Arthur Laurents, Original Story By: A Memoir of Broadway and Hollywood (New York: Knopf, 2000), p. 276.
- 3.
Stephen Farber, ‘Time to Stop Playing It Safe’, The New York Times, 8 November, 1973, p. 129. For an example of a negative review see Stanley Kaufman, ‘The Way We Were’, The New Republic, 10 November, 1973, p. 32.
- 4.
For a revised edition of Dyer’s groundbreaking book (1979), which includes a supplementary chapter by Paul McDonald covering more recent developments in star studies, see Richard Dyer, and Paul McDonald, Stars (London: BFI Publishing, 1997).
- 5.
William R. Taylor, Sydney Pollack (Boston: Twayne Publishers, 1981), p. 94.
- 6.
Quote taken from Guy Flatley, ‘Bewitched, Barbra’d And Bewildered’, The New York Times, 21 January 1973, The Way We Were microfiche, Margaret Herrick Library, Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, Beverley Hills, California.
- 7.
By the time Streisand made her screen debut in Funny Girl (1968), she had released a succession of popular albums of standards and collected four Grammy awards.
- 8.
Streisand’s standing in the 1970s was made all the more remarkable because the popularity of female performers had long been in decline: female stars accounted for only 10 % of the decade’s top stars, compared with 50 % in the 1930s. Indeed, women would have accounted for far less had it not been for Streisand, whose consistent success made her the third-biggest star of the 1970s (one position above Redford) and the only female performer to appear in the decade’s Top Ten.4 See Cobbett Steinberg, Reel Facts: The Movie Book of Records (New York: Vintage Books, 1982), pp. 476 + 482.
- 9.
Henry Bial, Acting Jewish: Negotiating Ethnicity on the American Stage & Screen (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2005), p. 155.
- 10.
Barbra Streisand Biography, The Way We Were press pack, The Way We Were microfiche/AMPAS.
- 11.
Lester D. Friedman, The Jewish Image in American Film (NJ: Citadel Press, 1987), p. 184.
- 12.
David Kaufman, Jewhooing the Sixties: American Celebrity and Jewish Identity (Waltham, MA: Brandeis University Press, 2012), p. 221.
- 13.
Kaufman, Jewhooing the Sixties, p. 214.
- 14.
Bial, Acting Jewish, p. 88.
- 15.
Kaufman, Jewhooing the Sixties, p. 249. Around the time The Way We Were was released, the women’s movement registered a significant impact on mainstream politics with the Equal Rights Amendment in 1972 and the legalisation of abortion the following year; see Peter N. Carroll, It Seemed Like Nothing Happened: The Tragedy and Promise of America in the 1970s (New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1982), p. 112.
- 16.
James Morrison (ed.), Hollywood Reborn: Movie Stars of the 1970s (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 2010), p. 10.
- 17.
Pamela Robertson Wojcik, ‘A Star is Born Again, Or, How Streisand Recycles Garland’, in Lesley Stern and George Kouvaros (eds.), Falling for You: Essays on Cinema and Performance (Sydney: Power publications, 1999), p. 197.
- 18.
Jeanine Basinger, A Woman’s View: How Hollywood Spoke to Women, 1930–1960 (New York: Knopf, 1993), p. 21.
- 19.
Chris Cagle, ‘Robert Redford and Warren Beatty: Consensus Stars for a Post-Consensus Age’, in ed. James Morrison (ed.), Hollywood Reborn: Movie Stars of the 1970s (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 2010), p. 40.
- 20.
Cagle, ‘Robert Redford and Warren Beatty’, p. 60.
- 21.
Cagle, ‘Robert Redford and Warren Beatty’.
- 22.
Paul Monaco, The Sixties: 1960–1969 (London: University of California Press, 2001); Roger Greenspun, ‘Robert Redford Stars as Man of Legend’, The New York Times, 22 December, 1972, Robert Redford clippings/AMPAS.
- 23.
‘“He’s a Phony And A Hollywood Puppet!”’, Screen Stars, September 1974; ‘Robert Redford Wouldn’t have disappointed Old Harry Longbaugh’, West, 28 February, 1971, Robert Redford clippings/AMPAS.
- 24.
Bruce J. Schulman, The Seventies: The Great Shift in American Culture, Society and Politics (Cambridge, MA: Da Capo Press, 2001), pp. 78–101. See also Maurice Isserman and Michael Kazin, America Divided: The Civil War of the 1960s (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000).
- 25.
M. W Lear, ‘Anatomy of a Sex Symbol’, The New York Times Magazine, 7 July, 1974, Robert Redford clippings/AMPAS.
- 26.
Christopher Andersen, The Way She Is (London: Aurum Press, 2006), p. 208.
- 27.
Arick, The Way We Were.
- 28.
Andrew Justin Falk, Upstaging the Cold War: American Dissent and Cultural Diplomacy, 1940–1960 (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2010), pp. 103–4.
- 29.
Kazan and his sympathisers maintain naming names was a courageous stand for freedom against those in the industry who advocated a totalitarian state, and was therefore a moral not a practical decision. Evidence of a wider communist conspiracy committed to overthrowing American democracy, however, has little basis in fact. For an expert re-assessment of Kazan’s films and career see Brian Neve, Elia Kazan: The Cinema of an American Outsider (London: I. B. Tauris, 2009).
- 30.
Laurents, Original Story, p. 286.
- 31.
Laurents, Original Story, p. 289. Laurents first came to the attention of the State Department during the Second World War. While serving in the Army radio unit in New York as a script writer, his vocal support of reform within the army (Soldier Vote) was considered subversive by the military establishment, and he was summoned to Washington to account for his political views. No punitive action was taken, but his subsequent work was screened by Washington. See Laurents, Original Story, p. 29.
- 32.
Charles J. Maland, ‘The American Adam’ in Peter C. Rollins (ed.), The Columbia Companion to American History on Film: How the Movies Have Portrayed the American Past (New York: Columbia University Press, 2003), p. 564. See also Chapter 5: ‘Behind the Waterfront’ in Nora Sayre, Running Time: Films of the Cold War (New York: The Dial Press, 1982).
- 33.
Trumbo has argued that ‘I am Spartacus’, the famous proclamation of each re-captured slave in the film’s climactic scene when asked to identify their leader in exchange for leniency, was meant to signify the solidarity of those who refused to co-operate with HUAC; see Peter Hanson, Dalton Trumbo, Hollywood Rebel: A Critical Survey and Filmography (Jefferson, NC: McFarland and Company, 2001), pp. 144–5. A rigorously researched history of the ‘Red Scare’ in Hollywood can be found in Larry Ceplair and Steve Englund, The Inquisition in Hollywood: Politics in the Film Community (Garden City, NY: Anchor Press/Doubleday, 1980). Allegories of paranoia, such as the science fiction film The Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1956) and the western High Noon (1952), could be read both ways, as either anti-communist or anti-McCarthyite.
- 34.
The Planet of the Apes (1968), for example, which was co-written by the former blacklistee Michael Wilson, has been cited by some scholars as an allegory of Hollywood’s anti-communist crusade. Paul Buhle and Dave Wagner, Hide in Plain Sight: The Hollywood Blacklistees in Film and Television, 1950–2002 (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003), pp. vii, ix–xi, + xvii.
- 35.
Arick, The Way We Were; Eric A. Goldman, The American Jewish Story through Cinema (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2013), p. 133.
- 36.
Quoted in Andersen, The Way She Is, p. 208.
- 37.
Andersen, The Way She Is, p. 210.
- 38.
Patricia Erens, ‘The Way We Are’, Film Comment, vol. 11, no. 5 (1975), pp. 24–5.
- 39.
‘Virile Robert Redford’, Cosmo, April 1974, Robert Redford clippings/AMPAS.
- 40.
Arick, The Way She Is.
- 41.
Dalton Trumbo to Sydney Pollack (letter plus drafts of individual scenes), 13 August 1972, Collection 1554, Box 180, Folder 1, Young Research Library, University of California, Los Angeles, California.
- 42.
‘Dialogue on Film: Sydney Pollack’, American Film, vol. 3, no. 6 (1978), p. 45.
- 43.
Andersen, The Way, pp. 212–13.
- 44.
Andersen, The Way, p. 211.
- 45.
Laurents, Original Story, p. 275.
- 46.
Another source of frustration for Laurents was Pollack’s ‘mishandling’ of the film’s political story; see Laurents, Original Story, pp. 277–8. For an in-depth assessment of the film’s coverage of the relationship between HUAC and Hollywood, see Melvyn Stokes, American History through Hollywood Film: From the Revolution to the 1960s (London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2013).
- 47.
Arick, The Way We Were.
- 48.
Arick, The Way We Were.
- 49.
Andersen, The Way She Is, p. 217.
- 50.
‘Dialogue on Film’, p. 45.
- 51.
Wojcik, ‘A Star is Born’, p. 197.
- 52.
Laura Mulvey, ‘Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema’ (1975), in Visual and Other Pleasures (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1989), pp. 14–26.
- 53.
Studs Terkel famously debunked the latter myth by revealing the brutal reality of the conflict in ‘The Good War’: An Oral History of World War II (New York: Pantheon, 1984).
- 54.
Steve Neale, Masculinity as Spectacle: Reflections on Men and Mainstream Cinema, Screen, vol. 24, no. 6 (1983), pp. 2–16.
- 55.
Taylor, Sydney Pollack, p. 116.
- 56.
Basinger, A Woman’s View, p. 7.
- 57.
John Saunders, The Western Genre: From Lordsburg to Big Whiskey (London: Wallflower, 2001), pp. 93–4.
- 58.
Saunders, The Western Genre, p. 94.
- 59.
James Fenimore Cooper, The Last of the Mohicans: A Narrative of 1757 (Albany: State University of New York, 1983).
- 60.
This scene was added to Laurents’ original screenplay. The Committee for the First Amendment is based on the group of Hollywood professionals of the same name that protested against the government’s anti-communist investigations. The group included the director John Huston and the actor Humphrey Bogart.
- 61.
Peter Schrag, The Decline of the Wasp (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1970). Michael Novak’s The Rise of the Unmeltable Ethnics (New York: Macmillan, 1971). See also W. H. Auden, ‘America is NOT a Melting Pot’, The New York Times Magazine, March 18, 1972.
- 62.
Christine Sprengler, Screening Nostalgia: Populuxe Props and Technicolor Aesthetics in Contemporary American Film (Oxford: Berghahn Books, 2009), p. 46.
- 63.
Angela Davis’ alleged involvement in the murder of a Supreme Court judge became a cause célèbre in the early 1970s; see Marc Olden, Angela Davis: An Objective Assessment (New York: Lancer Books, 1973).
- 64.
Eric L. Goldstein, The Price of Whiteness: Jews, Race, and American Identity (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2006), pp. 214 + 216.
- 65.
Peter Schrag, The Vanishing American ([S.l.]: Gollancz, 1972), p. 109.
- 66.
Schrag, The Vanishing American, p. 109.
- 67.
Both reviewers in Fashionweek and Seventeen complained about Hollywood’s preoccupation with sex, drugs and violence in recent years. See ‘The Way We Were’, Fashionweek, 12 November, 1973, The Way Were microfiche/AMPAS, and ‘The Way We Were’, Seventeen, November 1973, The Way Were microfiche/AMPAS.
- 68.
‘The Way We Were’, Fashionweek.
- 69.
‘Love Story’, Cosmopolitan, December 1973, The Way Were clippings/AMPAS.
- 70.
Surveys have shown that the intimate past (personal/family history) are far more important than the national past for the majority of Americans. But the two are often interrelated; the latter is often the setting for the former. See Roy Rosenzweig, and David P. Thelen, The Presence of the Past: Popular Uses of History in American Life (New York: Columbia University Press, 1998).
- 71.
Stanley Kauffmann, ‘The Way We Were’, The New Republic, 10 November, 1973, p. 32.
- 72.
Judy Stone, ‘“The Way We Weren’t”’, Ramparts, vol. 12, no. 7 (1974), p. 49.
- 73.
‘The Way We Were’, Rolling Stone, 6 November 1973, The Way We Were microfiche/AMPAS.
- 74.
‘Film and History Interview with Sydney Pollack’, Film and History, vol. 4, no. 2 (1974), p. 6.
- 75.
Kauffman, ‘The Way We Were’, p. 32.
- 76.
Pauline Kael, ‘Three’, New Yorker, 15 October, 1973, The Way We Were clippings file, The Cinematic Arts Library, University of Southern California, Los Angeles.
- 77.
Kael, ‘Three’.
- 78.
Kael, ‘Three’.
- 79.
Kael, ‘Three’.
- 80.
Schulman, The Seventies, p. 46.
- 81.
Vincent Canby, ‘Screen: Woody Allen Is Serious in ‘Front”, The New York Times, 1 October, 1976, The Front microfiche/AMPAS.
- 82.
Thomas Meehan, ‘Woody Allen in a Comedy About Blacklisting? Don’t Laugh?’, The New York Times, 7 December, 1975, The Front clippings/AMPAS.
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Symmons, T. (2016). ‘Not Beautiful in the Right Way’: Star Image, Politics and Romance in The Way We Were (1973). In: The New Hollywood Historical Film. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-52930-5_5
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