Now, protest is very necessary.”Ī filmic portrayal of these political leanings is demonstrated no finer than in the 1972 romantic drama The Way We Were, with Barbra Streisand playing Katie Morosky, an intensely vociferous communist Jewish girl who falls in love with affluent and WASPY naval officer Hubbell Gardener (characterised by unmitigated heart-throb Robert Redford). As Mrs Prada said after the show, “I didn’t want to do the 70s… but it came out naturally – it was an important moment for protest, for humanity. The manifestation of Miuccia’s placard-waving past took contemporaneous form on the runway via camel corduroy suiting, Baader-Meinhof berets and polychromatic knitwear that looked so authentically ‘lefty’, it could have comfortably been worn by a young Jeremy Corbyn himself. The production design of Stephen Grimes is a combination of realism and fantasy, and the costumes of Dorothy Jeakins and Moss Mabry include one memorable sequence in which most of the cast attends a party dressed as the Marx Brothers.“One of the stories often told about Mrs Prada is that, while a student in the 1970s, she was a card-carrying member of the Italian Communist party,” writes AnOther’s Olivia Singer in her review of Prada’s politicised A/W17 menswear and womenswear pre-collection. The pain of these revelations sometimes confuses the proceedings but the movie’s disjointed, spastic rhythm seems appropriate to the way Pollack exposes the glamour and ease of everyday corruption. Laurents’ screenplay has a shocking sense of character truth, and The Way We Were says things that no one else has dared to say in a major Hollywood movie. Herb Edelman is a radio producer, and Murray Hamilton is a sleazy fellow traveler. Viveca Lindfors is a Salka Viertel-like hostess, and Allyn Ann McLerie plays the kind of agent who always looks well kempt but has the instincts of a fascist. Patrick O’Neal plays a boorish Hollywood director who bullies Redford into compromising the screen adaptation of his one good novel Diana Ewing is his elegant but vacuous wife. Years later, they accidentally meet in front of the Plaza in New York where she’s passing out Ban-the-Bomb leaflets, a radical to the end, probably happy he has become gracefully empty, a once important novelist who writes television. She finally walks out on him after she learns of his cooperation as a friendly witness. As much as she loves him, she can’t save him from drowning in the lie of his own pleasant facade since he’s a weak man who always takes the easy way out.īecause Streisand is obviously the smartest and most interesting character in the movie, it’s devastating to see her follow him to Los Angeles to enact the Hollywood wife, one of that legion of women trapped in contempt for the way their once talented husbands collapse into uninteresting hacks. He is never particularly kind to her while she’s never at ease in his Waspish, upperclass world where pretty, apparently nice but ultimately bloodless people like Bradford Dillman and wife Lois Chiles make boring, stupid jokes about Eleanor Roosevelt just after the death of her husband. When they accidentally meet again after World War II, they fall erotically in love although it’s a tragic/foolish mistake. She is a Communist firebrand who makes speeches urging the defense of Spain from fascist takeover.Īs much as she loathes his way of life, she respects his talent and is drawn to the way he looks. When she first meets Redford in college in the Thirties, he’s the king of the campus, a budding Watergate type who also happens to be a talented writer. Streisand plays a political radical who never loses her humanity, even if she often loses her cool at the wrong time, in the wrong place. Since the Streisand-Redford marriage is given a death blow by his cooperation with the House UnAmerican Activities Committee, the movie brings up the memory of blacklisting in Hollywood, that ugly, slimy slice of history which still lingers on in broken friendships and in ruined lives and careers. The movie has the look of a big Hollywood romantic film but because director Pollack looks corruption in the face and exposes it for what it feels like, The Way We Were emerges as one of the least sentimental love stories ever filmed. The Way We Were, produced by Ray Stark and directed by Sydney Pollack from Arthur Laurents’ adaptation of his novel, is a traumatized, painful movie about a woman born with an unwavering sense of justice who ultimately frees herself from a harrowing love affair/marriage with a man who should be her natural enemy, a Fitzgerald-like hero, played with icy, dangerous charm by Robert Redford.
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