The Way We Were (Rastar Productions, Tom Ward Enterprises, Columbia, 1973)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2020 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Last night at 7 p.m. Turner Classic Movies telecast the 1973 film The Way We Were, legendary as the first (and so far the only, though since they’re both still alive there’s at least an outside chance there’ll be a second) film to co-star Barbra Streisand and Robert Redford. It was directed by Sydney Pollack from a script by Arthur Laurents, who these days is probably best known as the book writer for the Leonard Bernstein/Stephen Sondheim musical West Side Story. The Way We Were produced a title song that became one of Streisand’s most iconic hits (the song is by Marvin Hamlisch, who also wrote the original score for the film -- though much of it is just arrangements of big-band hits from the 1930’s, 1940’s and 1950’s, when the film takes place) and has become hailed as one of the classic romances of the screen, but it’s a film I’ve never warmed to. I’d seen it only once before, in a wretched over-the-air picture on a bad old black-and-white TV on one of its first network airings in 1975, but I didn’t particularly care for it then and I liked it a little better this time around, but not much. I’ll admit that my reaction to it was colored by the article I’d read about it in Ramparts magazine called “The Way We Weren’t” that criticized the film for setting up political conflicts between the characters and then belittling or frankly ignoring them.

The film starts out in 1944, when Katie Morosky (Barbra Streisand) is working as an associate producer and writer for radio broadcasts for the U.S. Office of War Information when she re-meets a young man she knew in college, Hubbell Gardiner (Robert Redford). We then cut to a flashback showing how the two first met: Katie was an English major in college and also a political agitator and member of the Young Communist League, whom we see at an old-fashioned crystal microphone delivering an impassioned lecture about the plight of women and babies being subjected to bombing from German and Italian planes during the 1936-39 Spanish Civil War. It’s well known that the Spanish Civil War was to a large extent a trial run for World War II -- Nazi Germany and fascist Italy were helping the Right-wing rebel leader Francisco Franco overthrow the Spanish Republic, which had been created in 1931 when a popular uprising had forced the King of Spain to abdicate; and the only country in the world that was willing to help the Republic was the Soviet Union (and they put a lot of conditions on that aid, notably wanting to use their influence to make sure that the Communists, not the socialists, anarchists or so-called POUM, unaligned Leftists who were frequently denounced as Trotskyists, got and held power in the Spanish Republic). I mention this only because Arthur Laurents’ script, with only occasional exceptions, doesn’t really delve into the political issues it hints at and the political and social conflicts between Katie and Hubbell become just another typical set of “complications” for an on-screen romance.

In 1936 Katie gets ticked off because their English teacher, saying he’s going to pick the best short story by any of the students, picks Hubbell’s over hers, but she’s haunted by its first line (“Everything had always come too easily for him”), realizes it’s autobiographical and falls in love with him immediately (and the fact that he’s played by Robert Redford in the first flush of his hunkdom doesn’t hurt, either; he’s so callow-looking he actually looks younger than he did in Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, made four years earlier). They meet again eight years later when he gets drunk, takes her to her place, throws up in her bathroom and then collapses on her floor -- though eventually they end up in bed together and nature and star chemistry take their course (and it’s nice to see a few topless shots of the young Robert Redford) before they drift into a seemingly serious relationship even though they spend an awful lot of their time arguing over her social and political values versus his lack of any. He takes her to dull parties with worthless friends like J. J. (Bradford Dillman) and Carol Ann (Lois Chiles, who got an “Introducing” credit and may or may not have been Hubbell’s former girlfriend). He’s also working on a second novel even though his first, A Country Made of Ice Cream, barely sold at all (when he sees a copy in Katie’s apartment he says, “You must have been one of the two people who bought it”), though when next we see them he’s signed a lucrative Hollywood contract as a screenwriter and is adapting A Country Made of Ice Cream for film, with his old friend J. J. as producer and George Bissinger (Patrick O’Neal) as director -- and Bissinger is depicted as the usual uncultured lout Hollywood portrays movie directors as being in films about the business.

The Hollywood idyll of Hubbell and Katie is actually the most entertaining part of the movie -- they’re still sniping at each other a lot but they seem more or less genuinely happy, and in a typically elliptical piece of Laurents writing Katie tells Hubbell that she’s pregnant by laying it out as if it were a movie scenario. Then the House Un-American Activities Committee enters the picture and starts investigating Hollywood for alleged Communist subversion in the movie industry. Katie joins the Committee for the First Amendment (which really existed; it ran an anti-HUAC demonstration in Washington, D.C. with Katharine Hepburn, Humphrey Bogart, Lauren Bacall and director John Huston in the front of the line -- all of whom later had to eat a lot of crow to be allowed to keep working in the blacklist era) while Hubbell stays in Hollywood and meekly agrees to all the stupid changes J. J. and Bissinger want him to make to A Country Made of Ice Cream before it is filmed. Eventually the coarsening of the political climate leads Hubbell and Katie to break up -- in one of the odder quirks of Laurents’ script they split before Katie’s child (a daughter) is born, and Hubbell seems totally uninterested in maintaining contact or being any part of raising someone who after all is his child, too. There’s a postlude set in the mid-1950’s in which the two principals run into each other again in New York, where Hubbell is working as a writer for live television shows and Katie is still out on the streets, organizing for a Ban the Bomb campaign (so we see her at the end the way we saw her at the beginning, doing scut work on the streets for a Leftist cause). She mentions that she’s remarried -- her name is now “Cohen” -- and we get the impression that he’s remarried too, to the Lois Chiles character who was always presented as much the better match for him. (He’s still not interested at all in that daughter of his; he seems perfectly content to let her be raised by another man -- and we never see either Streisand visibly pregnant or the daughter after she’s born.)

In a way The Way We Were is a Philip Roth novel with the genders reversed -- instead of the nerdy Jewish guy lusting after the tall, blonde, porcelain-skinned shiksa it’s the nerdy Jewish girl lusting after the tall, blond, porcelain-skinned goy. There’s even a weird argument between Streisand’s and Redford’s characters early on during one of their first dates in which she says she isn’t attractive and he tries to reassure her she is attractive,but in a different way -- and with cinematographer Harry Stradling, Jr. (son of the man who’d shot Streisand’s first three films and had died in the middle of making her fourth, The Owl and the Pussycat; she was convinced that the Stradlings, Sr. and Jr., were the only cameramen in Hollywood who knew how to light her nose so it would look prominent without dominating her face) highlighting her nose in her close-ups it’s clear that what Redford’s character means is that Streisand’s is “Jewish-attractive.” It’s probably a movie that irritates me more than it would if it weren’t for the political angle, which is expressed just enough that it becomes a symbol for all the ways Hubbell and Katie are incompatible but isn’t really gotten into all that much.

There are nice touches that writer Laurents could have made more of -- when Hubbell is in Katie’s apartment he notices a photo of President Franklin Roosevelt on her wall and says, “Roosevelt? I thought you thought he was an imperialist warmonger.” (Of course she’s also got a photo of Stalin, but then this is in 1944, when the U.S. and the Soviet Union were allies of convenience in the defeat of Hitler and the Axis -- until the party line changed in both the U.S. and the Soviet Union.) The dizzying speed with which the Communist Party changed course -- from fighting the Axis in the 1930’s to becoming isolationist and pacifist during the era of the Nazi-Soviet Pact to committed enemies of fascism again once Hitler double-crossed Stalin and invaded the Soviet Union in June 1941 -- could have become a legitimate dramatic issue in this film as Hubbell could have complained that he never knew what side of the political fence his wife would turn up on depending on the ideological demands of the Communist Party and the Soviet Comintern that largely controlled it.

I think my main problem with The Way We Were is that Streisand and Redford are playing attitudes instead of fully developed characters -- in that way it’s an ironic reflection and distortion of Bertolt Brecht’s concept of “Epic Theatre,” in which the characters were not supposed to be important in and of themselves but were representatives of the social forces and class relationships he sought to depict. At the same time The Way We Were doesn’t work that well as straight romance because the politics, such as they are, keep getting in the way. People went to see The Way We Were when it was new (and a lot of people did -- it was a box-office hit and became a sort of legendary touchstone of romantic cinema) lured by the posters’ promise of “Streisand and Redford Together!” rather than for any intrinsic qualities in the story that had been used as the excuse to bring them together. Also, a lot of people wanted Streisand and Redford to make a sequel to The Way We Were, which is not that different from all the people who wanted a sequel to Casablanca (which a lot of people wanted a sequel to in order to get the Bogart and Bergman characters together again at long last) -- and apparently at one point Streisand actually signed on to a project in which Hubbell and Katie meet again when he shows up for his daughter’s wedding -- the daughter being a student at UC Berkeley and, like her mom, also a political activist -- but Redford didn’t.

It was also ironic to see Redford playing a character so disinterested in politics when the real Redford is just the opposite; Mia Farrow, his co-star in the 1974 version of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby, two films later in Redford’s credit list than The Way We Were (The Sting came in between them), recalled that she could never connect with him off-screen because every moment he wasn’t needed before the cameras he was in his dressing-room trailer watching the Senate Watergate hearings on TV.