THE WAY THEY WEREN’T, AND HOW IT SAVED A MEMORABLE FILM FROM DISASTER:

Though the actor’s playing hardball frustrated producer Ray Stark (Funny Girl), who wanted to immediately hire Ryan O’Neill rather than negotiate, director Sidney Pollack knew how indispensable Redford would be. And how good he was, having just directed him in the eventual western classic, Jeremiah Johnson. O’Neill, Pollack realized, would have played the part as originally written, tilting the film toward Streisand and Laurents’ vision and to ultimate failure. It was the accommodations he made to secure Redford that salvaged the picture. Pollack brought in two new writers (David Rayfiel, Alvin Sargent) to elevate both Redford’s Hubbell over Streisand’s communist Katie Morosky and the love story above a political one.

Unlike any male character on film today, Hubbell constantly stands up to Katie’s ideological extremism, despite the filmmakers’ sympathy to it, making the film watchable. In their best exchange, Hubbell takes Katie to task for her piqued dismissal of his friends — all the men of whom just fought in World War II, including Hubbell. “You do it, you know. You make yourself feel out of place.… Why don’t you try talking to them?… You don’t talk, you lecture. I mean, what was that speech in there about Yalta? Katie, there isn’t anyone in that room who needs you to explain Yalta.” The Yalta Conference, of course, was the summit meeting between the three main Allied leaders — Franklin Roosevelt, Winston Churchill, and Joseph Stalin — at which Katie’s idol, FDR, fundamentally sold out Eastern Europe to the Soviet Union.

What truly saved the picture was the jettisoning of the heavy Blacklist emphasis in its third act. Hubbell forsakes future novel writing to adapt his last book into a Hollywood movie, much to Katie’s disappointment. This throws the couple into the center of the McCarthyite purges. Fifty years later, Hollywood players would initiate a modern blacklist against conservatives, but in the early ’70s, they settled for condemning the original.

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