Even in sepia Robert Redford’s eyes are Pacific blue. Californian azure. The truth and the lie. He’s the Santa Monica pretty boy no one wanted for Sundance; that’s no cinematic legend playing the mythical shootist from the old West.
Not yet.
Not until we finish the scene.
Those twin orbs dart back and forth beneath his pristine hat like beautiful iron sights fixed upon his fellow gamblers. Light strikes his arm, corduroy never looked so beautiful, caressed by Conrad Hall’s genius for shade.
We can imagine the soft thrum of the texture as shadows roll gently back and forth upon the material.
Redford’s hair is spun like a demigod underneath that brim. Achilles reincarnated as gunslinger and movie star, an eternal champion playing cards in a saloon. The camera stays for an extended sojourn on Sundance because Redford does just that, makes the sun dance around his nascent stardom; although he was Christlike at 33, incorporeal, elegiac, there’s something sorrowful in those eyes.
Does Redford already know that decades later this image will define him at the moment of his death?
He keeps the deck high in his hand and his eyes trained on his competitor. Sundance deals the cards with heroic intensity. The deck slams on the table. He’s called a cheat and a chair scrapes back on the wooden floor as one of the players senses slaughter and makes good their exit.
The eyes leap again before drawing down into a prolonged stare, the way movie stars can, and mere mortals can’t. That other blue-eyed ghost, Paul Newman as Butch Cassidy tries to talk sense to him. Sundance is incredulous, “I wasn’t cheating. I wasn’t cheating.”
We believe him, his hair swept back like a golden eagle’s wing diving for its prey.
“If he invites us to stay then we’ll go.” It’s chop logic of such sincerity, of such deadly earnest that we’re transfixed.
“He’s got to invite us to stick around.”
Perhaps Sundance is a new breed of vampire who has a rare case of oppositional defiance disorder. The moustache twitches, the eyes still do not falter. Violence looms and Butch says, “I can’t help you, Sundance.”
That stirs something primordial in Sundance’s accuser. The bravado diminishes in an instant. The genie back in the lamp. Sundance stands up straight armed like a cowboy Nosferatu, deadly beyond belief. He’s asked to stick around and dutifully leaves but not before shooting the gun belt off his erstwhile adversary.
Now the pretty boy’s legend is secured.
Years later in Bolivia, Butch and Sundance are surrounded in a small town. They’ve stolen a payroll, and fate has caught up with them. As Butch tells Sundance at the start of the film, “Every day you get older that’s a law.”
Sundance covers Butch as he tries to reach more guns and ammo. Sundance spins and pirouettes as he shoots his way through countless policeman. Redford is the dashing pistoleer, a matador swishing his guns with fluid precision, surely a movie star reaching iconic status in real time as we watch a movie will fight their way out against overwhelming odds. That’s the American way… isn’t it?
Not in 1969. First Butch is shot and then after a balletic bullet action Sundance is felled.
Wounded and bloody, they clamber back into cover. Redford is pale, wincing through the pain, still beautiful even though he’s damaged goods now, perfection seeping away gradually.
We watch his pained expressions as Butch tries to convince him of their next escapade, down under in Australia. Of course, it’s a pipe dream and when you listen to their conversation closely, they’re really discussing their imminent demise, the theological prospect of ending up in heaven or hell.
And then, as Butch and Sundance – or Newman and Redford – run together into a storm of lead, the film freeze frames as it has done every time we’ve watched it since it was first released.
The difference this time is that we now know Redford, the most handsome movie star of his or any other generation, will be immortalised forever with his friend Paul Newman. Never to be seen again but always immortal. The truth and the lie.