Word: redford
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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Essentially, Author Neil Simon has taken a plot as bland as a potato, sliced it into thin bits-and made it as hard to resist as potato chips. Two spoiled young honeymooners (Robert Redford and Jane Fonda) settle into a six-flight walkup in Greenwich Village. In Ogden Nash's phrase, "a little incompatibility is the spice of life, particularly if he has income and she is pattable." And so it proves in Barefoot. The puny pad she has chosen has no heat, no bathtub, and a hole in the skylight...
Certainly the high life at home seems varied enough, what with nude swimming, hot summer nights at the Moon Lake Casino, and Kay Francis movies at the Delta Brilliant Theater. Added excitement turns up, though, in the person of Robert Redford, exuding chin-out charm as a railroad troubleshooter who comes to town with enough pink dismissal slips to put most of Mama's boarders on relief. Ultimately, Alva follows her lover-man to the Big City where she tries both streetwalking and light housekeeping with Redford before fleeing into a rainstorm one wretched night to catch a fatal...
Ignorant Texans are the targets, and Scenarist Hellman blows the lid off a snake pit of contemporary evil when the town's bad boy, Bubber Reeves (Robert Redford), escapes from prison and heads home to settle scores among a scroungy lot of drunken, wife-swapping, white-collar workers who carry their pistols to parties of a Saturday night. "Shoot a man for sleepin' with someone's wife?" cries a roundheeled young matron, Janice Rule. "Half the town 'ud be wiped out." Poor Bubber's Mama (Miriam Hopkins), cast as Parental Guilt, hysterically accepts blame...
...order to protect their young against the perils of an education at Harvard. Marshall's son, played by Britain's James Fox, drawls endearments to Jane Fonda, who conquers a casting error as Bubber's faithless wife, making trollopy white trash seem altogether first class. Actor Redford, as Bubber, plays a born loser engagingly but cannot quite mask the clear-eyed confidence of a boy born lucky. All three finally flee to a flaming auto junkyard where virtually the entire county converges, brandishing torches, cheap whisky and other unmistakable symbols of moral decay...
...their own shadows. In adapting his novel to the screen, Scenarist Gavin Lambert softens the tone of merry irreverence and moves the action back to the comfortably distant 1930s. And Director Robert Mulligan never quite decides whether to play for heartbreaks or black humor. The strain tells on Robert Redford, a deft actor, miscast as Daisy's neurotic, one-night-stand husband who establishes his virility beyond reasonable doubt before being written off unconvincingly as a homosexual...