Word: redford
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...leathery as a football left out in the Texas sun-looks like the last of the red hot Muppets. No matter: the camera loves Willie Nelson. In The Electric Horseman, he simply leaned back, squinted, expectorated a few down-home aphorisms and stole a scene or two from Robert Redford. Now Nelson has been fitted for a sin-and-suffer role out of a '30s weepie-the Leslie Howard part in Intermezzo, to be precise-and he wears it as comfortably as a pair of custom-made boots...
...seems clear that Robert Redford has decided to place his talents and his star's clout more or less in the service of ideals he believes in. Though he is happy to entertain an audience, it had better be in the context of a story containing a liberal, humane moral. Somehow his roles -whether as investigative reporter or up-the-organization cowboy-suit him in his maturity, as they do not most other leading men, about whom the sweet odors of Bel Air and Rodeo Drive cling. There is something of the authentic knothead about Redford...
...foulest and most corrupt prison in America, is not as close to everyone's concerns as All the President's Men was, nor has it the knockabout charm of The Electric Horseman. But it is an often powerful film. Its most potent passages come at the beginning. Redford, in the title role, becomes an inmate in a prison in order to experience conditions there firsthand before he takes over as warden. Since I Am a Fugitive from a Chain Gang almost half a century ago, moviegoers have periodically been made painfully aware of how rotten life...
...moral argument is not long or preachily dwelt on. Nor is a romance that might have developed between Redford and Jane Alexander, playing the Governor's aide who got him appointed. One sees the spark flash between them and then watches them immediately suppress it, as men and women often do when a larger task is at hand. Both are excellent, as are Yaphet Kotto and David Keith as prisoners trying to decide if they dare to give their trust to Brubaker. One might wish that Director Rosenberg could control his ever zooming, ever panning camera. Stillness would have...
Brubaker is a difficult film to dislike, and for that reason it may accomplish part of its goal, which is to educate audiences to the bloody reality of prison existence. But as entertainment, it remains somewhat bland and predictable. Redford--Murton--drives off into the sunset, leaving behind a plantation of untamed men whose personal well-being he has sacrificed to protect his moral principles...