Two Very Big Stars, One Flawed But Important Movie

I suppose "you had to be there" to experience what The Way We Were had going for it at the time.

Barbra Streisand had by sheer force of will become the biggest female star of the 70s. She led with her singing talent, in a series of diminishing-return musicals: Funny Girl, Hello, Dolly, On a Clear Day You Can See Forever.

Then she tried shifting away from her singing and more towards her Groucho Marx-like, extremely Jewish snappy patter means of talking(and yelling.) She also realized that while her nose was prominent, her body was bosomy and supple, and went for sexy romantic leads in The Owl and The Pussycat and What's Up Doc.

No matter odd she looked, or how great she sounded, Streisand took stardom on her own terms: bossy, obnoxious, self-absorbed..but somehow beloved and starry , too.

As the ranking female star, Streisand also had the luck of landing some interesting male co-stars: Omar Sharif, Walter Matthau, Yves Montand, George Segal, Ryan O'Neal. I saw all of Streisand's films and as much for the men as for her. Good co-stars (especially Matthau -- who hated her -- Segal, and O'Neal.)

While Streisand established herself as THE female star of the 70's, Robert Redford was coming up strong on the male side. Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid made him a star, but is seventies run after that was rather arty and countercultural: Little Fauss and Big Halsey, Tell Them Willie Boy Is Here; The Candidate, Jeremiah Johnson, The Hot Rock. Of those films, all were well-reviewed, but only Jeremiah Johnson was a hit. Still, Redford seemed to be the "prestige pretty boy movie star" of the early 70s. Unlike Nicholson and Gould and the aborning Pacino, Redford LOOKED like a movie star...and projected an intelligence beyond his looks.

And so, Streisand HAD to have Redford for The Way We Were. Semi-unknowns like Ken Howard and Dennis Cole were discarded. Ryan O'Neal was blond and handsome but had just been funny and vapid opposite Streisand in What's Up Doc?

Streisand needed the BEST male movie star out there to hold up the other end of this major romance. She got Redford by hiring as her director his pal Sydney Pollock, who lured the reluctant Redford into the movie -- and helped Redford assert his character as smarter and more caring than he might have been. (The politics were largely jettisoned to keep Redford "clean".)

Even then, in late 1973, The Way We Were was considered to be poorly structured and erratic as a story. The dialogue was actually quite good, but edits to the finished film resulted in a movie that sometimes lost track of why things were happening, and so suddenly.

No matter...Streisand and Redford WERE major stars of the early 70's, and though Redford felt they were "of separate generations" -- Redford made Streisand seem hipper(after all those musicals) and Streisand made Redford seem starrier(with all those fawning looks at his glamour boy looks.) The star chemistry worked, and so did the sweet, sad nostalgia of the title tune(just this side of Moon River, says I, for making the movie WORK emotionally even when the story does not.)

Everything else aside, I think men and women related to what The Way We Were said about love: sometimes you feel love deeply for someone who's just not right for you. Its just not going to work out, and all attempts to force it...and to keep it...will fail. And all that's left are the memories and that painful day when a parted couple meets again and knows that they had a great love that couldn't last.

A few years earlier, Love Story had hit it big with a tale of a loving couple broken apart only by death itself...the sad death at far too young an age of the woman in the marriage. The Way We Were said, "losing a spouse to death is very sad...but rare at a young age. What is NOT rare is breaking up for reasons of incompatibility." THAT happens to couples all the time, and a lot of people who saw The Way We Were KNEW from those break-ups, and from the pain of knowing that the spouse or lover was still very much alive...but unattainable. There is no bringing them back...they have another life to live.

I daresay a number of "coupled couples" who saw The Way We Were on a date saw it as a cautionary tale: what COULD happen to them if they didn't really work on the relationship.

In the end, The Way We Were wasn't really much about its story. It was about its FEELINGS..the music, the break-ups, the reconciliations, the FINAL break-up. And that heartbreaking final scene where the exes meet by chance on a New York City street. Streisand's hand brushes Redford's hair, music up, tears flow.

The Way We Were speaks to everyone who fell deeply in love with someone impossible for them...but did it anyway, and paid the price.