"He sure looked like one of life's winners. As others have pointed out in their remembrances of the actor and director, he was a "quintessential leading man" who possessed "near-iconographic physical beauty." But the sheen was slippery, as he was well aware. His decades of work contain a theme so pronounced that once you notice it, you see it everywhere in his films: the hollowness of an easy victory."
"Told to skip fancy gunplay and just shoot at a target, he misses by a foot. Martin spits contemptuously and starts to walk away. Without a twitch of his handlebar 'stache, Kid says: "Can I move?" "Move? What the hell you mean, move?" With a drop to one knee and a rapid blam- blam, he dances the target across the dirt, and then rises and delivers that immortal reply: "I'm better when I move.""
"In so many of his roles, Redford played an athlete or an outdoorsman. Start counting with The Natural and the list expands to include his collegiate romancer in The Way We Were, the opening credits of which include him credibly hurling a javelin, rowing crew, and breaking the tape in a sprint. Even his lethally still, laconic gunfighter in Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid has all the jaunty arrogance of a great athlete, once he takes his thumbs out of his slouch-hipped belt."
Robert Redford embodied the golden-boy leading man with near-iconographic physical beauty and an effortless winner's look, yet his persona often masked deeper fragility. A persistent theme across decades of roles is the hollowness of an easy victory, dramatized through athletes and outdoorsmen who appear confident but face failure, limits, or moral compromise. Memorable examples include The Natural, The Way We Were (with javelin, crew, and sprint imagery), Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid's famous shooting scene, and solitary performance in All Is Lost. Roles such as Jeremiah Johnson, The Great Waldo Pepper, and The Electric Horseman reinforce the motif.
Read at The Atlantic
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