Sydney Pollack, working with Robert Redford once more came in 1973 to adapt to the screen the beautiful and touching novel by Arthur Laurents, The Way We Were. The tale of a burgeoning romance at Cornell University that flourishes into something later in life after the war as the two meet by chance in New York, before continuing in each others lives as they head to Hollywood with Redford’s Hubble becoming a screenwriter, and the two growing more and more involved by choice and by not with the current blacklisting of The House of Un-American Activities Committee. 

Credit

Laurents would adapt his own novel for the screen, himself of course not only being an incredible author, but also above all else one of the greatest writers of stage and screen of the era, and in the two lead roles of Hubble and Katie, Pollack went with Robert Redford and the incomparable Barbara Streisand. Laurents in fact when it came to adapting his book to screen wrote it with Streisand in his mind at all times. Redford is perfect for the role of Hubble with his all American ease and charm this for me, if one were to exclude her musical talents in other film roles, marks Streisand’s best performance on screen. The film tells the whole story of their romance and both actors are so stunningly wonderful at every turn in portraying that endless chemistry, aswell as of course the inevitable heartache at multiple turns that they can’t avoid as their similarities and love for one another don’t always overpower their differences – chiefly in regards to political ideology. Now it’s not to say that this film doesn’t have its fair share of tearful farewells and romantic speeches, but this a far more politically charged film than I feel it has come to be known. The forefront of the film for the most part does entirely regards Katie’s political ideologies and how they inform and lead her through life and how Hubble’s resistance, lightness about matters, general blasé feel around those subjects causes an impenetrable rift in their relationship. Laurents screenplay is touching, witty, quick and a beautiful piece of writing, that is in the end if it is all Laurents… Laurents was regrettably disappointed with the final project, feeling in many cases that the film veered too often away from his original novel and further his screenplay adaptation, all this made all the more interesting by the manner in which this mirrors the story of Hubble in Hollywood and the relationship he has in adapting his own book and growing more and more dissatisfied with the experience. Pollack even refused Laurents from the set.

Pollack brought in a litany of uncredited writers to help polish up the film, including among these names none other than Dalton Trumbo (another major figure in the Hollywood blacklisting of the time), Francis Ford Coppola and Paddy Chafesky. Unequivocally when one includes Laurents, four of the great writers of stage and screen from the time. The editing of John F. Burnett really does take us seamlessly and sometimes with great leaps from era to era, with Pollack trusting his audience by letting them catch minor (and some major) details he puts into the dialogue and actions to present the time that has passed and what has occurred in these passages. One of Pollack’s most effective techniques reflecting the passage of time and the effect of “misty water-coloured memories” are a series of incredibly long fades scene to scene, sometimes fades between three different shots, whilst still holding on the initial facial close up we started with in cross-fade. The film goes through time so beautifully and tells its story with so much craft and delicateness that you can’t help but fall in love with the tale every time you watch it, even if half of the job is done not by Pollack, but rather the performers in this case and the beautiful score by Marvin Hamlisch, along with of course Streisand’s performance of the titular song composed by Hamlisch that so eloquently and painfully talks of the tragedy of memory and in particular in this case how “what’s too painful to remember, we simply choose to forget”, but in the end never can and so with time having changed and not changed at all our figures they meet once more for one more chance meeting in New York – for a painful, touching and beautiful final moment that in my house at least, or rather just for me, doesn’t leave a dry eye in the house.

-        Thomas Carruthers