Robert Redford knew how to make a thriller

Robert Redford’s death will bring many examinations of his legacy, all deserved: Robert Redford, dramatic and romantic and comedic actor. Robert Redford, accomplished director. Robert Redford, champion of independent cinema.

I want to talk about another thing: Robert Redford, titan of the afternoon thriller.

What is an afternoon thriller? It is a thriller you watch on a Saturday afternoon, especially in fall or winter. Maybe you pull a blanket over your legs, maybe you have a beverage of some kind, maybe you’re with someone else and maybe it’s just you. And you stream a thriller with exactly the right mix of tension and charm and maybe a little bit of sexy intrigue.

And you know who was really good at that? Robert Redford.

All The President’s Men (1976)

In the special features of the 1976 Alan Pakula film, Bob Woodward, Carl Bernstein and Redford all talk about the fact that Woodward and Bernstein were still working on their 1974 book, framing it as a straightforward piece of reporting about Watergate, when they started talking to Redford about a possible movie. As they all tell it, he was the one who said it should be a story about them, a story about reporting on Watergate, and not just a story of Watergate itself.

That’s really what makes the film that followed a thriller, is following these two guys who work on The Washington Post’s metro desk who start digging and digging into a weird local burglary and end up tangling with the whole government. The film draws tension not only from the journalists’ experiences with big players like Deep Throat (later revealed to be FBI Deputy Director Mark Felt), but also from tentative discussions with sources who are very nervous and need a lot of careful coaxing to tell the truth. Perhaps the most influential journalism movie of all time, it also tells a pretty entertaining tale.

Three Days of the Condor (1975)

When people talk about ’70s paranoid thrillers, they usually have a handful of films in mind, and one of those is 1975’s Three Days of the Condor. It starts out quite devastating, as Redford’s CIA researcher goes out to lunch only to find when he returns that everybody in the office is dead. What’s even worse is that when he tries to get the CIA to bring him in safely from whatever threat is out there, it becomes clear that the threat is deeply embedded in the agency and he can, you guessed it, trust no one.

Guns! Keys! Assassins! Great outfits! If you’re ready to spend the afternoon growing ever more cynical about the machinery of government, and you want to do so with a great cast that also includes Faye Dunaway, Cliff Robertson and Max von Sydow, the movie you’re looking for is Three Days of the Condor.

Sneakers (1992)

Three Days of the Condor and All The President’s Men might be more likely to come up in the most serious considerations of Robert Redford’s body of work than is Sneakers, a preposterously pleasurable light thriller that came out in 1992. Redford plays the leader of a team of security testers who specialize in infiltrating various systems to find vulnerabilities. When one of these jobs turns out to be not what it appears, a cat-and-mouse game is on between the scrappy team and the forces of the NSA. The films of the 1990s about hackers and computers and surveillance are all over the place in terms of quality, but Sneakers is an enormous amount of fun. The cast is stacked: Redford, Sidney Poitier, River Phoenix (wonderful in one of his last movie roles), David Strathairn, Dan Aykroyd, Ben Kingsley and Mary McDonnell, plus terrific character actors including Stephen Tobolowsky and Timothy Busfield.

So yes, watch The Sting, watch Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, watch The Candidate, watch his directorial debut, Ordinary People. But also: Treat yourself to an afternoon thriller, maybe even this weekend. You will not be sorry.