Robert Redford
By 
It’s not unusual to tie movies to particular points in our lives and history. We now live in a time in which any movie might be tied to current events, but that’s not how it was when “Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid” came out. In 1969, we needed some respite from difficult national events, and Robert Redford and Paul Newman gave us that.
The heroes are criminals, loveable but lawless. They do well for a while, then they outrun their abilities and piss too many people off. They died in a desperate overreach. Yes, there may be a parallel to current events.
“Three Days of the Condor” hit in a personal way. There were parallels to a situation I was in, and I decided that if a person I worked with had some special projects he wanted me to participate in, I wouldn’t. He didn’t, and the situation remained innocuous, but he died a year or so ago, and his obituary utterly left out some chunks of his life. Families do that for many reasons, I guess.
Redford was delightful eye candy, not of the borderline abusive masculinity we see so much of these days. His concerns with the environment and nurturing young people in the film industry made him more attractive. He was a good person.