Sidney Pollack was one of the most succesful mainstream film directors of the last forty years. In fact, his nickname for himself was “Mr. Mainstream.”
His specialty was making big movies with big stars. He had an ability to work well with the biggest stars, and did so successfully with the likes of Barbra Streisand, Tom Cruise, Harrison Ford, Nicole Kidman, Anne Bancroft, Sidney Poitier, Al Pacino, Sally Field, Paul Newman, Dustin Hoffman, and Jane Fonda.
He began his career as an actor at the Actors Studio, where he also eventually taught. After brief acting stints, he began directing television and then films.
His favorite actor to work with was his old acting buddy Robert Redford, and he directed him in seven films.
His most famous movies are probably The Way We Were, Tootsie and Out of Africa, for which he won his only Academy Award as director.
I love Tootsie, but easily my favorite movie of his is Three Days of the Condor, a razor-sharp and pitch-perfect cold war thriller. Robert Redford stars as a member of a team of bookworms who scour all printed material published anywhere in the world. looking for key phrases or subjects the CIA might be interested in.
One day while he’s out picking up lunch for his co-workers, a team of assassins (led by the great Max von Sydow) calmly murders his entire team with a silenced machine gun. Redford then goes underground and tries to figure out what the hell is going on, and how can safely “come back in.”
Max von Sydow gives one of the greatest performances ever in a spectacularly written role as a thoughtful, civilized, and very professional international hit man. There’s a moment near the end of the film, when he offers Redford a gun, that is one of my all-time favorite moments in the movies.
Let’s also not forget how active and successful Pollack was as an actor, ever since Dustin Hoffman bullied him into playing the agent in Tootsie.
“I begged you to get therapy, ” he says, stricken, after being ambushed by a cross-dressed Dustin Hoffman in Tootsie. “You’re insane!’
“No! I’m employed!” gushes Hoffman.