"Do not tell me how to rob a bank, I know how to rob a bank!" Robert Redford admonishes his film partner Paul Newman. That was in 1969 in "Butch Cassidy & The Sundance Kid" - that outlaw ballad that made Redford a final star. Unfortunately, the bank robbery in Bolivia fails miserably due to a lack of Spanish knowledge of the two crooks.

Almost exactly 50 years later, Redford is now again seen as a bank robber in "A Rogue & Gentleman". However, as one who now really seems to be washed with all the water. It is a late parade role for the 82-year-old, who hinted that this could be his last screen appearance.

Knowing this, Redford's real person and the role he plays here almost inevitably merge. Director David Lowery ("A Ghost Story") did a great deal to reinforce this effect: "The Old Man & The Gun," as the film is originally called, reflects Redford's career in an original, yet adventurous, way at the same time tells a terrific decelerated robber pistol.

This is based on an at least partially true story, published by the New Yorker in 2003. It is about the notorious outbreak artist Forrest Tucker, who allegedly rose from prison 18 times and became a bustling bank robber at retirement age in the early 1980s. Tucker and his also old accomplices were called "Over-the-Hill Gang" at that time.

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"A Rogue & Gentleman": The boy of the grandpa gang

Unlike his "Sundance Kid" in the Wild West, Redfords Tucker rarely wears a cannon in the domesticated office landscapes of 1981, in which the act of "A Rogue & Gentleman" plays. He just pretends he has one. In order to persuade the perplexed bank employees to hand over the money, it is usually enough for him to have a bit of friendly chatter.

In these (almost) non-violent assaults, gentle sovereignty over macho or brutal poses prevails - this, too, was often a hallmark of Redford's movie characters. Toughness was seen, if at all, in his eyes, not in his fists. He was somehow happy, says one of the robbed bank employees almost admiringly when she is interrogated by the police. This Tucker has so much charm and commits his actions with such serene self-assurance - hard to believe he is a criminal.

Tender flirt

Believes that until the very end, by the way, the played by Sissy Spacek Jewel not Tucker picks up the roadside, after her truck is left. After all, you can not just leave a lady in distress standing, even if you're on the run.

The following scene in a diner, in which the two approach each other gently flirting, is one of the most beautiful and tender, which has recently been seen in the cinema. The camera scans every wrinkle and groove in the faces of these two aged, but unused stars. Even with his curious button in his ear, which Jewel mistook for a hearing aid, Redford radiates a remnant of that boyish appeal that made him a sex symbol of the 1970s.

A rogue & gentleman
USA 2018

Original title: The Old Man & The Gun
Director: David Lowery
Screenplay: David Lowery, David Grann
Performers: Robert Redford, Sissy Spacek, Casey Affleck, Tom Waits, Danny Glover, Tika Sumpter
Production: Condé Nast, Endgame Entertainment, Identity Films, Sailor Bear, Wildwood Enterprises
Rental: DCM
Length: 93 minutes
FSK: from 6 years
Start: March 28, 2019

Between Tucker and the - invented - ranch owner and horse fool a chaste romance arises. But Jewel never really gets her gallant beau. Like Katharine Ross in Butch Cassidy & The Sundance Kid, she will have to give up in the face of her lover's ruthless autonomy. And the policeman John Hunt (Casey Affleck), who has been assigned to the grandfather gang, is only allowed to arrest Tucker after the old rascal has played a cheeky cat and mouse game with the melancholy bull. The horse that borrowed Tucker from Jewel's stable, remains in the open pasture - the "electric rider" (Redford, 1979) has no electricity. But that's not the end of the movie.

Old-fashioned, but not nostalgic

The director and his star set many tracks in philosophy, the liberal worldview and the past Redford's in their old-fashioned, but not nostalgic film. The most daring is the flashback to a wild chase in the Redford / Tucker drives a dull gray Chevy from 1955, who plays a major role in the Desperado and escape movie "Two-Lane Blacktop". A scene from this 1971 B-movie classic can also be seen on a TV later when Tucker and his two cronies (Tom Waits and Danny Glover) prepare for the next robbery.

An action movie is not "A Rogue & Gentleman", quite the contrary. But it follows, clocked by a subversively grooving jazz soundtrack, the resistant pulse of the alternative Hollywood cinema of the sixties and seventies with its gangsters and renegades. A bank robber, especially as a repeat offender who considers robbery, thrill and escape as the motor of life, is always also an opponent of a system that has been over-economized.

Robert Redford has played many such implicitly political characters who either oppose the establishment or elude it with gentle anarchy. Whether as a "Sundance Kid", as a trapper, prison director, presidential candidate, Watergate journalist or CIA analyst, horse whisperer or - last - as a silent, stubborn rebel against the rules and forces of nature in "All is Lost". "A Rogue & Gentleman" often acts as a relaxed epilogue to this last great feat of the eternal solosist Robert Redford, who always stayed with himself in his most magnetic moments. He just got away with it.