3/20/2023 0 Comments The way we were song![]() The way she looks at him (calculating the angles-but tenderly, somehow) is pure Streisand. She's fine in a scene where Hubbell turns up at her apartment drunk, makes love in less than desultory fashion and conks out. She's the brightest, quickest female actress in movies today, inhabiting her characters with a fierce energy and yet able to be touchingly vulnerable. It's easy to forgive the movie a lot because of Streisand. Instead, inexplicably, the movie suddenly and implausibly has them fall out of love-and they split up without resolving anything, particularly the plot. So we're all set up for the big obligatory scene where Katie stands up for principle and Hubbell chickens out at a HUAC hearing. They arrive roughly during the McCarthy period, and of course Katie is outraged in defense of the Hollywood 10 and Hubbell doesn't care. And Hubbell sells his book to Hollywood and follows it West to sell out. So of course they fall in love and get married (Katie alternating between praising Hubbell's mind and his body Hubbell listening attentively). Hubbell, on the other hand, suggests that she find an additional mode of address to supplement her basic one, the impassioned political harangue.Īnyway, they have nothing in common. ![]() She can't stand Hubbell's WASP friends with their jokes about Eleanor Roosevelt and their endless weekend cocktail parties. ") and drifts out if the girl has too independent a mind. (We never get to hear much of his fiction, although one story begins, "Like his country, things had come too easily to him," and Katie has no trouble disagreeing with THAT.)įor all of his charms and talents, however, he's basically weak: He drifts into love affairs on the strength of drunken excuses ("Sorry I fell asleep here last night. Robert Redford plays Hubbell Gardiner, who fascinates Katie because he is not only incredibly handsome and the top athlete on campus, but also writes great fiction for their short story class. Upon reconciling with Hubbell and his friends after college, they all remark on her coiffure having altered in style: “You have your hair ironed? Does it hurt?” (I mean, the answer is probably ‘yes’, as straightening your hair when it’s at a Morosky level of unmanageable is practically akin to torture.) During the film’s infamous final scene, in which we see ex-spouses Katie and Hubbell bump into one another after years of separation, our heroine has finally cast the straighteners aside and embraced her natural Jew-curls proudly demonstrating true self-acceptance and that she requires no further validation from the man who still remains the love of her life.Streisand plays Katie Morosky, and when we meet her in the late 1930s, she's the secretary of the campus Young Communist League. The strongest representation of her identity is a head of naturally thick and frizzy curls, which she has regularly smoothed out in a Harlem salon. ![]() “A loud mouth Jewish girl from N.Y.C.” and her “beautiful goyishe guy”, she quips. Katie Morosky is an unapologetic Jewess: from her infinite neuroticism and extensive anxiety caused by a pot roast, to agonising over whether or not she meets Hubbell’s gentile standards for beauty. Develop a complex relationship with hair straighteners But aside from a comprehensive history lesson, we can also acquire some important life skills in how remaining faithful to your convictions in the face of romantic infatuation is one of the fiercest forms of activism. Set in the 1930s and 1940s, with costumes remaining suspiciously 70s throughout, the story of Katie and Hubbell’s tumultuous will-they-won’t-they relationship unfolds through a series of flashbacks to the misty, water-coloured corners of Katie’s mind.įrom the Francoist regime to McCarthyism, director Sydney Pollack profusely references political moments past throughout the film. Now, protest is very necessary.”Ī filmic portrayal of these political leanings is demonstrated no finer than in the 1972 romantic drama The Way We Were, with Barbra Streisand playing Katie Morosky, an intensely vociferous communist Jewish girl who falls in love with affluent and WASPY naval officer Hubbell Gardener (characterised by unmitigated heart-throb Robert Redford). As Mrs Prada said after the show, “I didn’t want to do the 70s… but it came out naturally – it was an important moment for protest, for humanity. The manifestation of Miuccia’s placard-waving past took contemporaneous form on the runway via camel corduroy suiting, Baader-Meinhof berets and polychromatic knitwear that looked so authentically ‘lefty’, it could have comfortably been worn by a young Jeremy Corbyn himself. “One of the stories often told about Mrs Prada is that, while a student in the 1970s, she was a card-carrying member of the Italian Communist party,” writes AnOther’s Olivia Singer in her review of Prada’s politicised A/W17 menswear and womenswear pre-collection.
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