Cliff Robertson is persuasive as the man who seems to know what he is doing. We value his supporting work most, from the calculating official in Three Days of the Condor to Ben Parker’s reassuring presence in Spider-Man.
Fi1m perspective
Cliff Robertson looks credible as the man with the answers, even when we have good reason to distrust them. As J. Higgins, the calculating CIA official in Sydney Pollack’s Three Days of the Condor (1975), that quality makes him useful to a thriller built around Robert Redford’s watchfulness. Robertson does not need to make authority conspicuously sinister for it to worry us. We rate him most highly in parts like this, where being plausible matters more than being conspicuous.
That was not the whole of his work. The leading parts included John F. Kennedy in PT 109 (1963) and Charly Gordon in Charly (1968), before JW Coop (1971) gave him a rodeo rider to play. On the latter, he was also writer, producer and director, which should discourage any impression that he was only ever a dependable supporting player. Supporting roles became more prominent afterwards, and eventually Ben Parker brought him to a new generation of viewers.
Sam Raimi puts that presence to gentler use in Spider-Man (2002), casting him as Ben Parker. We were glad of Robertson here: his steadiness suits a film whose great pleasure is Tobey Maguire’s uncertainty. He helps the warmth feel unforced, without requiring the adventure to stop and admire its older actor. There is a clear connection between this performance and Higgins, despite their different purposes: Robertson makes it easy to believe that other people would take these men seriously.
Dependability has its limits, and Robertson’s many routine films make a poor case for watching everything he did. Even the two films we recommend here have distractions: the romance is hard to believe in Three Days of the Condor, while the digital action in Spider-Man makes danger feel remote. Neither problem is his doing, though neither performance can repair it. Start with Pollack’s thriller for the calculating authority; choose Raimi’s adventure for the reassurance.
Biography
Cliff Robertson was an American actor whose career in film, television and theatre spanned more than five decades. Born Clifford Parker Robertson III on 9 September 1923 in La Jolla, California, he studied at the Actors Studio in New York after wartime service in the merchant marine. His film debut came in Picnic (1955), following early work in television and a Broadway appearance in Late Love (1953).
Robertson played Lieutenant John F. Kennedy in PT 109 (1963) and won the Academy Award for Best Actor for his performance in Charly (1968). He appeared in Three Days of the Condor (1975), Escape from L.A. (1996) and other films, and portrayed Ben Parker, Peter Parker’s uncle, in Spider-Man (2002) and its two sequels. He died on 10 September 2011 in Stony Brook, New York.
