Home \ Signature Roles \ The Electric Horseman (1979) — Robert Redford
ROBERT REDFORD · 1979 · SIGNATURE ROLES
Sonny Steele is a former rodeo champion who now wears a light-up suit and advertises breakfast cereal, riding a prize horse named Rising Star through Las Vegas.
Sonny Steele is a former rodeo champion who now wears a light-up suit and advertises breakfast cereal, riding a prize horse named Rising Star through Las Vegas. Robert Redford plays him as a man who has sold everything except his last shred of dignity — and who decides, on impulse, to steal the horse and ride it back to the wild.
With Jane Fonda as the television reporter who follows him, the film becomes a gentle fable about freedom: a man and a horse escaping the corporations that own them both, pursued by helicopters and headlines. Redford, himself a horseman and a conservationist, plays Sonny with an ease that feels personal, and the film’s final image — a horse running free in the desert — is one of the most quietly hopeful endings of his career.
