Barbra Streisand as Katie Morosky, directed by Sydney Pollack
The Way We Were is the Barbra Streisand film that most people carry in their hearts. Directed by Sydney Pollack and released in 1973, it pairs Streisand with Robert Redford in a romantic drama about two people who love each other deeply and cannot, finally, live together. Streisand plays Katie Morosky, a passionate, politically committed Jewish student who becomes a writer and activist; Redford plays Hubbell Gardiner, a handsome, easygoing WASP writer whose talent is matched by his reluctance to take a stand. Their story, spanning from college in the late 1930s through the Second World War and into the Hollywood blacklist era, is both a love story and a portrait of American idealism under pressure.
The film, written by Arthur Laurents from his own novel, begins near its end: Katie, now working in radio, spots Hubbell in a New York hotel and the past floods back. We then follow their first meeting at university, where Katie is the campus firebrand, protesting against Franco and for the Spanish Republic, while Hubbell is the golden boy, popular, athletic, and amused by her intensity. Years later, during the war, they meet again, fall in love, marry, and move to Hollywood, where Hubbell finds success as a screenwriter and Katie struggles with the compromises that success demands. When the anti-Communist blacklist arrives, Katie’s refusal to name names or soften her beliefs puts Hubbell’s career at risk, and the marriage breaks under a weight that neither love nor good intentions can lift.
Streisand’s performance is the film’s centre of gravity. Katie could easily have become a caricature — the humourless activist, the shrill conscience — but Streisand plays her as a complete person: funny, insecure, tender, stubborn, and sometimes exhausting to live with. She gives Katie a wonderful, nervous energy in the college scenes, a fierce dignity in the Hollywood scenes, and a heartbreaking restraint in the final scenes, when she lets Hubbell go because she understands that asking him to be someone he is not would destroy them both. Her famous final line, “Your girl is lovely, Hubbell,” delivered with a smile that barely conceals grief, is one of the great closing moments in romantic cinema.
Redford is equally well cast. Hubbell is not a villain; he is a decent, charming man who simply does not share Katie’s fire, and Redford plays him with a mixture of affection and evasion that makes the tragedy credible. The audience understands why Katie loves him — his warmth, his humour, his beauty — and why she cannot stay with him. Pollack, who had recently directed Redford in Jeremiah Johnson, directs their scenes with unusual patience, allowing long looks and silences to carry as much meaning as Laurents’s dialogue. The film’s period detail, from college quads to wartime New York to postwar Hollywood, is evocative without becoming a costume parade.
Music plays a crucial role. Marvin Hamlisch’s score and the title song, with lyrics by Alan and Marilyn Bergman, became inseparable from the film’s identity. Streisand sings “The Way We Were” over the closing moments with a restraint that makes the song’s nostalgia feel earned rather than sentimental: it is not a celebration of a perfect past, but a recognition that memory edits, softens, and sometimes lies. The song won the Academy Award for Best Original Song and became one of Streisand’s signature recordings, topping the charts and entering the standard repertoire. Hearing it today still summons the film’s images, even for listeners who have never seen it.
The production was famously troubled, with Laurents and Pollack disagreeing over the balance between Katie’s and Hubbell’s stories, and with extensive rewriting during filming. Some critics have argued that the released film softens its political edge, particularly in its treatment of the blacklist. That debate is fair, and it is part of why the film remains interesting: it is a Hollywood movie about Hollywood’s own cowardice, made by people who understood that history intimately. Even in its compromised form, it says more about principle, compromise, and the cost of both than most romantic dramas attempt.
Commercially, The Way We Were was a major success, one of the highest-grossing films of 1973, and it earned six Academy Award nominations, including Best Actress for Streisand. It confirmed her as a dramatic star of the first rank, not merely a musical performer who could act. For Redford, too, it was a defining romantic role, and the pairing of the two stars became one of the most iconic in 1970s cinema. Their contrasting screen images — her intensity, his ease — proved to be a perfect match for a story about opposites who attract and then, painfully, repel.
Watching the film now, its central question feels undiminished: can love survive when two people want different kinds of lives, and hold different ideas about what matters? Katie and Hubbell’s answer is no, but the film treats that answer with compassion rather than cynicism. It suggests that some loves are real precisely because they end, and that remembering them honestly — “the way we were” — is itself a form of fidelity. Streisand’s Katie embodies that idea: a woman who loved fully, fought for her beliefs, and walked away with her dignity intact.
The film’s legacy extends beyond its songs and stars. It helped establish the romantic drama as a prestige form in 1970s Hollywood, proving that audiences would embrace a love story that ended in separation rather than reconciliation, and that a film could address political history without becoming a lecture. Later romantic dramas owe it a debt, whether they acknowledge it or not, and its influence can be felt in everything from the structure of its flashbacks to the way its title song has become shorthand for bittersweet memory. For Streisand, it remains the dramatic performance against which her other screen work is often measured, and deservedly so.