Vitals

Robert Redford as Forrest Tucker, aging and amiable bank robber and escape artist

Texas, Summer to Fall 1981

Film: The Old Man & the Gun
Release Date: September 28, 2018
Director: David Lowery
Costume Designer: Annell Brodeur

WARNING! Spoilers ahead!

Background

After screen legend Robert Redford’s death earlier this month at age 89, I revisited his final leading role in David Lowery’s The Old Man & the Gun—a project Redford chose for his feel-good farewell film because he wanted his “last acting job to be fun.” Lighthearted yet elegiac, this crime caper premiered at the Telluride Film Festival and Toronto International Film Festival before its wider release seven years ago tomorrow.

The “mostly true” story is based on a New Yorker article of the same name by David Grann, chronicling the life and crimes of charismatic bank robber Forrest Tucker. Having built his career playing charming crooks in movies like Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid (1969), The Hot Rock (1972), and The Sting (1973), Redford’s final leading character appropriately shares the Sundance Kid’s cinematic DNA with larceny on his rap sheet but a twinkle in his eye—the kind of thief who pep-talks a nervous teller who cries because he’s sticking her up during her first day of work.

In addition to the similarities among his characters, The Old Man & the Gun is loaded with homages to Redford’s filmography. The opening legend echoes Butch Cassidy & the Sundance Kid‘s assurance that “most of what follows is true,” while the image of a horseback Redford riding to freedom could call back so many of his western roles—perhaps most specifically the driving action of The Electric Horseman (1979). His early work as an escaped convict in The Chase (1966) is directly featured on screen as Forrest recalls his sixteen jailbreaks, and even the way Detective Hunt taps his nose during a pivotal scene recalls Redford’s fellow grifters giving each other “the office” in The Sting. (And if those aren’t enough of a stretch, we even hear the Kinks’ song “Lola” at one point, which feels like a reference to the name of Redford’s first wife?)

The Old Man & the Gun begins with Forrest’s single-handed bank robbery of a small-town Texas bank in late July 1981, demonstrating such simple evasive maneuvers as a false mustache and switching vehicles to avoid capture. While police cars fly past, Forrest coolly pulls his Buick over onto the side of the highway to offer help to the widowed Jewel (Sissy Spacek) as she’s looking over the engine of her broken-down Chevy pickup truck.

“He was also sort of a gentleman,” admits a bank manager after Forrest’s next on-screen robbery, this time aided by his old prison pals Teddy (Danny Glover) and Waller (Tom Waits), whose combined ages in the 200s result in the group being dubbed the “Over the Hill Gang”. It’s this robbery where Forrest crosses paths with Dallas detective John Hunt (Casey Affleck)—without either man initially realizing it—setting him on the proverbial hunt for Forrest as the old man’s crime spree stretches across the south that summer.

As Detective Hunt drunkenly describes Forrest, “he is a guy who is old… but he used to be young… and he just loves robbing banks.”

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What’d He Wear?

“So what about you, what’s your name, Mr. All-Dressed-Up-In-a-Blue-Suit?” Jewel laughs upon meeting Forrest Tucker. Like many other Americans who viewed them as folk heroes, Forrest had admired the Depression-era desperadoes like John Dillinger and “Pretty Boy” Floyd who dressed to the nines to rob banks through the 1930s. Though his first bank heist wasn’t until decades after the dust had settled over Dillinger’s grave, Forrest would long emulate these public enemies, “dressing in chalk-striped suits and two-tone shoes,” as Grann penned in “The Old Man & the Gun”.

Costume designer Annell Brodeur and director David Lowery determined early on that Forrest’s uniform during the film’s 1981-set narrative would continue this pattern, dressed in a tailored suit that “wrinkles and ages, losing its sharpness as the law closes in and he questions his desire and ability to continue his crime spree.”

Following the film’s color palette chosen by director of photography Joe Anderson, production designer Scott Kuzio, and Brodeur herself, Brodeur selected a dark royal-blue wool serge from the Belgian textile company Scabal, explaining in an interview with the company that she was drawn to its “faint ruddy stripe and rich heft,” as well as being a rich shade of blue that flatters the ocean-eyed Redford. The stripe hardly registers on screen but adds a smart complexity to the suiting which further allows Forrest to “pop in the image,” per Brodeur’s vision explained to Panhandle PBS, part of her using “a few key primary colors to give vibrancy to a neutral world.”

Forrest’s single-breasted suit jacket transcends the excesses prevalent in late 1970s tailoring, styled with notch lapels of moderate width that roll to a two-button front. These buttons and the four decorating each cuff are a dark brown 4-hole horn. The jacket follows conventional suit design with its welted breast pocket, straight flapped hip pockets, and long single vent.

Based on contemporary style icons like Johnny Carson and the Depression-era crooks of Forrest’s youth, Brodeur specifically chose a three-piece suit for the versatility it provided as Forrest could dress it up or down. Thus, the suit has a matching single-breasted waistcoat (vest), with five dark-brown buttons matching those on the jacket. Unlike many tailored waistcoats, the vest with Forrest’s suit appears to lack pockets.

The flat-front trousers have side pockets and plain-hemmed bottoms, which break over the tops of his tall tan leather ankle boots. These boots have smooth uppers with straight zips up the inside of each ankle, fused onto cowboy-style raised heels for an aesthetic that balances frontier aesthetics and formal decorum.

With some exceptions, Forrest’s shirts are white cotton poplin with point and semi-spread collars, front plackets, a single breast pocket, and button cuffs.

When Forrest encounters Detective Hunt in the bathroom of his usual diner, he takes the liberty of straightening the detective’s tie, citing that “I was forced to learn how to do this in Catholic school,” which could explain him finding some rebellion in preferring the informal comfort of typically wearing his own ties loosened.

Across the first act of The Old Man & the Gun, Forrest almost exclusively dresses for his bank jobs in a striped tie that resembles the classic Brooks Brothers Mini BB#1 repp tie in a golden-yellow silk twill, patterned with “downhill” sets of five stripes in identical widths, alternating between three navy and two white stripes.

Beginning with the big St. Louis bank job in September 1981, Forrest rotates through a handful of other ties instead. He mimics the aesthetic of his gold Mini BB#1 tie with one detailed with alternating “uphill” stripes in bronze and beige, separated by narrower royal-blue bar stripes. Below each beige stripe, these royal-blue stripes flank a set of five narrow stripes that alternate between white and baby-blue.

Even his shirts begin alternating in St. Louis, such as the ice-blue self-striped shirt Forrest wears while casing the bank. He also cycles in a briefly seen blue-forward tie, with wider navy “downhill” stripes broken up by champagne satin bar stripes, each flanked by a narrower white stripe.

Outside of “work”, Forrest typically dresses for rendezvous with Jewel in a maroon tie that’s downhill striped in sets of magenta, baby-blue, and white stripes.

To maintain his meticulous timing during robberies, Forrest wears a simple but stalwart gold dress watch—on his right wrist, per Redford’s decades-long habit. Not as instantly recognizable as the actor’s screen-worn timepieces like his Rolex Submariner in The Candidate (1972) and All the President’s Men (1976), this wristwatch has a minimalist gold dial with gold non-numeric baton-style hour indices and a small date window at 3 o’clock, strapped to a brown leather bracelet that closes through a gold-finished single-prong buckle.

Redford also naturally wears the etched silver ring on his right ring finger, which he once explained to Stephen Galloway for The Hollywood Reporter had been given to him by a Hopi tribe in 1966 and thus appeared on his hand in nearly all of his subsequent films through the end of his career.

Forrest completes his assortment of jewelry with a silver bangle bracelet on his left wrist. We only briefly see the inlaid band of dark material through the center, which could be anything from onyx, enamel, or even darkened leather.

Especially when robbing banks, Forrest tops his look with a brown felt trilby—a shorter-brimmed alternative to the fedora that follows the same shape and philosophy. The self-edged hat has a dark-brown grosgrain band with the maker’s gold-toned badge pinned through the center of the bow.

When the forecast calls for rain, Forrest layers on a trench coat with a taupe-khaki water-treated cotton shell. The knee-length coat features most of the military-tested elements that established it as a menswear staple after it was popularized by British officers during World War I. The low-gorge ulster collar can be fastened over the chest with a top row of buttons, placed high above the 8×4-button double-breasted configuration that includes the buttons fastening down each gun flap over the chest. The coat also has a storm flap across the back, deep side pockets, shoulder epaulets, set-in sleeves with belted cuffs, and a full-belted waist.

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The Car

Though Forrest cycles through a few different getaway cars during The Old Man & the Gun, he always returns to his own light-blue 1978 Buick Regal coupe, the car he ultimately uses in his desperate getaway when cornered after a date with Jewel in the fall of 1981. Just three years old at the time of the story’s setting, the Regal represents a modest but stylish choice for an aging outlaw who preferred to blend in rather than draw attention. Inside, we see Forrest’s Regal is equipped with a column-mounted shifter for GM’s standard Turbo-Hydramatic automatic transmission and a blue split-bench interior, emphasizing comfort over sport.

Introduced earlier in the decade as a two-door personal luxury coupe, the ’78 Regal was produced during the second year of Buick’s downsized A-body platform. The vinyl Landau roof and B-pillar trim suggest Forrest drives a Regal Limited, the upscale trim level positioned alongside fellow GM coupes like the Chevrolet Monte Carlo and Oldsmobile Cutlass Supreme. Most ’78 Regals came standard with Buick’s 3.8L V6, though buyers could option various small-block V8s; without a look under the hood, Forrest’s exact engine remains a mystery. Either way, the Regal’s subdued elegance is a fitting ride for a gentleman bandit with a taste for understatement.

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The Gun

Despite the movie’s title, we very rarely see Forrest with a firearm. “He always did have a gun on him, but if he told me he’d never fired that thing once in his life, I’d believe it,” his former lawyer tells Detective Hunt. Forrest appears to cycle through a series of .38-caliber Smith & Wesson revolvers, from the Model 10 service revolver beside him during his attempted escape in Montana several years earlier to the one he stashes in his glove compartment after the movie’s opening robbery.

The clearest look we get of Forrest’s firearm during the “present day” narrative set through the second half of 1981 is when Jewel opens his Regal’s glove compartment and spies another Smith & Wesson revolver. The presence of a gun appears to give her pause—despite the fact that this is Texas! In the ’80s!

The shape of the weapon and its grips suggests a smaller-scaled revolver like the Smith & Wesson Model 36, albeit equipped with the three-inch barrel instead of the more common “snub-nose” two-inch barrel. This traditional double-action .38 Special revolver was introduced during a meeting of the International Association of Chiefs of Police in 1950, when its initial nomenclature “Chiefs Special” was determined by vote. When Smith & Wesson began numbering its models later in the decade, both the two- and three-inch Chiefs Special revolver was designated the Model 36.

A opposed to the six rounds carried by competition like the Colt Detective Special, the Model 36’s five-shot cylinder provided a narrower—and thus more concealable—profile that made it a quick favorite for plainclothes cops and crooks alike.

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What to Imbibe

While planning their big St. Louis bank robbery, Forrest joins his crew for beers, specifically long-necked bottles of Budweiser. Brewed in St. Louis since Adolphus Busch and Carl Conrad established their brewery there in 1876, Budweiser is an appropriate choice when they’re actually in St. Louis, though this classic lager seems to be the crew’s—and Detective Hunt’s—beer of choice back down in Texas as well.

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How to Get the Look

“It’s been my experience that lookin’ sharp will take you a long, long way; make it look like you know what you’re doing, even if you don’t,” Forrest explains to Detective Hunt, contextualizing his de facto bank robbery uniform inspired by bandits from a half-century earlier with his tilted trilby, blue three-piece suit, striped tie, and boots.

• Dark royal-blue muted-striped wool serge three-piece suit:
  • Single-breasted 2-button jacket with notch lapels, welted breast pocket, straight flapped hip pockets, 4-button cuffs, and long single vent
  • Single-breasted 5-button waistcoat
  • Flat-front trousers with side pockets and plain-hemmed bottoms
• White cotton poplin shirt with semi-spread collar, front placket, breast pocket, and button cuffs
• Gold, blue, and white-striped repp silk twill tie
• Tan leather inside-zip ankle boots with raised heels
• Brown felt trilby with dark-brown grosgrain band and self-edged brim
• Silver etched Hopi ring
• Gold dress watch with round gold dial (with 3 o’clock date window) on brown leather strap
• Silver bangle bracelet
• Taupe-khaki waterproof cotton knee-length trench coat with 8×4-button double-breasted front, belted waist, gun flaps and storm flap, side pockets, shoulder epaulets, and belted cuffs

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Do Yourself a Favor and…

Check out the movie.

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The Quote

You know what I do when the door closes? I jump out the window.