The "Best Year" Sailboat Scene

People don't much seem to like The Way We Were these days, but it was a big , sad, soap opera tearjerker with big stars in its day(1973) and part of a "nostalgia jag" at the movies which would also see The Sting, The Great Gatsby, Paper Moon and even American Graffiti among the "blasts from the past."

And there is a scene without Barbra Streisand in it that took on a great many fans(some of whom talked to me about how much they loved this scene.)

The usual sad "Way We Were" theme song plays instrumentally as "best pals" Robert Redford and Bradford Dillman sit drinking beers in a sailboat off the Malibu coast.

They are playing a game -- each man challenging the other to name "best day" "best month" and best year. It is nostalgia personified -- who among us does NOT have a "best day" in our lives, a favorite month..a favorite year.

And Redford drifts from one year to another ("1944...no '43...") and we realize he is thinking of the years when his love for Streisand was "young and pure" and unburdened by politics and pressures.

The music swells up and the camera cuts to a view above the boat as we dissolve to the next scene.

So memorable was this scene that it was re-staged with unknown actors for a beer commercial, years later.

But this: a montage of "cut scenes" on the Way We Were DVD shows that this scene had a different ending: Redford punches out Dillman in anger. So in the original, Dillman must have "said something." Probably about Streisand. And Redford hit him.

That's why the cut to high above the boat in the finished film is so awkward.

It was a good cut -- I think we much prefer seeing Redford and Dillman as good, sad friends.