Stuart Rosenberg and W.D. Richter‘s Brubaker (’80) was a ’70s hangover film. Not a trace of the influence of Star Wars or Jaws. It could have been released in ’74 or ’75 and no one would have blinked an eye.
Robert Redford was 43 during filming in ’79, and he didn’t look a day older than he did in The Candidate, The Sting or Three Days of the Condor.
Morgan Freeman‘s brief performance as a crazed psycho inmate put him on the map, and this was seven years before Street Smart (’87), mind.
Richter’s adaptation of “Accomplices to the Crime: The Arkansas Prison Scandal” was nominated for Best Original Screenplay at the ’81 Academy Awards.
Brubaker opened on 6.20.80, three months before the 9.19.80 release of Redford’s Oscar-winning Ordinary People.