While the 70s is known for its cinematic innovation, for his 1973 epic romance, The Way We Were, Sydney Pollock returned to the classic Hollywood romance. The movie boasts two of the period’s biggest stars –  Barbra Streisand and Robert Redford – as unlikely lovers. We first meet the two at an Ivy League university in the 30s.  Katie Morosky (Streisand) is a Jewish, working-class, Marxist activist who, while up for any social fight is socially invisible; Hubbell Gardiner (Redford) is the varsity athlete, entitled WASP dreamboat with whom all the girls are in love. Opposites, of course, attract: she is drawn to his handsome good looks and skill as a writer, while he warms to her for her fiery passion. They marry after World War II, but their relationship is always fraught, with the pronounced differences in their backgrounds and outlooks creating constant tension. Eventually, against the backdrop of Hollywood during the McCarthy blacklist era, they divorce. He is unfaithful to her during her pregnancy, and they ultimately realize that what made their passion burn bright also drove them apart. Despite meeting with a lukewarm critical reaction, Pollack's movie was and continues to be a popular favorite, a soapy romantic melodrama that is an irresistible guilty pleasure to many. Indeed one of the film’s great moments is the ending montage of loving moments seen from the distance of time and played to Streisand’s romantic anthem “The Way We Were.” Ironically, some of the people closest to the film were its biggest detractors. Writer Arthur Laurents, whose screenplay for the film was inspired by his own experiences as a student at Cornell in the 1930s and as a blacklisted screenwriter in Hollywood, was disappointed by how the film turned out, though a decade later he and Redford talked of collaborating on a sequel.