Barbra Streisand subtly referenced the controversy involving Jimmy Kimmel in a tribute to her iconic film, The Way We Were, which she starred in alongside Robert Redford, who passed away last week.

The program Jimmy Kimmel Live! faced indefinite suspension last Wednesday when its host implied that the person responsible for Charlie Kirk’s death might have been linked to the ‘MAGA gang.’ This led the FCC chairman to publicly consider investigating the show.

The ensuing murder inquiry has suggested that the shooter, Tyler Robinson, subscribed to leftist beliefs and is said to have texted his live-in transgender partner, Lance Twiggs (also known as Luna), claiming he shot the MAGA figurehead due to an overflow of animosity. Twiggs is assisting law enforcement with the case.

Kimmel’s suspension was met with an explosive outcry from Hollywood, and on Monday it was announced his show will return Tuesday night.

Streisand, now 83, has highlighted a connection between this contemporary controversy and the themes explored in The Way We Were, a film set against the backdrop of the Hollywood blacklist during the 1940s and 1950s amidst the Red Scare.

‘After 50 years, Columbia Pictures has allowed me to restore certain political scenes from The Way We Were, which were originally omitted due to their depiction of the blacklist era— showing individuals being persecuted and barred from employment for allegedly posing a governmental threat,’ she expressed. ‘It’s unbelievable that this is happening again in this country over half a century later!’

The 50th anniversary re-release of The Way We Were took place in 2023, 15 years after the death of its director Sydney Pollack, who had cut the footage in question.

In the 1973 movie, Streisand plays a fiery communist called Katie alongside Redford as an easygoing apolitical writer called Hubbell.

Although they embark on a sweeping romance and get married, their differences ultimately become too profound for them to negotiate, particularly given the Red Scare, which makes her associations dangerous to his Hollywood career. 

The two scenes that were cut from the original film and restored on the 50th anniversary Blu-Ray were about the intrusion of Katie’s politics into her marriage.

In one, Hubbell reveals that Katie has been named as a former communist to the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC), and although he vows to stick by her, she decides to leave him in order to protect him from her past.

‘If we got a divorce, you wouldn’t have a subversive wife…and that would solve everything, wouldn’t it?’ she argues over his objections.

In the other scene, Katie – who left activism behind to take a backseat to Hubbell’s career – is racked with guilt for having done so when she sees another young female firebrand giving a speech at UCLA and being heckled.

The original film already had a strong emphasis on the political nature of the storyline, prominently highlighting Katie’s youthful communist activities.

As her relationship with Hubbell begins to fray, there is a key scene in which he reprimands her for being unable to separate people from their politics, to which she erupts: ‘People are their politics!’

However Streisand felt that the two deleted scenes were integral to the development of the theme, and she bitterly regretted that they were cut. 

Sydney Pollack maintained during his lifetime that the movie flopped during an initial test screening in San Francisco, but then he cut out ‘about five scenes’ that were ‘all politics,’ and at the next screening the audience loved the film.

However in her memoirs, released in 2023 several years after Pollack’s death, Streisand said she ‘agreed with Sydney on three of those scenes’ but felt that losing the other two ‘destroyed the soul of Katie’s character…and destroyed me.’ 

She said producer Ray Stark and Columbia Pictures were ‘pushing’ Pollack ‘to take out the politics because they thought it would bore people.’ 

Streisand observed that the then-US President Richard Nixon had been ‘very active in the HUAC,’ and quoted an interview of Pollack’s in which he said that the ‘pressure I was getting was just unbelievable’ while making the movie.

When her memoir was published, Streisand plugged it on The Late Show with Stephen Colbert, which was canceled this year in a move its fans regard as political.

The late-night talk show, which Puck reported lost $40 million a year for CBS, will end altogether next year rather than even replacing its frontman, in a development that was announced this May.

The axe came down shortly after Colbert slammed his network’s parent company on the air for paying $16 million to settle Donald Trump’s lawsuit over a 60 Minutes interview with Kamala Harris, which was deceptively edited to make her answers appear more cogent ahead of last year’s presidential election.

Redford died last Tuesday at the age of 89 in his sleep at home in Sundance, Utah, and the news went public Wednesday, hours before Kimmel’s suspension.

Streisand joined the chorus of friends, fans and colleagues who delivered gushing encomiums to Redford last week after his passing.

‘Every day on the set of The Way We Were was exciting, intense and pure joy,’ she wrote alongside a picture of Katie and Hubbell.

‘We were such opposites: he was from the world of horses; I was allergic to them! Yet, we kept trying to find out more about each other, just like the characters in the movie. Bob was charismatic, intelligent, intense, always interesting— and one of the finest actors ever,’ she rhapsodized.

‘The last time I saw him, when he came to lunch, we discussed art and decided to send each other our first drawings. He was one of a kind and I’m so grateful to have had the opportunity to work with him.’

In a 2023 book about the making of The Way We Were, author Robert Hofler claimed Streisand was ‘infatuated’ with Redford on the set of the movie, to the point he wore two pairs of tight underwear during their sex scene to ‘protect himself’ from her.

The book sensationally alleged that Redford did not consider Streisand a ‘serious actress,’ and that as a happily married father of four he was unwilling to succumb to his ‘mesmerized’ co-star’s supposed desire to have an affair with him.