Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid (1969) - film review

Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid are two seasoned outlaws who are beginning to wish they had taken out a pension plan.  On their uppers and not overly optimistic over what the future may hold for them, they join up with their former associates in the Hole-in-the-Wall gang to mount a train robbery.  When this proves to be a walkover, they immediately carry out a second train robbery, but the outcome is far from successful.  Not only do they succeed in blowing up all the banknotes (and most of the train) in an attempt to break into the strongbox, but a posse emerges from a second train and very nearly captures them.  With things getting too hot for their liking, Butch and Sundance flee to Bolivia with their girlfriend Etta.  There, they hope to resume their career of carefree bank robbing, but find that they must first overcome the language barrier.  When they realise that bounty hunters may be trailing them, the two outlaws decide that perhaps now would be a good time to go straight. It turns out not to be the best career move...

Confounding the critics, who mostly wrote it off as vacuous, pretentious and immoral, Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid was an instant hit with the cinema-going public and proved to be one of the most commercially successful westerns of all time.  It took over one hundred million dollars at the box office and won a brace of awards (including four Oscars and nine BAFTAs).  Today, the film’s unique blend of humour, lyricism and old Wild West romanticism has made it a classic that is held in high esteem.  It is also considered the prototype of the modern buddy movie and feels emblematic of the counterculture that would revitalise Hollywood in the late sixties, early seventies.    

Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid is unlike any other western, before or since.  Somewhere between François Truffaut’s Jules et Jim (1962) and Arthur Penn’s Bonnie and Clyde (1967), the film is less an account of the exploits of two outlaws and more an exploration of the male-male buddy relationship.  In contrast to the merciless, hell-raising bandits in Sam Peckinpah’s contemporaneous The Wild Bunch (1969), the two main protagonists in this film are sympathetic anti-heroes that we just can’t help liking.  In the role that made him an overnight star, Robert Redford is the prefect complement to steely-eyed Paul Newman. There is a warmth and poignancy to their characters’ relationship, and it helps that the actors have a rapport that naturally admits some great deadpan comedy.  The winning duo would be back four years later in another box office hit, The Sting (1973), again directed by George Roy Hill.

Like all great films, Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid provides a vivid reflection of the era in which it was made.  The late 1960s saw a growing disillusionment with the old institutions, and authority of any kind was both distrusted and resented.  Perhaps the main appeal of the film for a contemporary audience was that its protagonists are a pair of society dropouts who just aren’t that bothered by material concerns and abiding by the rules.  Hey, we’re here to have fun, not to have little pen-pushing fascists tell us what to do all the time.  Those were the days...

The partners in crime we see in this film aren’t so much latterday Robin Hoods as thorns in the side of the establishment, the kind of rebels we all secretly admire and would perhaps even like to be.  This anti-authoritarian, pro-individualist subtext, perhaps more than anything, is what lies behind the film’s enduring appeal – that and some moments of inspired insanity.  The best example of the latter is the totally incongruous sequence in which Paul Newman goes cycling to the strains of Raindrops Keep Falling on My Head in a sequence that somehow manages to resemble both an impressionist painting and a tacky French porn movie.  Hallucinogenic drugs probably had something to do with the making of this film.

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