Butch Cassidy and The Sundance Kid's Critique on the Vietnam War

Rating: 8/10 (11 December 2016)

Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid is a western released in 1969 starring Paul Newman and Robert Redford. It covers the (mostly) true stories of the famous train robbers of the same names from the early 1900's. With smart dialogue and exciting action, reviewers constantly praise the film for its pure entertainment, ignoring its historical contexts and implications. Although Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid seems like a "turn your brain off" western action movie, it is possible to read into its political and social commentary of the sixties.
As an anti-hero kind of film, director George Roy Hill does a good job for making the audience root for the lawbreakers. Not inaccurate to the real-life story, citizens would get excited when they were robbed by the two men as if they were celebrities. The men are not known to be killers and are actually quite honest people aside from stealing what isn't theirs. Their charm wins over everyone besides the Union Pacific Railroad.
Before they know it, Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid are being followed by trackers of incredible skill and marksmanship. They eventually decide to leave the country altogether and start a new life. This only works for a short time as they are eventually shot down by the Bolivian Army, or, at least that's how the story goes. There is some loose evidence that points to the men faking their deaths and going back to America with different names. George Roy Hill expresses this mystery through the iconic ending freeze frame of the two outlaws charging dozens of men with guns blazing. He never shows the actual deaths of the characters, implying an open-ended conclusion.
What could be important about this film, however, is that it was filmed and released during the height of the Vietnam War, a very polarizing time for Americans. There were constant protests and urges for peace from the people. The war was not only accomplishing anything, but it was wasting the lives of the soldiers and the enemy.
Butch Cassidy, although based on true events, parallels this turmoil fairly accurately with the timeline of the heroes. The two characters start out as rebels to society and unafraid to stand up to authority. They do question their actions, however, and contemplate going to war as soldiers in order to become more respectable. Before they are able to possibly follow through, their lives are threatened and they must flee to Bolivia. They eventually try to get real jobs and essentially become bodyguards for an American who needs to transport money from the bank to his workers. This is where the parallelisms start to come through.
Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid have decided to conform to what's right in societal standards. They load their guns in a foreign country and swear to defend a fellow American. When this goes wrong and bandits get ahold of the money, the heroes are forced to gun them down. As the Sundance Kid watches the six corpses roll down the hill, he flatly says "well, we've gone straight." This demonstrates a huge conflict of morals regarding what's right in the characters' mind and what's right determined by authority. By following the law, they end up committing worse atrocities than when they were breaking it. Adding to that conflict, the Bolivian bandits, who spoke no English, were barely different than the bandits the two heroes were. This is basically what war is all about: killing the foreign version of your role in society. Soldiers kill other soldiers, both who think they are doing what is right. Butch Cassidy and The Sundance Kid in Bolivia could easily be two American soldiers in Vietnam ignoring their morals to "go straight". Butch Cassidy and The Sundance Kid is an entertaining film, but it is not done justice when neglecting the possible messages it has hidden under its sleeves. The sixties were a time for rebellion and speaking out against the brutality of war. George Roy Hill could have easily been taking part in that. The trigger-pulling western could have something to say behind the horse chases, explosions, and fast- paced banter.