Bosom Buddies

Rating: 8/10 (20 February 2007)

The ultimate "buddy" movie.
Buddy movies were all over the place in 1969 in various guises -- this, "Midnight Cowboy," "The Wild Bunch," "Easy Rider." "Butch Cassidy" is the lightest and most accessible of these -- for that reason, I don't think it's as interesting to look at now as these other movies are. But it does serve up a dose of good old-fashioned Hollywood film-making, and in Paul Newman and Robert Redford, it presented audiences with a cinema duo as memorable as that of Laurel and Hardy or Abbott and Costello, or if you prefer a more contemporary example, Jack Lemmon and Walter Matthau, who had manufactured a similar screen chemistry the year before in "The Odd Couple."
"Butch and Sundance" is mostly a nostalgic comedy, harking back to the glory days of screen westerns. But for all its levity, there is something dark about it that's hard to describe. Butch and Sundance are anti-heroes in the same way that Bonnie and Clyde were in Arthur Penn's brilliant film -- they've got the glamour of Hollywood movie stars, but their doom is sealed from the second the film starts, and because they're so likable and charismatic, it makes it that much more upsetting to see them destroyed. Like Bonnie and Clyde, Butch and Sundance find themselves unable to exist in a world intent on their destruction -- in this way, the film comments both on the death of the traditional western, and on the alienated restlessness of an entire younger generation that was beginning to make itself heard in American cinema.
Also starring Katharine Ross as the third point in a love triangle, and featuring one of the best film songs ever recorded, "Raindrops Keep Falling on My Head," which accompanies Paul Newman as he shows off for Ross on a bicycle in one of the movie's highlights.
Grade: A-