I'm in with the outlaws, I go where the outlaws go.

Rating: 8/10 (28 January 2020)

Movies have been guilty of romanticising the lives of ruthless criminals for decades, and Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid is perhaps the most blatant example, the film portraying the infamous outlaws as loveable rogues -- best buds who are simply enjoying their chosen vocation: holding up banks and sticking up trains (or is it 'sticking up banks' and 'holding up trains'?).
While I generally prefer films based on historical figures to be as factually accurate as possible, and get narked should they stray from the truth, I cannot help but warm to this revisionist western's dubious duo: as played by Paul Newman and Robert Redford, the affable anti-heroes share a bond that is hard to resist, engaging in breezy conversation as they go about their business, charming even the most pernickety viewer (i.e., me!) into submission in the process.
Writer William Goldman and director George Roy Hill clearly intend for their audience to side with Butch and Sundance, and for the most part, that is precisely what happens - at least until the showdown against the Bolivian army in the final act, when the outlaws gun down numerous soldiers while trying to flee. Up until this moment, the pair had only killed a vicious gang of payroll bandits, but it's much harder to forgive the shooting of men who are trying to uphold the law.
The ending sees the daring partners in crime making a final bid for freedom despite being vastly outnumbered. In keeping with the general light-hearted nature of the film, we don't see the men cut down in a hail of bullets and blood (as in Bonnie and Clyde and The Wild Bunch); instead, they are caught freeze-frame as they leg it, leaving just a glimmer of hope that they somehow survived (to date, no-one has been able to say for sure that Butch and Sundance died that day in Bolivia).
7.5/10, rounded up to 8 for Burt Bacharach's 'Raindrops Keep Fallin' on My Head', sung by B.J. Thomas -- anachronistic, perhaps, but still a timeless classic.