But No More Than That

Rating: 7/10 (11 February 2015)

Butch Cassidy (real name Robert LeRoy Parker) and the Sundance Kid (real name Harry Longabaugh) were two real-life Wild West outlaws, and the film tells a fictionalised account of their careers, both in the West itself and in Bolivia, where they emigrated in 1901 with Sundance's mistress Etta Place (real name unknown) in search of richer pickings. According to the film they left America because they robbed one train too many belonging to the Union Pacific Railroad, following which the railroad company boss, E. H. Harriman, paid for a special posse to track them down and kill them.
The plot has a number of similarities to that of another well-known Western from 1969, Sam Peckinpah's "The Wild Bunch". In that film too the protagonists are outlaws who are on the run from a posse of bounty hunters paid for by a railroad company and who take refuge in a Latin American country. (In that case the country in question is Mexico rather than Bolivia, although even in "Butch Cassidy" the supposed "Bolivian" scenes were actually shot in Mexico). In both cases the outlaws meet their demise in a shootout with the forces of law and order. And both films are what can be regarded as "late Westerns" in that the action takes place after 1890, by which time the Wild West was gradually becoming a tamer place and life was becoming more difficult for the bad guys. ("The Wild Bunch" is set as late as 1913).
The film takes a fairly sympathetic view of Butch and Sundance, treating them as amiable folk heroes rather than as dangerous criminals, and fosters the legend that they never actually killed anyone during the American part of their career, relying upon threats and bluff rather than the actual use of force. (They do shoot people in Bolivia, although only in self-defence). In "The Wild Bunch" too Peckinpah is generally rooting for the Bunch rather than for their enemies, and it has been suggested that this attitude owes something to the spirit of anti- authoritarianism and rebellion which were in the air during the late sixties. I am not so sure. Glamorisation and sentimentalisation of real- life Western outlaws was nothing new; Hollywood had been doing it at least since the days of Tyrone Power and Henry Fonda as Jesse and Frank James, and probably long before that. If the Production Code forbade glamorising criminals, the scriptwriters simply denied that these men were criminals in the first place. The end of the Code in the sixties merely meant that film-makers could be more barefaced about something which had long been common practice.
The film was a huge success at the box office and the top grossing film of 1969. Its reception from the critics was generally favourable and it won four Academy Awards. It helped to make a major star of Robert Redford and to cement the reputation of his older co-star Paul Newman; the two actors and the director George Roy Hill were later to team up again to make "The Sting". (Oddly enough, Redford was not the first choice for Sundance; that was Jack Lemmon, who turned it down). It has been selected for preservation in the United States National Registry of the Library of Congress as being "culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant." Despite these achievements, however, I have never quite been able to see it as a great milestone in the history of the cinema, which is how some have described it.
Certainly, it has its good points, prominent among them being some attractive photography of the Western scenery and a good musical score; its hit song, "Raindrops Keep Fallin' on My Head", has become famous, even among those who have no idea that it was originally from a movie. Two of those Oscars were for "Best Cinematography" and "Best Song". Newman and Redford are easy to watch, if occasionally a bit too laid- back for my liking, and perhaps make their characters a bit too likable, which makes the violent ending seem jarring. (In "The Wild Bunch", by contrast, William Holden and his associates are just the sort of characters whom one might expect to die in a hail of bullets).
What the film lacks is anything to set it apart from the standard average Western, of which many examples were still being made in the late sixties. By contrast "The Sting", to my mind a considerably better film, could never be mistaken for a standard average crime drama. That idyllic interlude where Butch and Sundance frolic with Etta (who in this version of the story appears to be involved in a ménage-a-trois with both outlaws) to the strains of "Raindrops Keep Fallin' on My Head" does not really count as a ground-breaking innovation, even though it was to be imitated in the "Marmalade, Molasses and Honey" sequence of another Newman Western, "The Life and Times of Judge Roy Bean". As for that bloody ending it was, as Roger Ebert pointed out at the time, a blatant attempt to copy "Bonnie and Clyde". "Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid" is a watchable and competently made Western with two charismatic stars in the leading roles. But no more than that. 7/10