"Just like the old days"

Rating: 10/10 (13 January 2011)

When the old Hollywood production code was abandoned in 1967 it wasn't just sex, violence and profanity that started appearing on cinema screens. For the first time since the early 1930s you could get away with making criminals the good guys. One of the nicest products of this new era of liberty was Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, a Western very much of its time in style and values, and yet one so warmly human and respectful to genre convention you feel it was aching to be made all along.
Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid is first of all a superbly written screenplay. What is striking is how witty it is from start to finish, enough to arguably classify it as a comedy Western. But this is far from being a Blazing Saddles-style spoof. The humour is very natural, and largely serves to make the characters instantly likable. A great example is the early scene in which Butch is challenged by Logan, and Butch uses his intelligence and his sense of humour to overcome his opponent, whereby from then on we admire and route for the guy. Another great aspect of the picture is how the two main characters are opposites who complement each other. The easygoing amiable Butch and the prickly, cynical Sundance are like a gentler version of the brains and brawn dynamic of many criminal duos both real and fictional.
It may seem obvious now, but it was only after a lengthy selection process that Paul Newman and Robert Redford were cast as the eponymous heroes. But just like the written characters, this pair have a great rapport and complementary styles. Newman has such presence and charisma that, even though his character actually makes a lot of bad judgements throughout the picture, he still has the air of man people will look up to and follow. Redford handles the difficult balance of bringing out Sundance's curmudgeonly manner but giving us the impression that it's all a front and he is a nice guy deep down. Above all they both make their performances look effortless, so that although these are obviously heavily idealised portrayals of the real historical figures, we believe in them as genuine people.
This was the picture in which ace director George Roy Hill really hit his stride. He often uses camera set-ups that may seem against cinematic convention but help to focus us purely on what is important. Take the sepia-toned sequence after the opening credits. We start with a very odd shot of Paul Newman walking through a town which, rather than show him in a more normal wide-shot showing off the whole street, frames him in mid-close-up. We then get a lengthy shot of Redford framed similarly whilst the gambler he is talking to has his back to us. What these shots do is draw us in completely on these two characters for their introduction scene, without distracting us with the faces of anyone who is inconsequential to the story. However, after these opening few shots we move to the wider group shots and landscapes that let us know we are in familiar Western territory. There are some other neat touches from Hill in the chase scenes that form the climax of the first half of the picture. He keeps the pursuing lawmen in long-shot, never allowing us to get a proper glimpse of them, which makes them a depersonalised presence, and puts us constantly in the place of heroes. Also rather than cutting back and forth as many chase sequences do, he has several set-ups in which both hunter and hunted are together in the same shot (very difficult to organise over such great distances), which gives a very realistic sense of the pursuit.
The icing on the cake is surely the music. Not just the Burt Bacharach tunes, at turns achingly sad or wonderfully jaunty, but the way they are used. The central montage of sepia photos has a beautiful sense of nostalgia to it, and the fact that these "good times" are presented in a way that is somewhat distant and abstract gives them a tone of poignancy when compared to the bad times that are to come in Bolivia. These good old days are dead and gone, the montage seems to say. Of course Raindrops Keep Fallin' on my Head is a tad anachronistic but it suits the tone of the bike ride sequence perfectly. Touches like this, the occasional nods to the nouvelle vague and the modern-sounding score, along with the carefree ethos, make Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid very much a movie of its time. And yet, it does not have the pretentiousness or downright weirdness of so many late-60s cinema, and with its good-natured charm it is in fact one of the most accessible and enduring pieces of its era.