Who ARE Those Guys?!

Rating: 10/10 (18 July 2011)

There are a lot of things that make BUTCH CASSIDY AND THE SUNDANCE KID one of the greatest Western films of all times. Take a solid screenplay by William Goldman, put in a great director like George Roy Hill, and pair Paul Newman and Robert Redford as the two titular characters, and the end result is a hugely entertaining and witty adventure that takes us from the high plains of the West to the out-of-the-way jungles of Bolivia.
Admittedly the details about the real-life late 19th century outlaws Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid and their Hole-In-The-Wall gang are softened for purposes of entertainment (the real-life participants were among the most notorious badmen in the history of the Old West), but it is quite a thing to see Newman and Redford get away with so much because we can't help but like them. And when the Union Pacific railroad sends a posse after them following the blowing up of a payroll train, we fear for their lives (as they keep asking themselves "Who ARE those guys?!"). The two men and their schoolteacher love interest Etta Place (Katharine Ross) hightail it down to Bolivia to continue their outlaw ways; but soon, they become wanted men again as "Bandidos Yanquis." Attempts by Newman and Redford to "go straight" by getting into the employ of an eccentric payroll master (the always-colorful Strother Martin) don't go as planned; and then it all comes down to a standoff in a small Bolivian town.
BUTCH CASSIDY was released in the same year (1969) as three other radically different Westerns: the more traditional John Wayne-led, Henry Hathaway-directed TRUE GRIT; Sam Peckinpah's THE WILD BUNCH; and Sergio Leone's ONCE UPON A TIME IN THE WEST. Although not anywhere near as violent as Peckinpah's, nor as surreal as Leone's, this film is still much more cynical than TRUE GRIT, since, like Peckinpah's film, it mourns the loss of the Old West, as progress and road agents are now strangling a once-limitless frontier and forcing outlaws and renegades south. And like Leone, it also shows even the railroad becoming more corporatized as the 20th century dawns. All of this is happening, even as Burt Bacharach's score (complete with "Raindrops Keep Falling On My Head") plays on, and we see Butch and Sundance getting away with a whole lot of money and a whole lot of schemes. At the same time, however, after being told by an ornery sheriff (Jeff Corey), "Your times is over! Don't you get it?!", they realize that they are probably not going to live much longer.
As a result, BUTCH CASSIDY, for all the fun it shows us, is every bit as fatalistic as Leone's and Peckinpah's radical restructurings of the Western myths. And yet it is this dichotomy that makes the film such an enduring film of its genre, with Newman and Redford perfectly matched (as they would be again, and with Hill directing, in 1973 for THE STING), and superb cinematography by Conrad Hall. Nobody should miss this film, especially when it comes to being a fan of that most American of film genres, the Western.