Movie review: Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid
I saw this hip buddy flick meets Western when it first came out in 1969. My teenaged cousins took me along to see it with them, most likely at Downtown Worcester's Showcase Cinemas. I was about nine then, so my focus was the gorgeous quarter horses, Butch and Sundance riding on their beautiful horses through wild, sparkling rivers, over mountain scrub, beneath cliffs - just one long exciting horse-back ride through the gorgeous American badlands.
Then I saw the movie in the 1970s, when stars Robert Redford and Paul Newnan were at the pinnacle of their Baby Boomer fame. I probably saw them in THE STING at Showcase that year; The film was on TV. There were two Boston television stations that showed great movies on weekend nights when I was a kid - Channel 56, I think, was one of them. It was here I got to rewatch, stretched out on our lumpy sofa, covered up with an old blanket, BUTCH CASSIDY AND THE SUNDANCE KID. This time the movie seemed a bit ... dangerous. I don't think it had anything to do with the gun fights. I think it had more to do with watching two non-conformists trying to stay free. I was just a young teenager but the message was clear. Very 1960s. FREEDOM AT ALL COSTS. Then, as an undergrad at UMass/Amherst, I saw Redford and Newman again in BUTCH CASSIDY - on a big screen this time, maybe it was some kind of Redford retrospective...maybe I saw it in Northampton at that cool movie house/ concert hall. With a boyfriend. Always with a boyfriend! The film was so cool then to me, hip fun! The actors looked sexy in their black boot-cut jeans and rugged barn coats, and they were so '70s compact, athletic, and Redford with his blond hair falling into his eyes and him sweeping it back with the flick of his slender fingers. I was young and the hormones were racing in me faster than our outlaws' horses streaked through the tall grass of Wyoming. I fantasized about Redford and dreamed of being in love with the romantic Newman. The message I got at 22 years of age: these two handsome bank robbers don't kill people - they just take their money! Because they want to be free! You need money to live outside this shitty society! Butch and Sundance were more honest than the people who set out to capture or kill 'em! I don't think I'm being unduly romantic here. And I still believe Dylan was RIGHT when he sang: "to live outside the law you must be honest." At the ripe old age of 62, I know just how true this is!
Rewatching BUTCH CASSIDY AND THE SUNDANCE KID today (probably my 15th viewing over the decades) made me wistful. To see a young and lovely Katherine Ross on that bicycle with the sweet Newman who secretly loves her. Pulling hay from her long chestnut hair (very '60s) as B.J. Thomas sings "Raindrops Keep Falling on My Head" ... I cried. For my youth, for my young idealistic self, the feeling of young love with infinite possibilities...time no longer stretches out before me the same way and I'm saddened by this fact of life. ... The goofy repartee between Redford and Newman (friends in real life for decades) as they faced death with their hip nonchalance. The dialogue not true to 1800's American Western life, even sounding very Baby Boomerish in some spots! but still wonderful. Why? Because the movie speaks to you ... Redford and Newman exude charisma from every pore, and they are GREAT actors. Really. Newman was always taken seriously, but Redford's Waspy gorgeousness made people underestimate him, dismiss his talent. These years we all know Robert Redford is a wonderful actor - and director.
So, it's after the Civil War and the West isn't as wild as it used to be: there are now towns and school houses and schoolmarms (Ross is a school teacher with her own school house a few yards in front of her house). There's train tracks, rail roads ...banks, too. Most gun slinger and bank robber types and open rangers are no more. The United States is just too civilized for their kind! Butch Cassidy and his partner in crime, the Sundance Kid, are the outliers, the holdouts. They continue to rob banks, spend all their cash via fancy vacations, gambling, hookers (Butch). So they have to keep robbing banks to bankroll their high lifestyle - and everyone in the territory knows them. The affable Butch and sexy, taciturn Sundance are tough, brave and doing what few are doing - following their heart. Everyone knows them and kind of admires them. At least in this film which is based on the true life Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid - just like Warren Beatty's BONNIE AND CLYDE, also made around the same time, is based on two famous infamous robbers on the lam.
But Butch and Sundance are good guys, so the bank employee entrusted with the bank safe filled with thousands of dollars says, "Butch! If there's anybody I'd want to steal this money, it's you..." But he's not gonna open that safe even when Butch asks him to nicely. He's duty bound. So Butch puts a little too much dynamite under that bank safe and the mega-explosion sends everyone flying into the air, including the thousands of dollar bills that now flutter away in the breeze. Again, this film is fantasy: Butch and then Sundance laugh as people jump into the air trying to pluck those dollar bills out of thin air.
What's great about this movie is the cool music, the old timey music, the silly dialogue, the counter culture vibes, its three mega stars, and especially the chemistry between Redford and Newman. Ross, as Edna the school teacher, is Sundance's "woman," but the real love affair here is between Sundance and Butch. Everyone around them knows their days are numbered: you can't rob banks the old way in a new America. But these two guys stick at it... for the adrenaline rush... but also to simply stick together. They have fun together. They know and like each other - “down to the ground,” as Maddie says in TRUE GRIT. When, finally, Edna realizes their end is coming, she tells Sundance, "I think I'll go home ahead of you," Sundance is unsentimental about her departure. "Whatever you want," Butch says. The guys have each other.
So when they run out of that old abandoned church in Bolivia, dirty, bloodied, still defiant, but deluded...with their guns loaded and their wrists bandaged they're met with a fusillade of bullets. The whole Bolivian army came out to kill them. Butch and Sundance thought they were just facing their American nemesis, the excellent Native American tracker Lord Baltimore and his posse. But as the final freeze frame shows us, our two heroes were sadly mistaken.