Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid
I had never seen this movie before, and as it began to unspool it became clear this was a “classic” I would watch not with joy but with a trudging sense of duty. Jokey, ironic and empty, “Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid” wants to both tear down and embrace the mythology of the western. It chooses for its heroes two wisecracking, amoral outlaws, and insists on the outsize grandeur of their adventures. Its tone says: Take nothing seriously. And yet the charisma of Butch (Paul Newman) and Sundance (Robert Redford) is supposed to be so overwhelming that we’re willing to follow them to the ends of the earth.
Clearly by the late 60s, audiences had woken up to the fact that Hollywood westerns had sold them a bill of goods, romanticizing the frontier and the stark justice of the lone gunman. Plus — no coincidence — Vietnam raged on. Great directors responded to this unease and created three of the best westerns — the best movies, period — ever made: “Once Upon a Time in the West,” “The Wild Bunch” and “McCabe & Mrs. Miller.” Each rejects the conventions of the western in favor of an inimitable personal vision, but they share one thing: squalor. Directors Sergio Leone, Sam Peckinpah and Robert Altman weren’t afraid to root around in the dirt — to suggest, despite the stylization inherent in moviemaking, that real life in the Old West was nasty, brutish and short. We get none of this in “Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid,” which was released in 1969, a few months after Leone’s and Peckinpah’s movies. In “Butch,” everything’s played for laughs. Even at their violent end, Butch and Sundance can’t mute their breezy rapport, and director George Roy Hill unforgivably pulls his punches, ending with a heroic freeze-frame just before the heroes are riddled with bullets by a company of the Bolivian army.
The movie really is tedious, slow and predictable. It has montages that go on forever, in love with their cleverness: sepia photographs showing Butch, Sundance and Etta (Katharine Ross) partying in New York before their long voyage to Bolivia; and later, Butch and Sundance using their rudimentary Spanish to rob banks. Before that, we get an endless chase sequence, with little suspense, in which Butch and Sundance are pursued by a “super-posse.” The cumulative body count is off the charts, and yet everybody dies in the distance, felled cleanly by a single shot — another myth, glibly celebrated. The glorious, sun-baked vistas captured by cinematographer Conrad Hall only reinforced my indifference to the action within the perfectly composed frame. “Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid” is by no means an inept movie. It knows how to entertain, how to push your buttons. And Paul Newman makes a dangerously appealing antihero. Look beneath the surface, though, and there’s nothing there.