The Future's All Yours
Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid / Daniel Carlson
Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid is so quintessentially 1969 that, had William Goldman not been around to write it or George Roy Hill able to direct it, it would nevertheless have been birthed by the air and the mindset and the swirling catastrophe that was worming its way through American culture and cinema like a beautiful sickness. The film is the rare confluence of performers, director, screenwriter, and atmosphere of heady implosion that doesn’t just make it a great movie, but an important one within the context of both the Western genre and mainstream film. It has humor, but it’s not slapstick; it has heart, but it’s not melodramatic; it has brains, but doesn’t sink beneath the weight of its cleverness. What’s more, it invented the modern buddy movie; it took a story set in the expanse of the Old West and played it for intimate, human-scale emotions; it watches the heroes run away instead of fight; it inverts its genre in a powerful instance of self-reflexive storytelling; and on top of all that, it manages to somehow act on a meta level as a forlorn farewell to the cowboy epics of the past and to the turbulent decade that had preceded it. It’s not just that the world — for Butch and Sundance, and for the viewers at the time — was already changing. It’s that nobody could even remember what it used to be like anymore. The choice isn’t between the good old days and a brave new world, but between a cold, unwelcoming destiny and a youth that might never have even been.
The film opens perfectly with the title card, “Most of what follows is true,” before unspooling a sepia-toned newsreel detailing the exploits of bank robber Butch Cassidy and his Hole in the Wall Gang. Hill keeps the vintage color for the opening sequence to introduce the two main characters, Butch (Paul Newman) and Sundance (Robert Redford), and the shifted color both adds to the film’s pseudo-historical feel and helps elevate these men to even greater iconic status — these aren’t men, these are proto-men, some unformed idea of manhood and lawlessness. Butch saunters into a bank one afternoon and gives it a quick once-over, noting the newly installed alarms and panic buttons behind the teller’s desk. “What happened to the old bank?” he asks the security guard. The response — that the old kept getting robbed, hence the alarms — drives right to the heart of Butch’s problem, and it’s one that will run him down until the film’s final frame: The world is moving on, and nobody bothered to tell him. Hill shifts the action to Sundance, locking the camera on Redford in a lengthy close-up that lets his eyes carry the energy of the scene in a way barely seen before or since. It must be noted that Redford was still next to nobody at this point in his film career; aside from Barefoot in the Park and some Broadway success, he wasn’t nearly the star that Newman was at the time. But his first scene as Sundance establishes him as a presence equally as strong and vital as Butch, as he plays cards and eventually and calmly shoots his way out of trouble. There’s no music to underscore the scene, either, and Hill only uses maybe 15 minutes of music in the entire 110-minute film, and that’s including the classic but deeply flawed “Raindrops Keep Fallin’ On My Head” sequence, which is definitely coming into the discussion later. The point is that Hill, from the start, is making practically an anti-Western, using no major musical themes or cues and having his heroes walk onstage with all the fanfare of a man ambling up to a bus stop. And it works.
The plot of the film is almost ludicrously simple: Butch and Sundance hang out and do outlaw things, like rob trains and loiter in saloons and sleep with hookers. But even here, Hill and Goldman invert what would be standard for the genre. After holding up a train, the action shifts to the town, where the local sheriff is attempting to round up a posse and fire up the citizenry in hopes of motivating them to fight back against those rascals who stole all that money. But the sheriff has no luck, and what’s more, Butch and Sundance are actually hanging out on the balcony of the saloon across the street, watching the sheriff’s vain attempts at preaching to the townsfolk — Butch with an easy grin on his face, Sundance more withdrawn, as if he’s never quite sure he’s out of danger. Redford’s performance is fantastically understated, giving Newman most of the room to do the broader humor and propel the duo forward with his clownish energy. But Redford takes a slightly greater risk by staying subdued, a lethal gunslinger carrying the weight of every score and every enemy on his back.
Even when he shuffles off into the night to the home of girlfriend Etta Place (Katharine Ross), he’s never really happy. That’s why the role-playing scene that introduces Etta has so much power: Sundance, apparently having broken into her home, surprises her in her bedroom and orders her to strip at gunpoint in what’s easily the most erotic quasi-kidnapping ever filmed. And sure, it’s cute when Etta’s faux terror gives way to exasperation at his tardiness, and they kiss, and fade to black, and everything’s fine; but Sundance never smiles. He doesn’t love Etta, and maybe doesn’t even like her; it’s the idea of her that draws him in, of warmth and sex and a hot meal and someone to look after him and for him to protect, too. Hill and Goldman deserve credit for never forcing a love triangle from Sundance-Etta-Butch, because there simply isn’t one there. That’s not to say they don’t all love each other, or that Butch isn’t portrayed as having some level of (maybe) platonic feelings for Etta. He takes her on a bicycle ride in the musicalized “Raindrops” sequence that feels for all the world like a terrible music video from the period, and it’s clear her likes her. But it’s just that that cheap romantic subplot would feel false here, and would pull the story away from the sweeping and more engaging story at its heart: The flight of Butch and Sundance from the law and their own pasts into a shining and doomed future of their own making.
Because the heart of the film is just that: One giant chase sequence that runs about 27 minutes, and which features Butch and Sundance running from a super posse led by lawman Joe Lefors, always wearing his trademark white straw hat, with a few other legendary riders. The posse pursues Butch and Sundance for days over every type of terrain, never falling for any of the duo’s evasive tricks, always never more than a hilltop away. The viewer never even sees Lefors or any of the other members of the posse up close; hell, they’re never more than specks on a dust horizon. But they’re out they’re, coming hard and fast, and that’s too much for Butch and Sundance. This is why the “Raindrops” sequence from before rings so false: It’s not merely a clunky, aberrant piece of filmmaking woven into a larger masterpiece, but the tone and lyrics are patently at odds with everything Butch and Sundance are about; these guys aren’t worry-free in the slightest, but hunted men, living on the run or in hiding every day. The film further subverts the genre’s typically strong and informed heroes by having Butch and Sundance utterly confounded by the skill of their pursuers. They almost don’t want to believe it’s Lefors on their tail, claiming that he’s a Wyoming man and never leaves the state. It’s as if they don’t want to admit to themselves that a lawman could be breaking his own set of rules just to pursue them, because if both sides are bending the rules, where will order come from? The wry joking between Butch and Sundance as they run isn’t a refutation of fear, but the only way they have to express it. And that’s a big part of what made the film such a standout in its time and continues to make it one: These guys, these antiheroes, are mediocre at what they do and absolutely terrified of the lawmen on their tail and a destiny they can’t see. For anyone who wasn’t convinced before, the chase sequence ends with basically a giant screaming metaphor as Butch and Sundance, chased up a hill and surrounded, run off a cliff and jump blindly to the rocks below, a fall that would kill mortal thieves but that doesn’t even put a scratch on these two mythologized outlaws.
Because that’s ultimately what these men are: They are living myths, the onscreen representations of versions of men who once lived, and whose tale has grown with the telling. And you couldn’t pick two more naturally compatible actors than Redford and Newman, swaggering around with almost unnerving ease and grace. Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid invented the entire concept of the two-character buddy action-comedy, and it did it so well for Fox that a few years later Universal tried — and succeeded — to rebottle lightning by putting Newman, Redford, and Hill together again for The Sting in 1973, the second and (for now) final time the two men would share the screen. But here, in their first pairing, they turn in wonderful performances. Newman embodies the idea of leadership even as he runs around like a kid, and Redford is equally adept at playing the kind of dark antihero he rarely got to play. Yet as talented as they are, it’s important that they’re also two impossibly handsome men, blue-eyed and young and somehow more physically present than the male stars of today. Ross is equally stunning, and they’re all perfectly photographed by cinematographer Conrad Hall, adding to the feeling that these beautiful people are somehow bigger than life, stories that have come right off the page or screen and are walking around, toying with us.
After their narrow escape from Lefors, Butch and Sundance decide to take refuge in Bolivia, and the third act of the film follows them as they travel to South America with Etta, learn Spanish, rob local banks, and try to live it up as best they can. But the final chunk of the film takes on an oddly formal air of finality, as if not even Hill and Goldman can get these guys out of the impossible situation they’ve made of their lives. A scene deleted from the original print and recently recovered deals with Etta’s decision to leave the boys and head home to the States, and she finally leaves them while they’re all at the movies one night. Butch and Sundance are flanking her in the theater, idly drinking during the newsreel, while Etta watches the film of New York and realizes that her life, her future, is back there with the rest of the world, and that she’s no longer a part of a trio, but a sad, third wheel accompanying two men who are too far gone to do anything but see their lives through to the bitter end. Butch and Sundance see themselves then in the newsreel, in a reenactment relaying the story of their purported death and capture, and though Hill rightly cut the scene for being what he called a “contrivance,” he was right on when it comes to the underlying point: “I liked the idea of these guys having lived so long that they now became myths, and they were images which they, in a way, had to live up to.” Hill has fashioned the ultimate myth-making movie, so powerful and unconventional and forward-thinking and just plain good that it drove home the final coffin nail in old westerns even as it opened up a world of ideas for new ones. Butch and Sundance were real men, too, but their actual exploits have long since become tangled with Hill’s film version, which has proven so rightly popular that it’s become ingrained into the pop subconscious as the way things were. In this regard, Hill’s revisionist western winds up as the ultimate example of the line from the classic The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance, directed by the greatest director of conventional westerns, John Ford: When the legend becomes fact, print the legend.
Daniel Carlson is the managing editor of Pajiba and a low-level employee at a Hollywood industry magazine. You can visit his blog, Slowly Going Bald.
Le Samourai | | Pajiba Love 01/24/08
Comments
Oh, God. The "Raindrops" sequence is absolutely brutal, and I'm glad you addressed it. It's rare that so brilliant a movie is brought to a screeching, crashing halt by such a bizarre and make-me-squirm moment. It always reminds me of the musical montage in the Thomas Crown Affair.
Posted by: TK at January 24, 2008 3:40 PM
Raindrops was my favorite song as a kid - obsessivly so. I love that scene. This is one of my top favorite movies of all time. Another is Little Big Man.
Who ARE those guys?
Posted by: GinKirk at January 24, 2008 3:56 PM
Can I move?
Posted by: TK at January 24, 2008 4:03 PM
Two pieces of trivia:
1) At one point, Newman was supposed to play Sundance and Redford was supposed to play Butch.
2) Also, at one point, Warren Beatty and Steve McQueen were pegged to star.
That makes at least five iconic roles that Warren Beatty either turned down or was considered for and did not get:
Sundance
Michael Corleone
Gordon Gekko
Jack Horner of Boogie Nights
Bill (of Kill Bill)
Posted by: Siddhartha at January 24, 2008 4:03 PM
Jesus fuck, a great review of a great movie.
Posted by: Withnail at January 24, 2008 4:15 PM
True, the Raindrops scene is bad, but the actual song...there are few songs that can inspire a smile in almost anyone regardless of their age or background.
Years ago, I was sitting in a car in horrific rush hour traffic. All around me people just looked pissed off. Then the DJ (I was listening to the national radio station so most people would be listening to the same channel) announced it was Paul Newman's birthday so he would play Raindrops Keep Faling on My Head. When I looked again at all the drivers around me, everyone was bobbing their heads back and forth with the music and smiling.
Posted by: PaddyDog at January 24, 2008 4:18 PM
This is one of those movies I feel criminal for not having gotten around to yet. Time to hit the video rentals...
Now, Paddydog, I must have no soul, because I hate that frickin' song. Worst. Earworm. Ever.
Posted by: Armando at January 24, 2008 4:39 PM
"Yet as talented as they are, it's important that they're also two impossibly handsome men, blue-eyed and young and somehow more physically present than the male stars of today."
You can say that again. I sincerely believe that Paul Newman in his prime was one of the most empirically beautiful men to have ever walked the planet. (He still looks damn good for an octogenarian!)
Posted by: Becca at January 24, 2008 4:52 PM
Loved the song by itself, but hated it in the movie.
Now, of course, I've grown to hate the song.
It's become elevator music to me.
Posted by: BWeaves at January 24, 2008 5:12 PM
"I have vision, and the rest of the world wears bifocals."
God, this movie--Goldman and Newman together? I think what I've come to respect most about Newman was his willingness, as a huge star, to play morally ambiguous and hugely flawed characters who don't achieve redemption. That and his impossible physical beauty, that is.
Posted by: brtrisk at January 24, 2008 5:22 PM
Oh yes, I would take Paul Newman any day, 80-something or not. oh those blue eyes.
Great review for one of my favorite movies. My mom is a Burt Bacharach nutcase, and this soundtrack played endlessly in my childhood. (The instrumental "South American Getaway" is great.)
"who ARE those guys?"
must rent movie soon.
Posted by: nancy at January 24, 2008 5:43 PM
Well since we're going there...yes, the Paul Newman factor. It's rather amazing that there's a man who could completely eclipse Robert Redford on the screen without even moving. Similar ro becca and brtrisk, I consider him among the most handsome men ever. Period.
Posted by: PaddyDog at January 24, 2008 5:46 PM
I haven't even read the review yet, but does anybody else think Redford was at his very hottest in this movie? I don't even 'staches or blondes (very much), but in this movie, he's smokin'. It's a good movie, but even if it wasn't, I think I'd watch it just to look at him.
K, that's all I got. Sorry.
Posted by: Slash at January 24, 2008 6:16 PM
The "Raindrops" scene is awful, no doubt about it. The other point that doesn't work for me is the montage of their journey to Bolivia. It's not that the idea of a montage itself is bad, but this one just goes on way too long.
Other than that, though, I adore this movie. Butch's relentless optimism about their endeavors, paired with Sundance's equally relentless distrust, play off of each other beautifully. I can imagine the casting reversed, but I can't imagine it working as well.
What's interesting is how much I like Paul Newman and his choice of movies since this era, and how much I don't like Redford and his choices.
"This might be the garden spot of the whole country. People may travel hundreds of miles just to get to this spot where we're standing now."
Posted by: Kate at January 24, 2008 6:37 PM
The other noteworthy musical sequence is that pretty masterly (but weird) montage where they go to New York, and the Swingle Singers are 'ba-da-ba-ba'-ing in the background.
"Raindrops", whaddya wanna bet, was forced upon the makers of the film, by the studio. I don't know that, but I suspect it.
Posted by: richbachelor at January 24, 2008 6:38 PM
Excellent review, well done!
I agree with Slash that Redford was the more delicious of the two. His eyes are magnetic. I would watch that man read a manual on how paint dries. Sigh.
Posted by: Lauren at January 24, 2008 7:14 PM
Amazing review. Keep 'em coming!
Posted by: Brooke at January 24, 2008 7:25 PM
Daniel and fellow Pajabinites, I apologize for cutting through the thread here, but I haven't commented in awhile and wanted the regular readers to be FOREWARNED:
'Untraceable', with the spectacular Diane Lane, is being released tomorrow. Diane Lane is the love of my life, and I've spent over 25 years following this goddess's career, and it's the first opportunity I (hopefully) will have to post a verrry long commentary to when it first appears here.
Just remember, if 'TMax' is writing & you could care less about Diane Lane, me not be offended if you skip my commentary.
And one more liberty please, Daniel? Let 'Mr. fave movie rom-com' Dustin know that, even if he isn't doing this review, could he please give a mention sometime to Diane Lane's first, best, and one of the most romantic rom-coms of the 70's, 'A Little Romance'?
Maybe for the 70's classics week, eh??
Can't wait to read everything I missed this weekend, and sorry for the interruption, y'all.
Posted by: TMax at January 24, 2008 7:41 PM
Nice review.
Just brought the d-lux edition back to the vid store today.
great movie. I espcially like bacharach's soundtrack...the acapella shite during the boliva expedition never fails to move me.
Bop ba dop ba dop bop bop ba da daa de da da de da dadada
Posted by: mothy at January 24, 2008 7:50 PM
TMax: Ted B. and I thank-ee kindly for the gracious Best of Pajiba words, which I missed when you first posted them. Welcome back.
Diane Lane. Mmmmmmm, sex donuts.
Posted by: socalledonlycousins at January 24, 2008 8:11 PM
Damn. They don't make men like that anymore. They are just so gorgeous and yet not at all painted up or blow waved or surgically altered. Just rugged features and piercing eyes. I think I need a cool cloth for my forehead.
Sorry, I've just been mesmerised by that photo. I'll read the review now.
Posted by: Loob at January 24, 2008 10:18 PM
Great review, I loved this movie- and yes, weren't they all impossibly beautiful? Newman was, and still is gorgeous.
Posted by: demondoll at January 24, 2008 10:26 PM
I'm not going to admit how many times I've seen this movie.
couple of things I'm going to disagree about, though.
First: the love triangle. I think there is absolutely a love triangle, a very palpable one. During the bicycle/Raindrops scene, Etta asks Butch wistfully what he thinks would have happened if she had met him first. Wistfully. And he thinks about it, and I don't think this is lighthearted. When they get back, and Sundance asks Butch what he was doing, Butch says "running off with your woman", and I get the impression that Butch is only half joking; I believe is might actually do it, or want to.
You're right: going into this in any more detail would cheapen it, but not because it's not important. Rather, it would cheapen it because the triangle is SO important, such an integral part of their relationship. I'd argue that it's a defining characteristic of their relationship. It's hard to buy that a triangular relationship would work so harmoniously otherwise. And I think it's a huge mark of Butch's and Etta's love for Sundance that they make it work, that they don't get together, regardless of Sundance's feeling, or lack thereof, for Etta.
If anything, I think they don't go into details about it because there's nothing to be done about it. Etta and Butch have accepted it, and so must we.
Second: the Raindrops scene. I don't think it's brutal. It's not the most successful scene in the movie, perhaps, but I'd argue that the whole second half is less successful than the first - that it almost loses some speed for a while.
There are quite a few times when we, the audience, almost believe that Butch and Sundance will make it. That they'll get away from those guys. Whether or not Sundance and Butch ever stop being afraid, or ever believe themselves that they'll get away, we are given reason to hope that they will. One of those times is during the Raindrops scene. Another is right after they get to Bolivia. The Raindrops scene serves several functions: one is to establish the chemistry between Etta and Butch. One is to provide us with that hope, that feeling of freedom. But also - perhaps this is to show us the way they were before they were mythologized? Before they had to live up to themselves? It shows us a playfulness that Etta and Butch can let themselves go back to that Sundance cannot, shows us their attachment to Sundance even though he is distant and removed from their optimism.
I liked it.
Now I'm going to go pretend that I don't know or think this much about this movie.
Posted by: -'b. at January 24, 2008 11:06 PM
Dan, once again a beautifully written review. Butch Cassidy is a great film. Would you consider writing a review of another classic buddy flick (and a personal favorite): The Man Who Would Be King?
I'd like to see a Pajiba list of good buddy movies. I'd include Butch Cassidy, The Man Who Would Be King, and Hot Fuzz.
Posted by: watoosa at January 25, 2008 9:34 AM
Thanks, Dan, once again a beautifully written review. Butch Cassidy is a great film. Would you consider writing a review of another classic buddy flick (and a personal favorite): The Man Who Would Be King?
I'd like to see a Pajiba list of good buddy movies. I'd include Butch Cassidy, The Man Who Would Be King, and Hot Fuzz.
Posted by: watoosa at January 25, 2008 9:34 AM
Yes, the Raindrops scene is awful, but you have to love Paul Newman's little kiss to the bull. Ahh, to have been Katherine Ross in that film......
ah....ah.....AHHHHHH SHHHIIIIIIITTTTTTTT!!!!!!!!
BINGO!
Posted by: dammitjanet at January 25, 2008 10:17 AM
I do love this movie so, so much. It was actually my first introduction to Newman (I was seven) and I've been in love with his eyes ever since.
Fun Newman fact: He worked with Stanislavsky when he first started acting. Stanislavsky said that while he was a "good actor", he would never be a "great actor" like, say, Marlon Brando because he was too handsome. Not just that he was too handsome, but that he knew he was. Stanislavsky said it was a great tragedy that Newman was so pretty because he relied more on his looks than he did his talents.
So now, no matter how great he is in a movie I remember that and have to laugh a little bit.
Posted by: Scarlett at January 25, 2008 10:53 AM
"First we need to go over the rules."
"In a knife fight?!"
Thank goodness for Netflix. I just finally watched this all the way through a couple weeks ago. It was always the movie I would catch part way through and watch bits and pieces of. Fantastic movie, and a spot on review.
Posted by: virnomine at January 25, 2008 11:05 AM
Eh, I didn't mind the musical sequence. Still like the song.
Great movie. If you haven't seen it, you really should rectify that. Great cinematography, great writing, funny (the part where they blew up the safe is classic), eye candy, it's awesome.
And in my praise of Redford's unbelievable hotness, did not intend to shortchange Newman, of course. He was, and still is, a damn good-looking man. And fortunately, a good actor, too. Another movie you should see if you haven't yet is "Cool Hand Luke."
Man, the 1960s and 1970s were just a gold mine of fantastic movies (some shitty ones, too, of course), especially Westerns.
Posted by: Slash at January 25, 2008 11:16 AM
Great review, I hope next Classics week you review one of Ross' best movies, The Graduate. I just love that movie.
And I think that the song has some meaning to it. It's catchy and sweet.
Posted by: Kamakazi Feminist at January 25, 2008 11:29 AM
I agreen with -'b's comments about the love triangle and would like to add this: Sundance loves Etta, he just doesn't love here as much as he (platonically) loves Butch. After all, this is a buddy movie, and the buddy comes first. This is why Butch and Etta can't get together - Butch loves Sundance too much to do anything, and Etta loves both of them and realizes that they can't live without each other, though they both could live without her.
I like the bicycle scene. I think it stands out in the movie because it is the only time in the movie (and the last time in their lives) that Butch and Sundance are truly happy.
And by the way, Slash: thanks to you, the song running through my head has changed from "Raindrops Keep Falling on My Head" to "Plastic Jesus".
Posted by: Three-nineteen at January 25, 2008 12:28 PM
Simply beautiful. This is the kind of writing that draws me back here time and again.
Thank you.
Posted by: Maryscott O'Connor at January 25, 2008 2:50 PM
I too, have seen this movie countless times and it never gets boring or tired or less entertaining. I almost always soil myself every time that dynamite blows a hole in the screen. Harvey getting his nuts driven to the back of his neck, News reading his name in the paper. Jeez, there's just a mound of great scenes, great lines, acting, directing and photography. I can live without Raindrops, but the ba-de-dah sequence isn't really one of my favorites. Kind of a 60's be-bop skat.
"I don't even know where we are and I've just been there."
"Your time is over and you're gonna die bloody."
"Morons, I've got morons on my team."
"I work for Mr. E.H. Harrimon of the Union Pacific Railroad."
"As long as she's smart, pretty. . ."
Brilliant stuff.
Posted by: bucslim at January 25, 2008 5:31 PM
Brilliant review. Its a movie I watched as a kid, and love as a grown up. And I couldn't have read anything else that summed up the movie better.
"it's important that they're also two impossibly handsome men, blue-eyed and young and somehow more physically present than the male stars of today".
So true. Whenever someone discuss a hot male star, I end up thinking,"not Newman or Redford, no way". Sigh.
Posted by: Diviya at January 26, 2008 9:50 AM
Excellent, insightful review. I like especially how Daniel Carlson not only identifies Butch Cassidy as being the geniture of the modern buddy flick, but also how the film tweaked the conventions of the western.
The most significant way Butch Cassidy does this is, as Carlson points out, by having the two heroes--and it's already an inversion to paint such a sympathetic portrait of two outlaws--run away from the law instead of fighting it out. However, this extended chase sequence unfolds so organically from the events that precipitated it that it doesn't appear obvious even though, as Carlson emphasizes, it's the heart of the movie; the plot turns on this sequence, leading Butch and Sundance to their downfall.
What precipitates the chase, the robbery of the same train twice, reinforces the break from convention: The scenes with George Furth as the hapless Woodcock, the clerk charged with protecting the money, are comic relief, devoid of the tension inherent in a similar encounter in a conventional western, a tactic that makes the ensuing pursuit of Butch and Sundance all the more dramatic.
As has been noted throughout this thread, the music in the film, when it is used, is the dead giveaway that the film deliberately shuns the strict conventions of the genre. It is emblematic of the way film-makers of this era sought to shatter the expectations and stereotypes that Hollywood movie-making had propounded. TK mentioned the music montage in The Thomas Crown Affair, but I'm thinking that in terms of deliberate anachronism, the "Raindrops Keep Fallin' on My Head" sequence and the vocal chorus that accompanies the robbery-and-chase scenes in Bolivia remind me of similar gambits in Kelly's Heroes.
Just as Butch Cassidy sought to explode conceptions about westerns, Kelly's Heroes, released a year after Butch Cassidy, sought to explode conceptions about World War II movies. Certainly, with a story about U.S. soldiers stealing gold from under the Germans' noses (even enlisting some of those Germans--elite SS soldiers, no less!--when they prove intractable), and featuring an American tank squad comprising what are for all intents and purposes hippies from the film-makers' present day, Kelly's Heroes deflated the notions of war-movie soldiering epitomized by the likes of John Wayne and Audie Murphy (although only one of those actors actually fought in WWII and is buried in Arlington National Cemetery; hint: don't think Rooster Cogburn).
Nevertheless, there are moments in Kelly's Heroes that embrace the conventions of the standard war movie--particularly the minefield scene and the subsequent firefight, which holds the taut drama of any good battlefield yarn--and that keep the film from becoming a farce or a parody. Similarly, Butch Cassidy, barring the anachronism of the musical accompaniment, stays true to the spirit, if not the conventions, of the western.
Perhaps the greatest example of this spirit is the relentless optimism--that "can-do" spirit that lies at the heart of so many westerns, which in turn embody the growth and ambition of the nation and its people (often at the expense of the indigenous population, but that's another story; Little Big Man, for one)--is the famous final scene. Surrounded by what seems like half the Bolivian army, wounded from the intense volleys of gunfire that drove them into a corner (and Sundance's tour de force gunplay during those volleys is an obvious nod to the conventional western--only it's the outlaw, not the lawman, whose gun proves superior), Butch is already hatching a plan for Sundance and him to flee to Australia. Death is only minutes away, but Butch practically convinces Sundance that they're going to get out of this! (Given how old and how well-known this film is, the statue of limitations on spoiler alerts has long since passed.)
The poignancy of Butch's optimism and of the reality of their impending demise is underscored by what has to be one of the most effective ending dialog exchanges in film. Re-arming and bracing to make a run for it, Butch suddenly pauses:
Butch: Wait a minute. You didn't see LeFors out there, did you? [Joe LeFors was the leader of the lawmen who chased Butch and Sundance from the U.S.]
Sundance (thinking): No . . . No, I didn't see him.
Butch (sighs in relief): Thank God. For a minute there, I thought we were in real trouble.
They then burst through the door into a fusillade of bullets. (One account of their actual deaths is not as heroic--but that wouldn't make for good cinema, would it?)
Apart from the memorable performances of Newman, Redford, and Ross, it's a pleasure to see who was in the supporting cast. Cloris Leachman appears briefly (in terms of screen-time and attire) as a ditzy prostitute; Kenneth Mars is a lawman who functions pretty much as a Cassandra, predicting Butch's and Sundance's violent deaths even as they try, earlier in the film, to turn themselves into him; and Henry Jones is the bicycle salesman who enables the ensuing infamous "Raindrops" scene between Butch and Etta by providing Butch with the bike.
Henry Jones was a veteran of many westerns; he played the town drunk who redeemed himself helping Van Heflin in the original 3:10 to Yuma. Another western veteran in the film was the always-delightful Strother Martin, who plays the "colorful" mine owner in Bolivia who hires Butch and Sundance as payroll guards. Martin appeared as Newman's foil in a number of films including Harper, Slap Shot, and most famously in Cool Hand Luke ("What we've got here is failure to communicate" should jog the memory).
In closing, I have to disagree with Carlson, and with the posters who also disagreed, with respect to Sundance's not ever loving Etta Place. Without delving into pop psychoanalysis, Sundance could simply not be outwardly demonstrative about his thoughts and feelings; however, I don't think that he would have allowed Etta to accompany them to South America had he not any kind of attachment to her. (I also agree with those who think that Butch had unrequited, not platonic, love for Etta.)
On the other hand, I do agree with Carlson about the eroticism of the "quasi-kidnapping" scene between Redford and Ross. It's a tribute to their acting that the scene comes off so convincingly even after having seen it so many times. Indeed, watching it now, I'm still riveted by the electrically-charged atmosphere between the two of them, and I'm still taken in when Ross breaks the tension with her comment about his tardiness. Even as a pre-pubescent kid who saw Butch Cassidy a hundred times, I wasn't sure exactly what I was seeing, but even then I knew it was good. And I did see this movie a hundred times (so it seemed), at the second-run theater in Sunnyvale, California, in the early 1970s. You know the one--Hacienda Cinemas? On El Camino, near Wolfe Road? Next to Golfland? You were there, right?
Posted by: DDT at January 27, 2008 3:45 PM
Damn, there was a term paper for this class? There goes the 4.0 . . . .
Posted by: denadn03 at January 28, 2008 5:34 PM
Cool Hand Luke? Will there be a review for this exceptional movie? Paul Newman got robbed,imo, at the Oscars when he didn't win for this role.
Posted by: carrie at January 30, 2008 5:25 PM