Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid (1969) Review
9/10
Two robbers hold up the same train twice. The second time the railroad has put a special car on it containing six men and horses, and those men don’t stop following them. The 9 is for a film that’s funny for ninety minutes and is about extinction the whole time. Everything these two are good at has stopped working, and neither of them will say so directly, so the picture says it through a posse that won’t go away.
I adore this film. Newman and Redford are funnier together than almost any pair in American movies, and the whole time that posse sits on the horizon reminding me how this has to end. That mix of jokes and dread is exactly the kind of picture I want. What holds it to a 9 is the bicycle sequence, which is charming and stops the film dead, and a Bolivia stretch that runs slightly long before the ending rescues it.
Who Are Those Guys
The central act is a chase that lasts nearly forty minutes and is almost entirely about not being able to escape. The posse is never identified, never speaks, and is never seen closer than a distant line of riders with a white hat at the front. They don’t gain ground dramatically. They simply don’t stop.
That’s a far better antagonist than a named villain would be. A person can be outwitted, and the film’s two protagonists are extremely good at outwitting people, and none of it works. Butch keeps asking who they are and the film never answers. The repetition turns a question into the film’s real subject: something has arrived that their skills don’t address.
The posse scares me more than most villains with faces do. They never speak and never hurry, and each time Butch asks who those guys are, I feel the ground slide a little further out from under the two of them.
Redford was largely unknown and Steve McQueen was attached for a period before a billing dispute ended it. That’s one of the more consequential casting arguments in the history of the business. The film made Redford a star and eventually named his festival.
An unidentified, unstoppable pursuer is more frightening than a named villain because the reader can’t evaluate it. There’s nothing to outthink. The requirement is that it must never accelerate. Steady, unchanging pressure is what produces dread, and a pursuer who dramatically closes in becomes a conventional threat again.
Use repetition to convert a line into a theme. The same question asked six times, never answered, becomes the thing the story is about.
Withhold the face. The moment the reader sees who’s chasing, they start assessing, and assessment is the opposite of dread.
Goldman Wrote Friendship, Not Plot
Almost every scene is two men talking while something else is happening. They argue about knife fighting rules while a man challenges Butch for leadership, and about swimming while a posse closes in.
That’s the screenplay’s method throughout and it’s why the film has lasted. The plot is a decline and every scene is a conversation, and the conversation is funny in a way that doesn’t date.
Goldman spent years researching before writing it and said afterward that the thing he couldn’t get over was that the two men ran. Everything in American mythology says a gunman stands his ground, and these two got on a boat to South America.
That single detail is what the screenplay is built around, and it’s why the film is a comedy for most of its length. Men who run from something they can’t beat are funny right up until the moment they stop running, and this film stops them exactly once, in a courtyard, at the very end.
Goldman also refuses the usual structure. There’s no arc, no lesson, and no moment where either of them changes. They’re the same two people at the end as at the start, and the world around them has moved.
Newman and Redford are doing something specific that’s easy to miss. Butch talks constantly and does almost nothing. Sundance says very little and does everything. Neither remarks on the arrangement.
The cliff is where the division pays off. Butch proposes jumping into a river, Sundance refuses, and the reason is that he can’t swim, which he admits furiously after being pressed. The man who does everything has one limitation and has been keeping it to himself for the entire film.
The cliff is my favorite scene in the film. Sundance’s furious confession that he can’t swim is the biggest laugh in the picture and a small heartbreak at the same moment, and it tells you more about him than any gunfight could.
Etta Is the Third Character
Katharine Ross plays a schoolteacher who joins them, is treated as an equal, and leaves before the ending because she says she won’t watch them die.
The film gives her the only clear statement of what is happening. She says plainly that she’ll do anything they ask except that, and it’s the moment somebody finally names the ending the two men won’t discuss.
The relationship between the three is handled without a triangle, which for 1969 is unusual. The film simply declines to make it a source of conflict and lets the three be comfortable.
What she’s not given is much to do, and the film knows it. She teaches them Spanish in a sequence that’s largely comic, and then she goes, and the picture is honest that she’s more sense than either of them.
The Bolivian robberies are the comic high point and the saddest stretch in the film. Two professionals reduced to reading a hold-up from a card in a language they can’t speak, being laughed at by the people they’re robbing, and still doing it because it’s the only trade they have.
Give one character permission to name what everybody else is avoiding, and then remove them. Etta says the true thing and leaves. That means the two men have to spend the last act knowing it without being able to discuss it. The departure makes the naming land. Refusing an obvious conflict is a real choice. A triangle would have been conventional and would have converted a film about obsolescence into a film about jealousy. Be honest about an underwritten character. This film gives Etta the best line and not enough scenes, and the writing acknowledges instead of disguises it.
The Bicycle and the Sepia
It opens in sepia with a silent-film pastiche and closes on a freeze frame that drains to sepia, and the bracketing is doing something specific. These two are being converted into photographs in front of the audience. The film starts as an old picture, becomes color for the living part, and turns back into an image at the end. The bicycle sequence sits in the middle of that and is the most divisive thing in it. Newman rides around a farmyard to a Burt Bacharach song for several minutes while nothing happens. It’s charming and it stops the film, and it’s also thematically exact. A man is delighted by a machine that’s about to make his horse obsolete, and the song playing over it is about the future arriving whether you want it or not. I’m of two minds about it. I smile all the way through, and I’d still cut it in half, because it lets the air out of a film that’s spent its best stretch running from a posse.
The song won the Academy Award and became a number one record, and Conrad Hall won for the photography, and the screenplay won as well. Four awards from seven nominations for a Western released into a year when the genre was supposed to be finished.
The Freeze Frame
They’re surrounded by the Bolivian army, wounded, out of ammunition, and planning where to go next. Butch suggests Australia. They run out into the courtyard and the image freezes.
The most imitated ending in American film and almost nobody copying it understands why it works. It’s not a stylish way of avoiding the violence. It’s a refusal to let these two become corpses. For two hours the film has been establishing that they can’t say what’s happening to them, and the freeze is the picture extending them the same courtesy one last time. It also completes the sepia bracket. They start as an old photograph and end as one. That means the last image of them is the form they’ll survive in. That’s the only survival available. That freeze frame moves me more than any shootout could. I think it’s the kindest ending in any Western I know, and it’s the moment I love these two idiots most. The historical record is uncertain about what happened to the real men, with accounts placing them dead in Bolivia in 1908 and other accounts placing them back in the United States for decades afterward. A film that freezes before the outcome is being accurate as well as merciful.
An ending that stops before the consequence lets the reader keep the characters. Show the bodies and you’ve given them a fate. Stop and you’ve given them a last action. The technique only works if the outcome is certain. Ambiguity about whether they die would make it a cheat.
Bracket your work with the same device at both ends and the change in between becomes the argument. Sepia, color, sepia, and the reader understands what happened without a word. Beware of imitating a famous ending. Almost every freeze frame since has been a stylistic flourish, because the copy takes the image and not the reason.
Should you watch Butch Cassidy?
Yes, and notice how funny it is right up until it isn’t. Two men who are extremely good at a thing the world has stopped needing, pursued by people they never see, end as the photograph they began as. I rate it a 9 because the bicycle interlude and the Bolivia stretch slow it down, and nothing else in it does. The rest is about as good as a Western gets.
