Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid (1969) Review

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 do not stop following them.

The 9 is for a film that is genuinely 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 will not go away.

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 do not gain ground dramatically. They simply do not stop.

That is 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, which is that something has arrived that their skills do not address.

Redford was largely unknown and Steve McQueen was attached for a period before a billing dispute ended it, which is one of the more consequential casting arguments in the history of the business. The film made Redford a star and eventually named his festival.

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. They argue about swimming while a posse closes in.

That is the screenplay’s method throughout and it is why the film has lasted. The plot is a decline and the texture is a conversation, and the conversation is genuinely funny in a way that does not date.

Goldman spent years researching before writing it and said afterward that the thing he could not 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 is why the film is a comedy for most of its length. Men who run from something they cannot 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 is no arc, no lesson, and no moment where either of them changes. They are 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 is 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 cannot swim, which he admits furiously after being pressed. The man who does everything has one limitation and has been carrying it in silence for the entire film.

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 will not watch them die.

The film gives her the only clear statement of what is happening. She says plainly that she will do anything they ask except that, and it is the moment somebody finally names the ending the two men will not 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 is not given is much to do, and the film knows it. She teaches them Spanish in a sequence that is largely comic, and then she goes, and the picture is honest that she has 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 cannot speak, being laughed at by the people they are robbing, and still doing it because it is the only trade they have.

The Bicycle and the Sepia

The film 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 is charming and it stops the film, and it is also thematically exact. A man is delighted by a machine that is about to make his horse obsolete, and the song playing over it is about the future arriving whether you want it or not.

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 are 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 is not a stylish way of avoiding the violence. It is a refusal to let these two become corpses.

The film has spent two hours establishing that they cannot say what is 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, which means the last image of them is the form they will survive in, which is the only survival available.

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.

Should you watch Butch Cassidy?

Yes, and notice how funny it is right up until it is not. Two men who are extremely good at a thing the world has stopped needing, pursued by people they never see, ending as the photograph they began as.

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