This week, we look back at Robert Redford’s star-making role in Butch Cassidy & The Sundance Kid!
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The Pick: Butch Cassidy & The Sundance Kid (1969)
For the rest of the year, we’re focusing on the great career of the late, great Robert Redford. In this year of great contention and struggle, celebrating some of the great American actors and filmmakers has been a solace for many of us here at Cinapse. With the recent passing of a true legend in Redford, it felt like it was only appropriate to do a deep dive into some of his great films. In fact, he was the heartbeat of so many great American films, calling a two month retrospective a “deep dive” is a false moniker. It barely scratches the surface of his almost mythological career. As we explore some films we love and films we are newly experiencing, we invite you to join us for our Redford Retrospective.
After oscillating between different eras of his career, we shift back once again to the early days of Redford’s career, to his star-making feature, Butch Cassidy & The Sundance Kid. Released in 1969, Butch Cassidy & The Sundance Kid was not only a near perfect vehicle for Redford to flex his skills as both a comedic performer as well as a stone cold killer, but also showcased one of the best pairings of performers that ever graced the silver screen; Redford & Newman. Their ability to bounce off of one another, in both the comedic bits and tense life or death moments, made for an incredible cinematic relationship, which clearly carried weight in both men’s lives, with Newman calling his charity summer camp the Hole In The Wall Gang Camp, and Redford famously naming the Sundance Film Festival after his character here.
The Team
I have an interesting relationship with this film. Like many people, my relationship with cinema started with my parents, specifically my father. Every Sunday, we’d watch a movie together, either at the cinema, or something rented on VHS. His tastes veered a bit towards the classical “War & Western” Dad Movies, with a few horror films peppered in here and there.
One set of films he loved above almost all others, though, were the Redford/Newman films, and of those two, Butch Cassidy & The Sundance Kid was king. It was a film, along with The Sting, which got a near yearly viewing from us, my dad always finding every comedic bit still funny, and the ending still incredibly sad.
Rewatching this for the first time in nearly 20 years, I can fully understand its lasting appeal. Butch Cassidy & The Sundance Kid is a film that still feels fresh nearly 60 years later. The dynamic between Redford & Newman is some of the best chemistry put on film, as the two of them bounce effortlessly off each other, setting a cinematic framework that “buddy cop” films picked up and ran with decades later.
While their bits together are great, both Newman & Redford also make great character choices for themselves, creating multi-layered protagonists. Redford plays Sundance as a man whose aloofness is just a mask, one he can barely keep on as the stone cold killer within tries to break free. Redford is able to switch from genial to menacing in a moment, most of it all done with a shift in the eyes. Newman on the other hand is his opposite; a gregarious huckster who enjoys meeting new people just as much as he enjoys robbing trains. Newman is a man who puts on the front of being a hardened criminal, but when his big dreams start to falter and the violence begins, he starts to resent his life of crime.
Just like most of the westerns of that era, Butch Cassidy & The Sundance Kid is about a changing world, and those who are quickly realizing there’s no place for them in the New West. Here, Butch & Sundance are forced to reckon with a new type of authority, as their lives of carefree bank and train robbing are ended once they cross the wrong, powerful man. They attempt to keep the party going down in Belize, but even there, they find that the new way of things, new order to the disorder, is coming for them fast, and there’s just no way for them to get out of the way before they’re knocked flat.
I don’t typically watch a lot of Westerns, unless they’re centered around women’s stories or other underrepresented voices. So this was my first viewing of Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid… and likely my last. If ever a film coasted along on vibes, it’s this 1969 movie, based on a screenplay by William Goldman (All the President’s Men, The Princess Bride). There seems to be little structure to the storytelling, not much to the dialogue, and the action onscreen can be fairly dull.
Not enough works in the film’s favor, besides the desert landscapes and the main duo involved. Unfortunately I just couldn’t care about Butch (Paul Newman) or Sundance (Redford), no matter how attractive the actors are on screen here. Sundance’s teacher girlfriend Etta, played by Katharine Ross (The Graduate), fares little better. She gets to ride with Butch on a bike, teach the guys beginner Spanish, and sleep with Sundance. Her role may be based on a woman that we still don’t know much about these hundred of years later, but more imagination in the conception of her character would have been appreciated.
And more of a plot than these guys planning a couple train heists/bank robberies and then running away to Bolivia. Perhaps the trip to South America could have been fun to see, but filmmaker George Roy Hill uses a photo/audio montage sequence instead (accompanied by some very chipper scoring by Burt Bacharach) to illustrate their journey. Another point against Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid is how Bacharach’s score rarely fits with the action onscreen. It’s distracting.
This is the kind of movie where you can tell the folks working on it probably had a lot of fun making it. I certainly hope this was the case, so at least someone had fun during this process. As a viewer, I found it fairly forgettable and disappointing. I wished I was watching Cat Ballou instead.
November and December Lineup: Redford Retrospective
November and December Lineup: Redford Retrospective
