by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2020 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
Two nights ago Charles and I watched a DVD of the 1969
Western Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid,
which I originally saw when it was (relatively) new on a double bill with Planet
of the Apes. I wasn’t all that interested
in Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid and actually thought I’d fall asleep through most of it — only about
five minutes into it I said to myself, “Hey! This is good!” Seen today in a good DVD transfer that does
justice to Conrad Hall’s Academy Award-winning color cinematography (even though
the technicians at 20th Century-Fox’s in-house color process,
DeLuxe, pissed Hall off by tweaking scenes he’d deliberately overexposed to
make the color less bright and vivid, and returning them to full-color glory), Butch
Cassidy and the Sundance Kid emerges as a
quite good movie but also a really
quirky one. It co-starred Paul Newman and Robert Redford in the first film they
made together — there would be only one other, The Sting, also directed by George Roy Hill (a pity because in
both movies they worked together so well) — with Newman as Butch Cassidy and
Redford as the Sundance Kid.
The film was a personal project of its writer,
William Goldman (who complained to friends that he’d be remembered for this and
so little else he wrote his obituaries would begin with a reference to it — and
when Goldman died his obituary in the New York Times did indeed lead off with his scripts for this film
and another Redford vehicle, All the President’s Men). Among the imdb.com trivia comments were claims
that Newman had to fight with 20th Century-Fox to get Redford cast
as his co-star — among the studio’s choices were Marlon Brando (who probably
would have insisted on playing Butch Cassidy and relegated Newman to the
Sundance Kid), Steve McQueen (who insisted on top billing —when he and Newman
finally did make a film together,
The Towering Inferno, McQueen not
only insisted on top billing but that he be given the first crack as to which of the two male leads he’d play, so he picked the
butch, heroic firefighter and stuck Newman with playing the architect who
designed the building) and Warren Beatty (who apparently felt it was too close
to his own half-comic, half-serious crime film, Bonnie and Clyde). Redford was a popular leading man in 1969 but
wasn’t considered a superstar — ironically, it would be the role of the
Sundance Kid in this movie that would launch him into superstar status.
Also,
in 2014 PBS ran an American Experience segment on the original Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid which
indicated (at least to me) that, while this film is quite good, an even better
one could have been made had Goldman and Hill stuck closer to the facts. As I
wrote in my blog post about the PBS documentary, “Am I really going to surprise
anyone by saying the real Butch and Sundance, judging from the still photos
reproduced here, didn’t look much like Paul Newman and Robert Redford?” The
film tells at least the broad outlines of the real story — Butch and Sundance,
as part of the Hole-in-the-Wall Gang (the real gang was called “The Wild
Bunch,” but Sam Peckinpah had famously used that as the title of a major
Western the year before so Goldman’s script had to change it), stage robberies
of banks and trains in the Southwest in the late 19th and early 20th
century. When the companies they’re targeting — particularly the Union Pacific
Railroad, whose robber-baron CEO, E. H. Harriman, becomes a running joke in the
film — clubbed together to hire the notorious Pinkerton Detective Agency to
assemble what amounted to a death squad to hunt them down and kill them (the
Pinkertons were notorious for being able to do just about anything, including outright murder, to protect the
capitalists from outlaws, union organizers or anyone else who got in the way of
Big Money — thanks to supine state and local governments who were in the pay of
the giant corporations, particularly the railroads and the banks, and
essentially gave the Pinkertons immunity), the real Butch and Sundance, like
their movie equivalents, fled to South America.
In the film they go directly
from the U.S. to the desolate and dirt-poor country of Bolivia, and one
wonders, “Why the hell did they go to Bolivia? Why didn’t they go to a South American country that
had money, like Argentina or Brazil?” The real Butch and Sundance actually did go to Argentina and worked legitimate jobs for the
mining industries there and in Chile — including, like their movie
counterparts, standing guard for mine payrolls against the people trying to rob
them — only the Pinkertons’ death squad followed them there and forced them to
flee in Bolivia, where the Pinkertons worked with the Bolivian military and
police to hunt them down and kill them at last. The movie depicts the goon
squad that went after Butch and Sundance but doesn’t refer to them as Pinkerton
operatives, and throughout the film there’s a kind of nervous alternation
between drama, violence, comedy and romance. The leading lady for both Butch and Sundance is Etta Place (Katharine Ross), a
prostitute in real life but a schoolteacher in Goldman’s script, and in the
film’s most charming (and best-remembered) sequence Butch takes her for a ride
on the handlebars of a bicycle while B. J. Thomas’s performance of the Burt
Bacharach-Hal David song “Raindrops Keep Falling on My Head” plays on the
soundtrack. According to imdb.com, Thomas was hired after the filmmakers’
original choice, Bob Dylan, turned it down (Bob Dylan? If he’d
sung the song the sequence would have turned into pure camp!), and he thought
it would kill his career — instead it became the biggest hit Thomas ever had
and it started him recording a whole lot of songs about rain (including the
singularly beautiful “Everybody Loves a Rain Song”), just as after “Over the
Rainbow” was a hit Judy Garland got inundated with more songs about rainbows.
Charles
noted that the film changed tone an awful lot — in some ways this was the
1960’s version of the portmanteau
movies of the 1930’s which combined romance, action, music and comedy in an
attempt to give every audience member something they’d like. When Hill created a montage sequence showing Butch and Sundance robbing every
two-bit bank they could find in Bolivia and living it up on the proceeds at
what passed for a high life there — all set to faux-ragtime music by Bacharach, who composed the film’s
entire soundtrack instead of just the famous song (and who left a lot of the
dramatic scenes powerfully unscored) — Charles said it looked like they mashed
up Woody Allen’s films Take the Money and Run (Allen as an outlaw in 1960’s America) and Bananas (Allen as an American milquetoast who gets involved in a South American revolution),
and later when the goon squad that dared not speak its name teamed up with the
Bolivian army to shoot down Butch and Sundance (and gave Newman and Redford the
chance to play a quite beautiful ’tis-a-far-far-better-thing-I-do joint death
scene) Charles said it looked like Peckinpah (though at least Hill avoided the
cliché of Peckinpah and Bonnie and Clyde director Arthur Penn to have the outlaws die in slow motion). The film
mostly got mediocre reviews from the early critics — they pointed out the
anachronisms, including the modern haircuts Newman and Redford were sporting
(created by Jay Sebring just became one of the victims of Charles Manson’s
murderous “Family”) and the jaunty, “cool,” “with-it” character of Goldman’s
dialogue (including the screamingly funny scenes in Bolivia in which Katharine
Ross is trying to teach Our Antiheroes enough Spanish to be able to rob banks
there — one wonders if the little phrase book she’s carrying is called Spanish
for Crooks) — but audiences came out of the
theatres loving it and telling their friends to see it back when opening
weekends weren’t the be-all and end-all of a film’s theatrical career and a
movie could be built into a hit
if it could be kept in theatres long enough for people to see it and tell their
friends, “No, really, you’ll like
it!”
