by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2014 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
Charles and I ended up
watching a PBS-TV program on the American Experience series on the legendary outlaws Butch Cassidy and
the Sundance Kid. What was most fascinating about this show was that judging
from the information presented here a quite good movie could have been made
about them that would have been considerably darker and more serious than the
one we got in 1969 — which was a great film but obviously modeled their story
on the success of Bonnie and Clyde two years earlier, particularly in its rapid-fire alternation between
comedy and drama, and also the glamorization of the outlaws by having them
played by full-on movie sex gods. 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? It’s also ironic
that some of the locations in which the real Butch and Sundance story took
place, including Telluride and Sundance (the Kid, whose real name was Harry
Longabaugh, took the name “Sundance” from the town where his first robbery took
place), themselves are now the sites of iconic film festivals.
Writer-producer-director John Maggio focused his take on the Butch-and-Sundance
story around the fact that they were basically the last of the Wild West’s
great outlaws; that unlike most of their predecessors, Butch and Sundance
meticulously planned their crimes — Butch was determined never to face a murder
rap — and Butch, whose real name was Robert Parker (he took his name from Mike
Cassidy, the crook he met early on who essentially took him as an apprentice in
the outlaw business), was the child of Mormon settlers in Utah until he met
Mike Cassidy and realized how much more lucrative crime could be than the
honest but tough work as a farmer and cowboy that had worn out his father and
driven him to an early grave. The show noted that the real name of Butch’s and
Sundance’s gang was the Wild Bunch — the 1969 film changed it to the
“Hole-in-the-Wall Gang” (after one of their nature-made hideouts in the Rocky
Mountains), obviously because the name “Wild Bunch” had already been taken by
Sam Peckinpah’s film for Warner Bros. the year before — and that contrary to
the movie, in which Butch, Sundance and Sundance’s girlfriend Etta Place flee
the U.S. and head straight to Bolivia, they first went to Argentina and
actually established a law-abiding life for themselves as ranchers until their
nemeses, the Pinkertons, caught up with them in Argentina, drove them out of
the country and forced them to flee to Bolivia — where they started committing
crimes again. But without the infrastructure they’d had to support them in the
U.S. — particularly the support of local farmers, who helped Butch and Sundance
because their targets, banks and trains, were parts of giant corporations that
were screwing the farmers over — they found that they were all too easily
caught by the Bolivian police and ambushed. Interestingly, Maggio depicts the
deaths of Butch and Sundance as a mutual suicide — Butch first shot Sundance
and then himself so they would neither be arrested nor killed by Bolivian
lawmen — a different and far more tragic ending to their story than the one in
the movie!
What’s most fascinating about the American Experience treatment of the Butch and Sundance story is the
role of the Pinkerton Detective Agency in going after them; the agency had been
founded in 1850 by Allan Pinkerton, who was hired by President Lincoln to
coordinate spy operations during the Civil War (the show includes a photo of
Allan Pinkerton with Lincoln on one of the Civil War battlefields). By the end
of the 19th century the Pinkerton agency was run by Allan’s son
William, who decided the key to keeping it in business and growing it was to
hire his forces out to the railroads, bankers and mining companies who were
being targeted by the last remaining Western outlaws — and, as anyone who’s
familiar with the history of the American labor movement from a Leftist
perspective will know, the Pinkertons also hired themselves and their
operatives out as strikebreakers and used the same tactics they’d used against
the outlaws, including maintaining extensive dossiers on any potential enemies
of their corporate customers, against union organizers and radical
working-class activists. What made the Pinkertons ideal from the corporate
perspective was that, being private and not subject to the limits on ordinary
police officers — particularly jurisdictional issues and Constitutional rights
— they could do literally anything they wanted, safe in the knowledge that the judicial system
(like most of the government in the 1880’s and 1890’s — plus ça change, plus
ça meme chose) was in the corporate
pocket and therefore the Pinkertons could themselves break the law with
impunity and never have to worry about being held to account for anything they
did, at times literally including murder. (The great detective-story writer
Dashiell Hammett had been a Pinkerton operative, and later when he’d written
his major books and was sliding down his 27-year alcohol-fueled path towards
oblivion, he liked to tell his Leftist friends that at one point he’d been
offered a $50,000 bonus for killing a particular labor leader — and inevitably
one member of his audience would ask him just what he had done for the Pinkertons
that had led his bosses to think he might have accepted the offer.) Butch and
Sundance could probably have lived to a ripe old law-abiding age in Argentina
had it not been for the Pinkertons, who chased them down there and harassed
them until they had to flee the country and return to a life of crime. As I
noted above, the Butch-and-Sundance story could have made a great and
considerably darker (but probably not as popular) movie as the one that did get filmed, and Maggio made the point that the
spectacular train robberies Butch and Sundance (the real ones) committed were
becoming the stuff of myth even while they were still alive: the Buffalo Bill
Wild West Show featured a live dramatization of a train robbery with a
life-sized replica train, and the movie that got the reputation of being the
first film that actually told a story was William K. Dickson’s 1903 production
for Thomas Edison … The Great Train Robbery.
