Another Western. But this one places itself in a different category than the standards because of its modern action, themes, and storytelling. Paul Newman plays Butch Cassidy, the typical gunslinger who's never shot anyone before, and Robert Redford plays the Sundance Kid, whose best feature may be his girlfriend played by Katharine Ross.My favorite part of the movie is what many Western purists universally despise: the four minutes in the middle of the movie with Butch and Sundance's girlfriend just riding around on a bicycle to Burt Baccarach's Oscar-winning "Raindrops Keep Falling on My Head." Wordless and playful, this is one of my favorite scenes of all time, mainly because it is amidst bank-robbing and shoot-outs. Irresistible.
I'd like to talk for a second about the ending of the movie, but since it is a bit of a surprise and different, I would like to point out to anyone who wants to watch the movie and be surprise should stop reading now, and resume after the jump:
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The ending has become a classic: Butch and the Kid are trapped in a stone building in Bolivia, surrounded by 100s of Bolivians ready to kill the shifty outlaws. Even though I've seen the movie before, I found myself thinking "How are they gonna get out of this one?" And then I realize that they don't. With both of them wounded and their spirits broken, they run out of the building with guns blazing and ... the movie stops, freeze-frames. We hear the shots fired, but we never see the duo riddled with bullets. So all we are left with is this. Many people think this is just copying how "Bonnie and Clyde" had ended two years before, but I see it as "Butch" tipping its hat to that movie. They are trying to say that crime is crime, whether in the modern age or the Old West. The reason this last photo we're given of the duo is so important is that it immortalizes them -- they still live on, even though they've been dead for more than a century. No one can say they saw them die. And that is what makes the way this movie ends so striking and so original, to be copied by countless films, including "Thelma & Louise" in 1991.
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What makes the movie work is not the action sequences, which are great, but the dynamic between Butch and the Sundance Kid. You really believe these guys have been friends for ages from the very first scene, when Butch says, classically, "Boy, I got vision and the rest of the world's wearing bifocals."
The ultimate late-1960s portrayal of a time long gone by (the modern applications of counterculture and the like are endless), this film is sure to be treasured for many years to come, even if I find only about ten minutes of the movie truly valuable. Quality over quantity, I guess.
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