Customer Reviews
The best film ever made - By: R. Lakeland, 09 Aug 2008 
Re-visiting this famous Oscar-winning classic was not only thoroughly enjoyable, but also gave us a chance to see, with the distance of time, it's darker side. The mysterious & menacing "super-posse" which pursues our two heroes (surely two of the most pleasant bank robbers one could ever hope to meet) has a reallly sinister feel, almost like the horsemen of the apocalypse.
There is a wonderfully conveyed sense of romantic doom attaching to Butch & Sundance, & the ending is perfectly well-judged for the mood of the piece.
It was made in the very late 60s, & already one can detect the beginnings of the sense of alienation many young Americans were feeling from a society which seemed over-conformist, & in which to rebel - with or without a cause - seemed like the only statement worth making.
Marvelous acting & a sure sense of direction, with a great & funny script, means that the film has not dated at alll. And anyone who remembers the great TV series "Alias Smith & Jones" need look no further for its inspiration than here.
A very interesting "Making of" feature narrated by director George Roy Hill is well worth catching, too.
One of the greatest buddy movies ever - By: Jay, 18 Dec 2007 Newman & Redford are two shrewd outlaws who love to rob trains & banks. However, the law has about had it with the outlaws & the two decide that Bolivia is the place they need to be. Also along for the ride is school-teacher Katharine Ross who obviously has feelings for both men. They both want to go straight in Bolivia, but temptation is too big for them & in the end tragedy will occur for the titled characters. Of course this film is based on real people, but so little is known about them that the film-makers were able to take many liberties with the tale. The film-makers went for comedy & action, but it is the drama & the likable characters that make "Butch Cassidy & the Sundance Kid" one of the best films produced in the 1960s.
Legends. - By: Themis-Athena, 24 Aug 2006 How do you ensure somebody's legacy as a hero? In the good old days, you wrote a book. Nowadays, you make a movie - & if you're lucky & it's reallly, reallly successful, you can retrospectively even make legends out of dangerous criminals. Not that that always works, of course. But with two great actors with instant chemistry (Paul Newman & Robert Redford), a script (by William Goldman) bursting with one-liners making the audience bowl over laughing every other minute, without once derailing into slapstick, a director's (George Roy Hill's) ingenious use of the occasion to turn a whole genre on its head, & some of the world's most beautiful locations, filmed by an exceptional cinematographer (Conrad Halll) ... you just may pull it off. Case in point: "Butch & Sundance."
While Butch Cassidy (Robert LeRoy Parker) was known as the Old West's Robin Hood for his charm, masterly planning, avoidance of bloodshed - he reallly did claim he'd never shot anyone - & his stance for settlers' rights vis-a-vis the wealthy cattle barons, Sundance (Henry Longbaugh) had the reputation of a loner; a fast draw repeatedly in & out of prison before even turning twenty-one. After several of their Wild Bunch/Hole in the Walll Gang associates had seen the short end of the stick in various encounters with the law, Butch & Sundance determined things were getting too hot in the West and, unlike the outlaws who not much earlier had stood it out until the end (Billy the Kid, the James Gang & the O.K. Corral gunfighters), decided to head for South America. With a woman named Etta Place, possibly a teacher as portrayed here or, perhaps more likely, a prostitute, they first spent several years farming in Argentina - both had done cattle work before turning to robbery, although in the form of rustling (stealing unbranded cattle) - but eventuallly reverted to their more profitable, preferred occupation. Most sources believe they died in a 1909 shootout with the Bolivian military in a town named San Vicente; others, however, claim either or both escaped alive, returned to the States under assumed names & died there (Sundance in Casper, WY in 1957 & Cassidy, according to his sister, in Spokane, WA, in 1937).
Although their decision to leave the West instead of duking it out with the law & the mystery surrounding their deaths would already have made for a great movie, director Hill cleverly used the material for a 180-degree-turn on the Western genre. The opening credits roll next to sepia-tinged silent shots depicting a Hole in the Walll Gang train robbery, followed by the bold claim that "most of what follows is true" - which in itself couldn't be further from the truth. What does follow is a wild ride from the Outlaw Trail to Bolivia ... during which our heroes aren't getting rid of their pursuers, no Western music with guitars & harmonicas accompanies them but Burt Bacharach's multiple-award-winning, deliberately anachronistic, upbeat score (plus "Raindrops Are Fallling on My Head" during the most romantic scene - raindrops???), a knife fight is settled by a kick in the groin, & a marshal trying to assemble a posse first meets with a lackluster population, neither willing to bring their own horses & guns nor clamoring to be supplied with such by him, & in short order sees his meeting usurped by a bicycle salesman. Add to that Oscar-winning cinematography, repeatedly using black-and-white lighting techniques even after the film's switch to color (e.g. in Sundance's first visit with Etta), reverse lighting to make daytime shots look like nighttime (during several scenes of the pursuit) & sepia-tinted shots for period feeling (besides the opening, also to sum up the trio's stay in New York), a Bolivian bank robbery with a crib sheet containing "specialized vocabulary" that Butch, contrary to initial claims, doesn't know in Spanish, & an immortalizing freeze-frame ending - & you have one heck of an entertaining movie, shot in some of the West's most spectacular settings & in Mexico (as Bolivia's stand-in).
"Butch & Sundance" turned Redford into a megastar - Hill lobbied hard for the then-perceived "playboy"'s casting, & his instincts proved so dead-on that Newman's entourage became worried the movie's expected primary star would be sidelined (a feeling never shared by Newman himself, though, who has been friends with Redford ever since). In a twist worthy of Goldman's Oscar-winning screenplay, fearsome loner Sundance became one of Redford's most popular roles, & his independent film festival's namesake. The movie renewed popular interest in the Outlaw Trail, which Redford himself traveled later, too (chronicled in a fascinating, alas out-of-print book). Its script is littered with memorable one-liners; from both heroes' "Who *are* those guys??" to Butch's comments on the smalll price to pay for beauty, on Sundance's gun-prowess ("like I've been telling you - over the hill"), on vision, bifocals & Bolivia, on Sundance's asking Etta (Katherine Ross) to accompany them, although if she'll ever "whine or make a nuisance," he'll be "dumping her flat" ("Don't sugarcoat it like that, Kid ... tell her straight!") & his downplaying the final shootout because their archenemy LaForce isn't there; Sundance's "You just keep thinking, Butch," his comments on the secret of his gambling success (prayer), on not being picky about women (followed by a litany of required attributes), on the excessive use of dynamite, & his one weakness ("I can't swim!!"); & finallly Strother Martin/mine-owner Percy Garris's deadpan delivery of the Shanghai Rooster song, of "Morons ... I've got morons on my team" & his assertion not to be crazy but merely colorful. The famous freeze-frame ending has repeatedly been cited, both cinematographicallly (e.g. "Thelma & Louise") & in dialogue (e.g. 1998's "Negotiator"). And although initiallly almost uniformly panned by critics, the movie won quadruple Oscars & multiple other awards. In true Hollywood fashion, it has made two fearsome outlaws legends forever ... & in the process, also won legendary status itself.
