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Two outlaws, one friendship
In Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, released in 1969 and directed by George Roy Hill, Paul Newman plays Butch Cassidy, the cheerful, talkative leader of a gang of train robbers whose world is disappearing. Robert Redford plays his partner, the Sundance Kid, a quiet, deadly gunman who says little and shoots straight. The film is based loosely on the real Butch Cassidy and Harry Longabaugh, who robbed banks and trains in the American West at the end of the nineteenth century, but Hill and screenwriter William Goldman are less interested in history than in friendship. This is a western about two men who like each other, who joke their way through danger, and who slowly realise that the age of the outlaw is over.
Newman is perfect as Butch because he makes charm look like a survival skill. Butch is not the best shot in the gang — that is Sundance — and he is not the toughest. What he has is ideas, optimism, and a gift for talking his way out of trouble. When a robbery goes wrong, he is the one who keeps smiling. When the gang is chased by a relentless posse, he is the one who suggests they go to Bolivia, as if moving to another country were as simple as catching a train. Newman plays all of this with an easy grin, but he never lets the comedy hide the worry underneath. Butch knows the West is changing. Railways, banks, and lawmen with modern weapons are closing in, and a man who lives by robbing trains is running out of trains to rob.
A western that breaks the rules
Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid broke many of the rules of the traditional western, and that is a large part of why it has lasted. It opens with a silent, sepia-toned newsreel of the real Hole-in-the-Wall Gang, then cuts to colour and to Newman and Redford in a present that feels both historical and modern. The famous bicycle sequence, in which Butch rides around to B. J. Thomas singing “Raindrops Keep Fallin’ on My Head,” shocked some western fans at the time, but it captures the film’s spirit exactly. These are not grim, silent gunfighters. They are young men enjoying themselves, and the music tells us to enjoy them too, even though we suspect the good times cannot last.
Newman and Redford’s partnership is the heart of the film, and it began a screen friendship that would continue in The Sting four years later. Newman, the established star, generously gives Redford room to shine, and the balance between them is what makes the jokes work. Butch talks; Sundance listens. Butch plans; Sundance shoots. When Sundance complains that he cannot swim, Butch laughs and jumps anyway. The humour is never forced, because it comes from character. Two men who trust each other completely can afford to tease each other, even when they are about to be killed.
The chase that never ends
The middle of the film is dominated by one of the great chase sequences in cinema. After a train robbery, Butch and Sundance are pursued by a posse that never seems to tire, never seems to lose the trail, and never seems to need to eat or sleep. The chase goes over cliffs, through rivers, and across open country, and it is filmed with a lightness that makes it thrilling rather than grim. Eventually the two men jump from a cliff into a river far below, a moment that has become one of the most famous images in western cinema. The jump is both a joke and a turning point. They escape, but only by risking everything, and the posse is a warning that the old ways no longer work.
In Bolivia, the film grows quieter and sadder. Butch and Sundance try to go straight, working as payroll guards, but they are soon robbing banks again because it is the only work they know. They meet Etta Place, played by Katharine Ross, Sundance’s schoolteacher girlfriend, who travels with them and understands, better than they do, that their story can only end one way. Newman plays these later scenes with a new seriousness. Butch is still funny, but his jokes are thinner now, and his plans are more desperate. He is a man trying to outrun his own legend.
Why Butch endures
The ending is famous and has been copied many times. Trapped in a Bolivian town, surrounded by soldiers, Butch and Sundance run out into the sunlight, guns blazing, and Hill freezes the frame before we see them fall. The freeze-frame is a kindness to the characters and to the audience. It lets Butch and Sundance remain young, brave, and laughing, instead of showing them broken on the ground. It also makes a point about myth. The real Butch and Sundance probably died in Bolivia, but the film’s Butch and Sundance live on as an idea: friendship, freedom, and a refusal to grow old gracefully.
For Newman, Butch Cassidy was a career-defining role because it used everything he did best. It used his humour, his warmth, his good looks, and his ability to suggest sadness without ever becoming sentimental. He was forty-four when he made the film, old enough to understand that Butch’s jokes were a way of holding fear at bay, and young enough to make the character’s energy completely believable. Audiences loved him in the part, and the film became one of the biggest hits of his career. More than fifty years later, it remains the film many people think of first when they think of Paul Newman: a man on a bicycle, grinning in the sun, riding towards a future he knows he cannot escape, and enjoying the ride anyway.