Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid is a 1969 Western film from director George Roy
Hill. The movie stars Paul Newman and
Robert Redford in the respective roles of the title characters, and it tells
the story of their criminal career at the turn of the 20th century. Butch
Cassidy and the Sundance Kid is a notable movie because it tells a
character-driven story through a well-balanced contradiction of romance and
reality.
One of this film's greatest strengths is to engage and
communicate effectively with the audience.
The events of the film seem like they are actually happening, and the
audience often gets the feeling that they are a part of the scene, but at the
same time, the film maintains a fantasy-like vibe. This contradiction blends
together well due to the elements of character and story working with the
elements of plot and filming. Often,
these aspects will split apart stylistically to achieve an interesting tonal
range. The most immediate place we see
this theme is in the use of the characters.
The two protagonists are perfect examples of classic
movie stars, and, throughout the movie, they do classic western things; they
rob trains, rob banks, and run around the American West resisting
apprehension. Unlike the classic
westerns, however, Butch Cassidy doesn't always have the same production
value that glamorizes the western movie archetype. While their charisma wins the audience over in
spite of their criminal lifestyle, the portrayal of the actors not as the stars
they are, but instead as more down-to-earth people, more hapless than
heroic. Paul Newman and Robert Redford
are two handsome chaps, and occasionally they are filmed in a Hollywood film
star style of glamor and bigger-than-life action, but oftentimes their
on-screen prominence is fairly subdued.
In fact, the filming goes farther to articulate realism. Most of the shots correlate to the
juxtaposition of Butch and The Kid; a normal conversation at a table or around
other people is filmed with wide framing, catching multiple characters in a
single shot. When the two characters are
having a more personal exchange, however, the filming often switches to
shot-counter-shot, capturing more nuances of their humorous, argumentative interactions
with close-ups.
The second split from the traditional western genre is
the lack of a visible antagonist.
Neither the viewers nor Butch and Sundance ever get a clear view of
who’s up against them. In the simple
terms of western movie, no one really knows beyond speculation who the actual villains
are. Following a train robbery, Butch
Cassidy and The Kid find themselves on the run from some worthy adversaries who
manage to track them to the point of forcing them to run to Bolivia. Butch and Sundance keep asking each other,
“Who are these guys?” The tension created by exposing the heroes' futile
efforts to escape the law builds wonderfully over this chapter of the story,
and we would expect to end the movie with a classic standoff on the roof of a
building. Instead, this extended scene is
mainly a plot point which drives the characters into the next part of the
story. This articulates that the story
is more about the partnership between Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid than
it is about the singular resolution to conflict. As opposed to a straight arrow plot with some
McGuffin device for conflict, the story in Butch Cassidy and the Sundance
Kid is character driven. The point of each scene and act is not contrived
to accommodate a complex plot, but rather, naturally builds off the continuity
of the prior scenes and progresses the character arc.
The element of
the changing tone is the foundation for one of the main themes of this film,
which is the idea that Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid are trying to live a
lifestyle that's being pushed out of the world.
Comedy and tragedy are melded together in scenes, showing the
contradictions of the romantic ideals and the true nature of life. This element is shown best in the showdown
between Butch Cassidy and the Bolivian Bandits. For much of the movie, the tone is light, with
the two characters, Butch Cassidy particularly, humorously confident in his
approach to out-maneuvering the enemy, whoever it is. His optimism collapses abruptly, however, in
an instant when he must shoot and kill a man for the first time. One minute, Butch confesses to Sundance that
he’s never actually had to kill anyone, and Sundance makes a snarky
retort. The next minute, the blunt tonal
shift in Butch’s attitude is accented by the victim’s blood-stained shirt and
scream. For the first time, both the
characters and the audience feel the romanticized western lifestyle collapse,
and recognize the foreshadowing of Butch and Sundance’s inevitable ending.
Leading up to this
showdown, the grey area between the romanticized west and reality is rather
large. The separation between these
ideas is most noticeable in the soundtrack, or oftentimes, lack thereof. The epic western score movie viewers are
familiar with is absent from the film when we might expect it; the only
soundtrack in these moments is the sounds from the movie, creating a more gritty-feeling
world for the viewer. However, some
sequences are scored with pop-like music for the opposite effect. Butch and Etta’s bike ride exemplifies
this. The two distinct differences
further highlight the tonal range of the film.
The beginning of the film often features Butch Cassidy in these overly
romantic scenes that isolate him in his innocence. The moment he kills for the first time is the
gut-punch (for both Butch and the audience) that the romantic American West is
destroyed.
Butch Cassidy and the
Sundance Kid is an effective and refreshing film because it sidesteps tropes of
glamorized movies by blurring the lines between the romantic, ideal western and
blunt reality. This is one of the
earliest instances these themes are seen in movies, and we continue to see the resonance
of this film's style in many of the works of today's directors, such as Martin
Scorsese and Quentin Tarantino.
Barsam, Richard; Dave Monahan. Looking
at Movies, Fourth Edition. New York: W.W. Norton and Company, Inc., 2013.
Print.
Butch Cassidy and
the Sundance Kid. Dir. George Roy Hill. Perf. Paul Newman, Robert Redford, and
Katharine Ross. 20th Century Fox, 1969. Film.
“Butch sundance poster.” Photograph. 2 September
2007. Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid. Wikimedia.org. Web. 11 March
2014.
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