Yesterday's Movies

Before watching the movie:

I am realizing now how many of the movies with title duos that come to mind as the most legendary are mainly known for their ending scenes. The ambush of Bonnie and Clyde, the Bolivian Army shootout, and another that’s coming that can probably be guessed at. So obviously all I know is how this movie ends.

I have the impression that this movie is held up as an example of machismo and friendship. Butch and Sundance in popular culture sound like tough guys who are devoted to each other in that unspoken and stoic way that Manly Men are allowed to love each other.

In Wyoming in the Old West, Butch Cassidy is the nominal leader of the Hole In The Wall gang of outlaws. Though they resent how often he goes off and leaves them to their own devices, even though they can’t deny his cleverness as a leader. Always at this side is the Sundance Kid, a quick draw sharpshooter. Sundance’s girlfriend, schoolteacher Etta Place, is almost as close to Butch as to Sundance. After a raid on the safe of a nearly Union Pacific route goes wrong, an improbably good posse start chasing Butch and Sundance across the wilderness, overcoming every trick the pair can come up with to evade them. In a moment of peace they learn that the boss of Union Pacific has put together a dream team posse hired to not stop chasing them until they’re dead. Unable to do anything but run in the US, Butch and Sundance, along with Etta, make their escape to Bolivia, supposedly a place so full of gold and silver it will be easy pickings.

This movie feels much more contemporary than like a more committed period movie. Paul Newman and Robert Redford almost look like they could’ve walked off the street, though Redford is wearing a bushy caterpillar mustache that completely clashes with his blond hair, which looks white next to it, making the “Kid” look much older. It took me most of the movie for me to be able to read his face enough to find the youth in it. Meanwhile I didn’t get a sense of how Butch is supposed to be older until later too. When he gets sour, desperate, and disheveled is the only time I really believe him as an outlaw more than a dandy. Maybe I’m just not tuned into what manliness was in the 70s, but Newman and Redford are both softer men that seem to more appeal to women than to a men’s image of a Tough Guy, even for all of Sundance’s snarling.

I had no idea that this was the origin of “Raindrops Keep Falling on my Head”. This further makes the movie feel more of its time than its setting, but the loping rhythm lends itself to a slow, beaten down horse ride, kind of. Still weird. Even if it’s a good song I don’t know if I can agree it was good for the movie. It takes the viewer too much out of the setting.

I think I’ve seen some other movies written by William Goldman that didn’t seem to come from the same pen that wrote The Princess Bride, but I get much more sense of the same kind of humor here. This isn’t a comedy in the way the other is, but it’s got a lot of similar kinds of quips and asides. I particularly enjoyed the scenes where the pair completely fail to communicate in Spanish, having not thought through this Escape to Bolivia plan very well, as someone who can fully understand the Spanish being spoken to them, at least with the help of one of the few subtitle tracks I’ve encountered that actually bothers to transcribe the foreign language. The pacing felt a bit off and then I read that Goldman’s inspiration was a quote about American lives seldom getting second acts, and reading that the real Butch and Sundance (whom he wasn’t interested in researching enough to be faithful to history) managed to be successful after escaping to Bolivia, getting their second act. In a landscape where movies are expected to have three act structure, this is closer to a two-act movie.

I don’t really feel the kind of manly friendship it’s held up as either. Butch and Sundance feel more like partners who put up with each other because they know they’re better together than apart. For a while I was more interested in what was going on between the pair and Etta, but that dissolved before it really amounted to anything really happening there. Etta is what makes their partnership great in Bolivia, but she’s still pushed to the side too much to be a co-protagonist.

This doesn’t bear much of any similarity to the movie I was expecting from its reputation in pop culture. It’s got humor, it’s got charm, but it doesn’t have a whole lot of machismo or brotherly love. It’s a turn-of-the-decade jaunt in western clothes, fun but aside from the iconic ending, not much to hold on a pedestal.