Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid Offers Some Thrills But Struggles With Characters And Atmosphere

At the tail end of the 19th-century, Butch Cassidy (Paul Newman) and the Sundance Kid (Robert Redford) are legendary robbers who steal from trains and get away without anyone even knowing they were there. They've had remarkable good luck over the years and maintain a mostly friendly relationship with a number of their associates ranging from fellow crooks to important townsfolk. But their luck runs out when an unknown group begins to chase after the duo relentlessly. This time, they can't seem to shake whoever it is that's on their tail. If anyone could get out of this scenario, it's Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid...but what if all of their luck has finally run out?



Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid was of the last great classic Westerns released at the tail end of the 1960s. Though the genre had been one of the most reliable Hollywood moneymakers for decades, the genre hadn't been as consistently successful throughout the 1960s and the 1970s brought out more expensive and glossy blockbusters like Jaws and Star Wars that would become the new mode for delivering thrills to moviegoers. Heck, the titular lead characters own legendary reputations coming to a close feels like Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid providing some, intentional or not, meta-commentary on how the Western genre was seeing its own last days as one of the biggest American genres.

Contemplating how Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid fits into the larger history of the American Western is probably one of the most interesting parts of this serviceable but not all that remarkable movie. Now, I'm not going to sit here and deliver some "spicy hot take" on how Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid is the worst movie ever or some hyperbolic nonsense, it isn't at all. There's plenty to offer positive comments on here. The two lead actors, for instance, are immensely charming, which should come as no surprise to anybody. What's especially enjoyable about their lead performances is how they don't quite fit the traditional personalities a typical lead dynamic duo. Instead of one being the smart guy and one being the dumb guy or one being the experienced guy and the other being a novice, for instance, Butch and Sundance frequently shift around what kind of roles they inhabit, sometimes Butch comes off as the more intellectual of the two while other situations call for Sundance to have the greatest wits between them.

Given that they're trapped in a daunting situation that sees their circumstances constantly changing, it feels appropriate then that Butch and Sundance similarly have some flexibility in what kind of dynamic they share, they can't just be stagnant people in times of endless upheaval. I'm also a sucker for juxtaposing casual dialogue with heightened circumstances, so any time William Goldman's script has the Sundance Kid chit-chat with a guard during a train robbery like they're just talking about the weather, I was giggling away like a fool. It helps that Robert Redford and Paul Newman have excellent line deliveries that really help sell these moments of casualness among people who spend their days as train robbing thieves.

Honestly, the biggest issue in Goldman's screenplay is that it's hard to get attached to the characters. They work as amusing creations but not ones you can get invested in emotionally, which the melancholy ending makes clear was supposed to be the intent all along. Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid is a film that works best at just providing diverting amusement rather than actually compelling character-based drama. This is especially true of the love triangle between the two titular leads and Etta Place (Katherine Ross), which really doesn't work as well as it should. There's little in the way of attempts to give Etta a stand-alone personality and, in the context of this film, she remains just an object that gets lugged around with Butch and Sundance across the third act.

The lack of interesting characters has the additional adverse side effect of hindering the features intended ominous atmosphere tied into the final days of the old wild west coming to a close. Something like The Man Who Shot Liberty Valence was able to execute a more sorrowful successful version of that same tone thanks to it having more fleshed-out people to lend weight to that atmosphere. In that particular feature, we understood the lives of the people impacted by this era coming to a close and that made the wistful nature of the story impactful. Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, meanwhile, struggles to create the interesting characters needed to make that atmosphere work properly. At least those characters work better at offering up a solid amount of enjoyable thrills, even if the movie, as a whole, feels like a warm-up before lead actors Paul Newman and Robert Redford teamed up with director George Roy Hill for the far better-crafted The Sting.