GROSS/60 1969 - Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid - they fought the law
And the law won.
GROSS is every year’s top-grossing movie, since 1913, reviewed.
BUTCH CASSIDY AND THE SUNDANCE KID; PAUL NEWMAN, ROBERT REDFORD; directed by GEORGE ROY HILL. 110 minutes. Wikipedia, IMDB, Letterboxd.
Some of the movies on this list - the list I’m working through here - are important just because they’re important. This is one of those movies. It’s not great cinema (I feel like you’re going to be shouting at me here…), it’s not particularly poetic or life-enhancing. It just sits at an important junction in film history - the beginning of the sexy New Hollywood, the end of the ponderous Old - and asks to be loved. Like The Graduate (reviewed here), another important movie, most people remember the music - that one track, in fact - and certainly its winsome male leads.
Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid came out in the same year as Sam Peckinpah’s The Wild Bunch, and the films are set in the same universe - at least in the same lawless Southern borderland. Both films build to a bloody, climactic shoot-out that takes place somewhere South of an important border that’s over there too, separating countries and provinces that we know were fluid and contested and messy for a century or more.
I live in the UK. Here - and in the rest of the world - we’re all expert in this part of American history because, even though these events all took place four or five thousand miles away from our little flats and houses - on their winding lanes and narrow streets - in a dusty tan and ochre landscape that’s about as different as you could get from any European location (perhaps some in Southern Italy or in highland Spain might approximate), we’ve been schooled.
We’ve been schooled in the American West and, more specifically, in its ideology - in its violent and unremitting zero-sum individualism - to the odd degree that we have, puzzlingly, essentially adopted it, even though we continue to live on those winding lanes and narrow streets in a part of the world with its own, very different, more collective, huddled-together and connected ways of living.
This is the irony of President Trump’s conversion to tariffs on services. He’s acquired an interest in the balance of trade in the movies, although it’s essentially a 75% surplus in favour of the USA - for every dollar of movie imported three are exported. And to be honest I was kind of surprised the surplus was as small as it is. I mean what are they importing exactly? Kung fu movies?
I don’t want to be graceless: Butch and Sundance are beautiful, they smile winningly, carousing and disdaining the authorities likeably; they circulate in their territory like warlords, retreating as needed to an isolated camp, a real place called the Hole in the Wall, a defensible hide-out that was populated entirely by outlaws - a kind of robber commune - and emerging only to party and to rob trains and/or banks. The Hole in the Wall is essentially the ideal American community - self-governing, utterly autonomous and ruthlessly defended (in the present, Seasteaders aim to reproduce this model, the protection of international waters standing in for the Hole in the Wall’s isolation, but even out on the ocean these stories don’t always end well).
Butch and Sundance’s ultimate departure for Bolivia is meaningful because it coincides with the end of the period of liberty that made places like The Hole in the Wall possible: the long period of ungoverned expansion into the West that came after the civil war, the reordering of borders, the capture and purchase of territory. Butch didn’t suggest Bolivia because he’d read in the papers that the economy was booming. He thought it represented a final retreat from the intrusive state that wanted to make them less free. They’re driven out of their Wyoming fastness by encroaching lawfulness. What they find in Bolivia isn’t the permissive paradise they were expecting, though, and they’re shot to pieces by the army of an actual state - one that’s already in the orbit of the Yankee bully.
The movie has a famously ambigious ending. We’re pretty sure that Butch and Sundance are about to die, in a hail of gunfire (is there a better phrase for this situation? Wall of bullets? Wave of ordnance), but we can’t be certain because George Roy Hill cuts at the critical moment. It’s a satisfying end to their story and also a kind of existential puzzle for us. Do they live, do they die? Should they live, should they die?
In cinematic terms Hill, a literate man who studied Joyce in Dublin with his GI Bill grant, ends his movie in the most cinematic way possible. He stops time and suspends death. It’s the film director’s superpower: to short-circuit cause and effect by simply snipping off the effect and dropping it in the edit bin, suspending consequences.
It feels like an odd compromise with the Hays code, which had finally been abandoned a couple of years before this movie’s release. The film is a New Hollywood archetype and an authentic revisionist Western but somehow Goldman and Hill couldn’t imagine allowing Butch and Sundance to get away with it, to dodge the consequences of their actions (and there’s even some evidence that one of them might have done in real life). So we wind up with something that might be a 100% code-compliant ending. Or might not be.
I don’t usually rate or compare movies here but if I was going to make an exception I’d suggest skipping this one and finding the Peckinpah on Amazon Prime or on a Blu-Ray. Watching it again for this exercise I’m speechless. it’s a big, beautiful, humane thing. In Butch and Sundance we love two men set against a kind of dusty, out-of-focus set - it’s insubstantial, unaccountably camp (that hit song inserted to what purpose?); in The Wild Bunch we love dozens - all flawed, weak, lacking in impulse control, generally lost - and they’re set against a vivid social canvas. I don’t think I’d understood this before - the film’s like a Bruegel or Victor Hugo (Peckinpah should have shot the 1832 Paris uprising - the barricades would have been spectacular).
The movie was obviously an enormous hit and is an enduring classic. In their very thorough survey of Newman’s career on the Big Picture podcast Sean Fennessy and Amanda Dobbins almost skip past it with not much more than: “What can you say? Magical movie, one of the most fun movies you can watch.” But contemporary critics weren’t in love with it. Pauline Kael called it ‘a glorified vacuum’. David Thomson says “You could argue that the film was a few smart, modern fellows having fun with the idea of making a Western…” Ouch.
I owe the connection to The Wild Bunch to Thomson. He makes it in his Have you Seen, which is one of those books people used to keep next to the TV. Where do they keep them now?