Somehow I managed to avoid ever seeing Butch Cassiday despite how well known it is, so when it was on TCM last month I DVR'd it and just got around to watching it last night. Having now seen it, its certainly easy to see why the film has garnered the acclaim that it has and why its still remained popular, though I have to say that the movie didn't completely blow me away either. The biggest reason why the movie has the following that it does is that its two title roles are played by absolute legends in the forms of Paul Newman and Robert Redford. Indeed, their buddy cop movie-esque banter throughout the movie is its strongest suit. The repore of the two fantastic actors goes a long way in terms of the movie's sheer entertainment value, but I'm not sure its enough to propel it to the status of, say, the 150th greatest movie of all time.
In the simplest sense, the movie tells the (at least partially) true story of Butch and Sundance, leaders of the notorious Hole in the Wall Gang, who narrowly escape capture and become fugitives after a train robbery that the law apparently saw coming and dispatched a posse to intercept them there. Butch and Sundance flee into the wilderness and, after several attempt to throw their pursuers off their trail fail miserably, they deduce that they're being followed by a sort of all-star team of the west's best lawmen and trackers. This all leads up to the famous waterfall scene, where Butch and Sundance opt to take their chances jumping rather than try and survive a gunfight in which they'd be outnumbered and surrounded. They manage to make it back to the home of Etta Place, who is Sundance's lover, although really the most extended period we see Etta with either of the two by themselves is when she's out bike riding wtih Butch in the "Raindrops Keep Fallin' on My Head" scene. This is as good a time as any to point out that I really, really, don't like that song, although the rest of Burt Bacharach's score is actually pretty good.
At any rate, Butch, Sundance, and Etta decide to travel south to Bolivia, where Butch--being the self-described brains of the operation--assures that it will be smooth sailing. There are some funny scenes where they realized that they forgot to learn Spanish at any point, and eventually end up robbing a bank while looking off of a notecard to tell the employees what to do. They run into much bigger problems, though, when they think that their old enemies from America have caught up to them, and they make brand new ones as word of the "banditos gringos" starts to spread around. They make an effort to go straight, but it seems as they're fated to remain the outlaws they've always been, and the movie ends with them still fighting, guns blazing.
If there's anything the movie is trying to be more than just a crime/cat-and-mouse chase movie, it seems like its trying to be a commentary on the end of the old west. There's a scene in which Butch and Sundance enlist the help of an old friend who's now working as a sherrif who tells him essentially that the era of the wild west outlaw is over, and that they're either going to die in a shootout or end of rotting in jail. I think the fact that we never really see the posse that's pursing Butch and Sundance for most of the movie up close and none of its members are developed as characters--despite Butch and Sundance explaining how formidable they are--adds to this motif. In a way, they're not really trying to outrun a pack of people, but they're trying to outrun the inevitable incursion of progress that's going to stifle the lawlessness of the frontier west. When they're forced to jump down the waterfall, they're literally being pushed aside by the new era. They eventually escape to Bolivia, but as we see from a montage sequence that separates the American part of the movie from its final act in Bolivia, they spend much of their treck down to South America intermingling with society-types at various gatherings. So, even though they physically escaped capture, they would seem to have lost some of their identity.
A lot can be discussed about how the movie plays off this idea of the end of the old west, and I'm sure on repeat viewings there would be more that would come up, but I can't see the movie being as endlessly watchable as a movie like The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly. That movie can be dissected literally almost shot-for-shot, and can be looked at from an endless amount of angles, from the operatic duel of its three principal characters to its condemnation of the brutality in the Civil War. Really the best things going for Butch Cassidy are its cinematogrophy, and the amazing repore of Paul Newman and Robert Redford, two greatly talented and charismatic actors who play off each other extremely well. These things make for a movie that's well worth watching, but as far as the greatest westerns of all time are concerned, I don't know that I put it up as high as some others might.
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