Tag Archives: Film

What happened to the old bank?, asks Butch Cassidy (played by Paul Newman).
The no-nonsense proprietor responds: People kept robbing it.
A small price to pay for beauty. Butch Cassidy decides.

By 1969, the year in which the film was released, the beauty and economic excesses of the Hollywood studio system had been replaced by a more functional system of independent producers and agencies selling package-deals to studio-distributors. These “New Hollywood” directors studied at film schools like NYU or UCLA, or, as with the director of this film, George Roy Hill, started in television. The films were being made by younger artists and reflecting younger audiences’ sensibilities — see the slick, stylish violence of Bonnie and Clyde (1967) — and concerns — the existential ennui paired with ironic humor in The Graduate (also 1967). (As it happens, the star of The Graduate, Dustin Hoffman, was considered for the role of Butch, while Warren Beatty and Jack Lemmon were possibilities for Sundance, and Marlon Brando was up for either role. When Paul Newman and Robert Redford were finally cast, the original title of the film The Sundance Kid and Butch Cassidy, was changed so that the more famous actor’s character would come first.)

! Sometimes these New Hollywood films downright shocked establishment critics. Just as the New York Times Bosley Crowther infamously panned Bonnie and Clyde, revealing his stodginess by deeming the film “non-sensical” and “not wholesome,” so another critic at the Times treated Butch Cassidy similarly uncharitably. Vincent Canby wrote in his review that the movie is “[one] that attempts to borrow so much from other films (Bonnie and Clyde, Jules and Jim) that it must be apparent to any movie buff who, I think, will be slightly depressed by this awareness… [I]t might have been very funny if you’d never seen a movie before.” Butch Cassidy went on to be a box office hit and garner Oscar nominations for Best Picture and Best Director,

while winning for Best Screenplay, Score, and Cinematography. What Canby read as derivation was read by others as a complicated rumination on a mythologized American past that gains momentums through its opposites: sweeping Western panoramas with peppy ‘70s pop playing against it, modern scenes of violence and bloodshed faded to an old-timey sepia, a school- teacher who manages to bridge the categories of Madonna and whore in ways that John Ford would never dream (or at least, could never show).

! What is the meaning of putting these generational cues and signs into conflict — is the clash merely an aesthetic device, or is there an ideological, even an industrial, argument being forged? It cannot be a coincidence that a film so confused and conflicted about America’s Wild West imaginary would be proceed on the heels of Hollywood’s movement away from its own grand past: of Hollywood glamour, of MGM spectacles, and Studio Chiefs who begged, borrowed, and stole for their art.

And now, the 1969 Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid…

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Thanks for playing, kids! -Annie