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| "Who are those guys?" |
“Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid”
Dir: George Roy Hill
Prod: John Foreman, George Roy Hill, Paul Monash, Paul
Newman
Scr: William Goldman
Phot: Conrad Hall
Arvada Plaza Theater
9374 W. 58th Ave.
Arvada, Colorado
Oct. 24, 1969
“Nobody knows anything . . . Not one person in the entire
motion picture field knows for a certainty what’s going to work. Every time out
it’s a guess . . . “ – William Goldman
The guy who uses Oscars as bookends ought to know. The
award-winning novelist and screenwriter (“Princess Bride,” “All the President’s
Men,” and on and on) made his first big mark with this film, and his thorough
and entertaining narrative of its creation is found in his first memoir, “Adventures
in the Screen Trade.”
I saw the movie 12 times, back in the day when you had to go
to a big dark room and watch it at preappointed times. The number was a proud
record for me until Monty Python films came along. I returned again and again
to the theater, usually by myself. I watched it again recently, after a break
of about 25 years, and wasn’t nearly as impressed as I remember. What made me
love it so much?
Well, for one thing, it looks great. It was directed by the
polymath daredevil George Roy Hill, and shot by cinematographer Conrad Hall,
only one of the top 10 who ever lived.
But it just doesn’t make any damn sense. It seems now like a
vast borrowing from previous traditions. It’s a buddy movie, an elegiac end-of-the-West
movie, a chase film, sprinkled with some romance, and not a little comedy. And
a little musical comedy – what in the hell is “Raindrops Keep Fallin’ on My
Head” doing in there? It mixes styles and even filmstock with impunity, moving
from sepia to full-color, deep-focus shots, changing lenses every other scene.
The duo’s leap from the cliff is from “Gunga Din”; the slo-mo violence is pure
Peckinpah, and their final apprehension comes straight out of “Treasure of the
Sierra Madre.” It’s Hope and Crosby on steroids.
It’s said that all and sundry involved were just ripping off
“Bonnie and Clyde,” which came out two years earlier – another tale of outlaws presented
as cheeky, rebellious, fun-loving proto-hipsters. However, something must have
been in the air, for Goldman had been researching the story for eight years. The
success of the French New Wave and its American imitators trying made the
moneymen have to put up with experimentation and creativity – those things were
actually paying off! Filmmakers were now open to, if not expected to, be
non-standard and innovative in content and form.
“Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid” is innovative only for
its own sake, though. It carries very little thematic weight. We have the
standard bit about the Closing of the Frontier. The Man in this instance is the
big, ruthless Machine of Progress, powered by faceless killers like the posse
that chases the heroes, never seen up close. (It’s not insignificant that it
takes an entire army to destroy the duo, as the characterization of Bolivia is
casually racist.) And, as for countercultural significance, casting two of the
most handsome, normal-looking, articulate, and charming white guys in film
history as the rebel-buddy-heroes is almost literally a whitewashing of
history.
In “Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid,” it’s as all the
elements were thrown into a blender, or sorted out with the yarrow stalks of I
Ching divination. Full of quotes from movies past, it’s meta. It’s the – hey!
It’s the first postmodernist film!(?)
And it worked. At the time, I LOVED the nonsensical
insertion of the song. At the time, I was madly in puppy love with my best friend Todd Dickson's sister; we used to act out the scene to the soundtrack album. I laughed at the funny parts, I tensed when the posse
got closer. I didn’t even mind the weird New York City photo-montage, shot that
way because the studio wouldn’t let them shoot on the “Hello, Dolly!” sets, so
they snuck in and got stills. I reacted exactly as expected. I cried at the
end. I was young; I could roll with the punches. And that’s film is meant to
do, to involve you, to entertain you. It doesn’t have to hang together or make
sense or observe the three Aristotelian unities or any of that crap. It has to
hold our attention and want more.
Now that I’m older, I want tonal consistency. I can’t just watch
anything, and for hours at a stretch. My diet has become more discriminating,
my absorption rate slower and more selective. I can’t gobble down films like I
used to, and all that I have seen since “Butch” premiered has rubbed off some
of its luster. It met a need at the time for me, obvious, and for many others.
It’s instructive to learn that sometimes the experience of a film is like a love affair -- it doesn’t have to be significant or even make sense or stay with
you forever. Sometimes we just need to be taken out of
ourselves for a while.
Next time: “Colossus: The Forbin Project”
