Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid
This movie is far, far stranger than I remembered. Before rewatching it a few weeks ago, I would have summarized my thoughts on this movie as follows:
- Paul Newman and Robert Redford are bona fide movie stars whose charisma is unparalleled
- That "Raindrops Are Falling on My Head" scene is crazily out of place
But after watching it again, I have to revise both of those statements. Per the first: yes, Paul Newman is at his personable, witty best. His Butch Cassidy is funny, charming, and instantly memorable. However, Robert Redford's Sundance is decisively uncharismatic. He's quiet and morose. He drinks too much. He fights when he shouldn't and pushes those weaker than him simply to stroke his own ego. He's not just a jerk, he's abusive and cruel to his girlfriend (who is much more clearly endeared to Butch) and, in most respects, a lousy friend. He's also a total creeper.
Which brings me to point number two: the Burt Bacharach score isn't weird, it's entirely typical of the film. The "Raindrops" scene is memorable not because it is an anomaly in the film, but because it is the first of a series of anachronistic and disjunctive scenes. It's worth noting that the musical number immediately follows one of the more distressing moments in the film: Sundance's quasi-rape of his girlfriend in the middle of the night. In case you've forgotten, the scene I'm talking about begins with Sundance waiting in a chair inside a girl's room; when she enters, he points (and cocks) a gun at her and forces her to strip. Slowly. And completely. In the end, he grabs her and forces himself on her, kissing her hard on the lips. It's only after this kiss that we get any sense of our bearings in the scene: the girl glares at him and growls: "Just once I wish you would show up on time!" Some comfort. It's also followed by the first of two strange train robbery sequences, both of which end with the same hapless railroad employee being blown up by dynamite (the first time, we see him face down and unconscious afterwards, blood running out of his ears). Again, levity is played against violence, and our horror--with our heroes' actions; with the reality and proximity of death to these characters--is juxtaposed with action-entertainment. This becomes the dominant theme of the second half of the film, culminating in Butch and Sundance's killings of a group of Bolivian outlaws who attempt to rob the bank convoy they are protecting. After the slow-motion shots of their deaths and the fixed-camera images of wind blowing dust over their corpses are over, Butch quietly asks his partner what, exactly, they've done by "going straight." The point the director Hill emphasizes is that it doesn't matter for these two which side of the robbery they are on--whether they're blowing up trains or warding off bandits--they are men capable of dealing death. As a result, their screen charisma breaks down and the audience is reminded that despite their wit or sexual allure, they are at heart mysterious--and being mysterious, by definition, means being the subject of the gazes of others. Perhaps this is one reason Sundance engages in the role-playing game with his girlfriend earlier in the film: it offers him a chance to stop being the subject of the looks of others and permits him to become the voyeur. Is this comfortable territory for an audience? Certainly not. However, it does help us understand the odd nature of the film's rhythm and editing as one more tool in Hill's arsenal, complementing his work on not only the reality of death, but its close proximity to precisely those characters we want to believe are immune to it.
Without a doubt, this is the most striking feature of the film upon a second viewing: Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid is a movie about the irreconcilability of who these outlaws are and who we wish them to be.
And this, ultimately, is what makes the movie so effective (and, even, great): we realize that our love for Newman and Redford is a mirror of our love for Cassidy and Sundance. In both cases, we fall not for men, but the images of men, not as pictures of themselves, but as symbols for a mythical kind of life.
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