Butch Cassidy and The Sundance Kid

For Mark Parker (1953-2009)

As always, if you've never seen the film in question, turn back now.

And do read previous posts, there's a certain continuity going down here, plus the one to come (The Theory post) – thanks much!

“Butch Cassidy and The Sundance Kid” (1969 - Twentieth Century Fox)

Paul Newman, Robert Redford, Katharine Ross.
Directed by George Roy Hill.

Where I grew up is a suburb of a largish county town – population c. 15,000 at the time – but with its own golf course, racecourse, airport, swimming pool, upmarket hotel much frequented by Queen at one stage, and a small thirties rural-style cinema with an interesting policy regarding the enforcement of British Board of Censorship certificates: "Have you got the right money?” Sometimes we didn't even pay.

When an early-to-mid-teens young dude, I saw “The Devils”, “The Wicker Man”, “Straw Dogs”, Bruce Lee, various classic spag wests and flavours of Dracula, surrounded by schoolmates old and new.

I also saw “Butch Cassidy and The Sundance Kid” more times than I’ve ever seen any other film, before or since.

I don´t recall where I first saw it , it could've been at a bigger Ritz-type venue in town, but for years after, whenever there was a gap in the schedule, it would be on in the village - Saturday after pub closing time, Sunday night, Sunday afternoon, Thursday night main slot in a slow week.

We would always sit in the back-left quadrant of this cinema of maybe 100 seats and, as time went on, chant whole chunks of the dialogue in unison, or pick disagreements with anyone else in the audience objecting to the noise. "Do you think you used enough dynamite" was almost the name for this thing you read now.

But what we would always do, is whistle along to the bicycle sequence featuring BJ Thomas' No. 1 hit, “Raindrops Keep Falling On My Head”, by Burt Bacharach and Hal David. Loudly.

Eventually,, we would start whistling it arbitrarily in the middle of other films.

As I said, I don't remember where or when exactly I saw “Butch” the first time.

But I remember how it felt.

And if I was obliged to watch one film I had already seen, I might choose “Blow-up” or “Eyes Wide Shut”, or even something striking that I had just seen (with Chastain in it, for example) – but if I was with company, it would always be this one.

Here's a list from 2009 of the top twenty-five films of all time, US box office adjusted for inflation, population growth and share of wallet, and given the films concerned, still fairly current I would imagine.

Every time the list is adjusted in the source article, "Butch" and "The Sting", also directed by George Roy Hill, creep higher up the list. Aside Hill, only Lucas and Spielberg have more than one film here. "The Sting" is higher, and that's because of "Butch" - the film is basically Butch Transposed, and was much-awaited when it came out. “Butch” is the only western in the list.

"In short, it is ironic that while critics continue to argue about the importance of LAST TANGO, NASHVILLE, and BARRY LYNDON, bonhomie films like THE STING and BUTCH CASSIDY will probably have the most penetrating and lasting effect on the public."

“Male companionship movies and the great American cool” by Arthur Nolletti, Jr.

Most of what follows is true

That's the famous slugline going into the film proper – after we have watched, to one side, a brief and flickering silent short, hard to distinguish as an early 1900s feature or a recreation for a newsreel. The ‘newsreelity' of this tableau is, in fact and in analogy, as contrived as the film to follow, most of which, paradoxically, is "true."

If you haven't seen the film (still reading?) it's basically an outlaw western in a dozen mini-acts:

Intro-Fight-Train1-Etta-Train2-Superposse-Jump-NY to Bolivia-Banks-Payroll1-Payroll2-Shootout

As any cursory Internet search will tell you, the true events occured in the first decade of the last century – although as far as the movie's scenes in the great western outdoors go, it could be at any time post-1870, even the incongruous-looking bicycle had been around since then. But as time wears on it becomes apparent we are at the end of a supposed golden era.

There are several housekeeping-style script insertions that indicate the precise time period. In the saloon-bordello scene following the first train heist we hear “Goodbye Dolly I Must Leave You” on the phonograph, and further references to the War with Spain – in fact at their lowest point before bolting for South America, they even try to make a deal to enlist in order to escape the superposse on their trail. Oh, and several years after they actually met they learn their real names are Parker and Longbaugh.

The issue is, what isn't true, and why.

Butch and Sundance themselves, mainly.

These two outlaws, giving off a distinctly Robin Hood-type aura, are time travellers from the sixties stuck in the fin-de-siécle without a way back, deciding to be outlaws who go out of their way not to kill anyone. Butch blows his loot on trips or gives it away, Sundance's girl Etta tells him. They're not really in it for the money - “whatever they're sellin' I dont want it”.

Everyone covers for them - saloon gals, bartenders, even lawmen. It’s an idealistic picture of late-sixties society. The only thing that doesn't add up is the Man, connoted by the real-life deus ex machina rail baron E H Harriman.

Newman and Redford's outfits are contemporaneously ‘with-it’ (denoting sex appeal) and their haircuts are by Jay Sebring. At least, Mr Newman's is, and it looks like Redford got in on the appointments too.

They interpret the world they find in 1900 Wyoming and parts west and south, with the percepts of 1969 Californian leisure-class males. And how else could they?

In the wilderness scenes, I'm kind of watching a drama set in 1969, except for the odd prop - the dialogue, the pristine trendy costumes, the shapely bods, always under a cloudless sky. A car could drive on set and it wouldn't seem, or indeed be, that anachronistic even if it was a muscle car. It's what happens when we imagine ourselves back into olden times – yankees at the court of King Arthur.

“I got vision, and the rest of the world wears bifocals” says Butch/Newman, in a possible dig at their inventor, Benjamin Franklin.

The film is choreographed like a musical without a score – the principals move about the west like edgy dancers, the cutting and the comic timing is musically paced to perfection, yet at the same time there is the perceived realism contrived from realistically sixties characters inhabiting an imagined recreation of the past. The two non-vocal musical montages – of the three escaping to New York en route to Bolivia, and then bankrobbing their way through South America, with Etta as accomplice now, are masterful examples of a 'genre' (is “Camelot” in the same genre as “Mary Poppins”?) that reached an absolute apotheosis in the sixties – in the top 25 list all the musicals are from the sixties. In fact the latter Bolivian interlude, with the Fifth Dimension/Brasil '66 vibe, is peerless.

I kept thinking that there was another movie from slightly before that presaged the thoroughly modern badinage between Newman and Redford - but actually there isn't.

What “Butch” did was crystallise that Crosby & Hope, Martin & Sinatra, Batman & Robin urbane duolism within an epic and panoramic dimension: whereas previously all of those double acts moved across cardboard cut-out versions of reality with zero jeopardy, Butch and Sundance robbed banks across half the known world and then got shot to fuck - or maybe not. And ever since, every movie that has even a trace of this, owes it bigtime. Favreau and Vaughn are Butch and Sundance reimagined for the nascent hipster demographic.

And that’s why it engages us so much. The real West was largely a deeply unpleasant place, with murder and rape and eating each other in wild extremes of heat and cold within unforgiving landscapes. Going into the 1970s and until now, westerns strive more and more for verisimilitude, which invariably means unsympathetic so-called antiheroes, our sympathies eventually aligned with the least-dislikeable characters of those presented to us on screen. Even so it is an imagined past. “Butch” is an imagined past imagined exactly to entertain us.

We don't rely on any interpretations of this world other than theirs, certainly not that of law and order, nor of big business either. We interpret this world through them, and if we had to live in this world we'd want to be them - rather than the sheriff, or the bicycle salesman, or EH Harriman of the Union Pacifc RailRoad.

Not to mention that in reality the two train robberies depicted in the film netted enormous takes, the latter a million eight in today dollars. These are, if only momentarily at times, two rich guys. When living large in New York and later in South America, they wouldn't look out of place at an E H Harriman social gathering.

The famed scriptwriter William Goldman spent eight years researching, from the end of the fifties onwards, so for the time, he would undoubtedly be the only one with a grasp on the subsequent narrative arc. It’s common these days for scripts to be in development for decades, but not so much then. In 1969, anyone more than 75-80 years old was potentially an eyewitness to any one of these dozen mini-acts and it's possible he tracked all of them down during those eight years, which, incidentally, is more or less the timespan for the events covered in the movie.

Can we trust Goldman, and Hill, with our belief? We'll come back to that question.

Everything's jake

Back in the day, films used to run more or less non-stop from one show time to another, and one could get on the narrative train, so to speak, at any point in the film and then sit tight for the next showing and up until the point of arrival in the previous showing, without paying a second ticket – hence the term “this is where we came in”.

Watching this film again after many years, I realise that it runs in a sort of loop.

Shot one: the door to a bank, then Newman's static face fills the screen - he is the contractual lead, after a lot of to-ing and fro-ing during development. Then Redford's poker face, seated in the saloon, at smaller scale. Ironically, when next they met, in “The Sting”, Redford was the lead, as a result of everything leading up to the last scene in “Butch”, putatively set in San Vicente, Bolivia, where the camera freezes close in on both their faces as they exit the door of what looks like a bank, and then slowly pans out to the closing credits, a perfect trailer for their 1973 rematch.

During the first introductory scene, the colour mix remains sepiated. As the stand-off over the card game winds down and they leave town, there is a remark about them being over the hill. Next shot, they are riding over a hill and the sepia fades to glorious colour, until that final shot.

This message is reiterated at every turn - their time is over, the West is now tamed, there’s no place to turn for the common man. Rich/er guys now have the wherewithal to hunt them down worldwide. What violence there is, is institutionalised.

E H Harriman hires the law to pursue them dead not alive across international lines. Whilst they believed the famous Indian tracker “Sir” Lord Baltimore never left Oklahoma and the lawman Lefors never left Wyoming, the barons have taken over and made their own private international federal case out ot it. As the two face the famous jump, when asked who's the best lawman, Sundance asks Butch if he means for bribing.

Only when they play the lawman, guarding the payroll down the mountain in Bolivia, do they actually have to kill people.

So, the loop - watch it again, from bank to shining bank, today or another day (better for us!) but what you'll still see is two guys who got nowhere and the woman still checks out on them. The system's all wrong, the businessmen can hire to kill, the lawmen are corrupt, but what'ya gonna do. They couldn't win each ends up, but it was sure fun to watch. Cue the standard ending for the time – the car explodes in flames (“Vanishing Point”, “Dirty Mary Crazy Larry”) the film burns out (“Two-lane Blacktop”) or in this case, siennas out to a thousand rounds.

But this is a pragmatic and ambiguous ending. According to the recorded facts - and we are talking about lawless Bolivia over a hundred years ago - what we see on screen is what would have happened, had Parker and Longbaugh not apparently committed a murder-suicide pact during the night they were holed up and surrounded by a brigade of the Bolivian army - the stand-off lasted much longer than the few minutes we see on screen.

When I studied Latin American History at college, right at the end of the year when I'd already read all of the books (in English, virtually none of which had been written less than sixty years before), my supervisor told me, well South American colonial history is all entirely suspect, as the viceroys used to simply make up their missives home to the king in order to either get more resources sent or send less resources back. Untold scores of fantasy rebellions, invented insurgencies, supposed bullion robberies. It's definitely in the culture. If I'd thought about it and got him to sign a statement to that effect I could have got a complete pass on that exam through motives of untakeableness.

On top of which, the Hollywood constraints of the time that could have forced Goldman and Hill's hand - can't actually show hundreds of bullets going into two outlaws, assuming of course that the soldiers could shoot straight, but at the same time, have to depict ‘justice’ being done.

What they apparently also couldn't show, is that our two heros switched in two similarly-white caucasian stooges from the house they were holed up in, and somehow hightailed it out of there alive to live happily, if discreetly, ever after, if ever after is another thirty years. Just enough time to show up in depression-era Chicago to pull the medium-long firm heist of all time.

The ultimate escapist movie - they really escaped. Exhumations, DNA sampling and varying accounts from family members to prove or disprove this possibility endure to the present day.

That's why this is one of the greatest endings of all time.

'We've shown everything that's true up to this point - where the facts run out, they run out. Do he or I think they got away? Well, it's as much of a cert as the 3/1 at Belmont.'

Leading us to Etta Place, the one known survivor of their time in South America. She's as much late-sixties as they are, the third leg of an ambiguous relationship onto which some people have tried to hang homoerotic meaning while confusing Etta's role in their life, and at the same time lambasting the mock-rape scene which introduces her character after the first train heist.

Is Etta a strong female character? Etta was, variously, a prostitute and/or a schoolteacher, as she is portrayed by Ross. She is subject to a decision to go to South America but is unsuccessful in persuading them to come back to the US with her, where presumably they would have least been safe from Harriman in the anonymous masses of early 20th-century New York, as they indeed were for at least two months of 1901 - Sundance was from Jersey after all. In their obdinacy lies their apparent downfall.

The famous “Raindrops” segment starts with Sundance and Etta in bed, post-'rape', in a little shack on the prairie, suddenly awoken by Butch on bike circularly serenading them with the dracula-esque refrain of “Your soft white flesh is miine.” Then Butch carries her off on the bike in the only vocal musical interlude of the film, which becomes the 'romantic interest', despite the fact that Etta is ostensibly with Sundance. It was the clip of the movie most seen, as it was licensed to promote the hit single it produced. As they return to her home, Etta asks Butch what would have happened had she met him before Sundance. Their scene has just played like two lovers, whereas the night before Sundance mock-raped her. Thus the movie toys with an idea of a threesome which may or may not have happened before or happened later and Etta is allowed to define that ambiguity by not explicitly declaring for either of them.

Is that a strong female character? Seemed so when I was twelve years old.

In reality the three of them spent almost five years ranching in Argentina before Pinkerton's caught up with them and forced them into Bolivia and the old life of crime, per the South American Getaway interlude. When Butch says that ranching is a “brutal” existence he knows what he's talking about.

In the film-truth, when they arrive at a decrepid Bolivian rail station, it's as if they're just off the boat from New York:

“What could you possibly want to buy in Bolivia?” snaps Sundance at Butch.

Well gee I don't know, real-life Sundance, but you did go back and forth from South America to the US twice, with Etta in tow, before you finally bit the mythological bullet.

Australia

Back to the central issue with this film – what's true, and how do we know it's true - a relationship not with reality but with the truth.

The film purports to be truthful bur admits it isn't completely… when it says “most”, what does that mean... at least sixty percent? Is that by design or by necessity - is the whole truth known and some of it held back either by the filmmakers or other hidden actors, or did Goldman start off thinking that he had the whole story and then he got to the ending.

It's impossible now to analyse films old or new without acknowledging our universal access to information. Facts can be scrupulously checked, critiques old and new can be assessed, and some films can be researched almost endlessly. Hard to claim that modern/post-modern approaches to film criticism formulated in the sixties and seventies, primarily in or around pre- and post-'68-unrest France, are not catalyzed by this.

According to such theories, all films are fantasies set within the realist constructs of a three dimensional world often derived from real events - the 'narrative' being the story arc that configures either the politics or the ideology being sold to us... if we bought a ticket (sometimes I didn't).

How political or ideological is this film - can it avoid being either, by attempting to be pragmatic, and can I applaud a pragmatic movie?

A political film seeks to either purvey a particular aim or set of aims or at least draw one closer in order to discover such aims by investigating the real-world context.

An ideological film intends more to persuade us to view the world under the given terms projected within it - this is what the world is like, period.

The two are not mutually exclusive.

So-called Hollywood movies are usually defined as endorsing the so-called established order, but in fact other cinemas from other parts of the world seek the establishment of different orders. The difference with Hollywood is its economic dominance in the field, given the cultural function of a ‘movie’.

Today though, we're often employing techniques, whether consciously or not, to counteract most if not all of the ideological mechanisms traditionally found in films. We have the capability to deconstruct works of art that are explicitly and narratively based on factual events – in real time, cellphone in hand - and the old immersive experience of cinema washing over us hardly exists any more.

The central question becomes, what did they leave out and why? The absence, ambiguity or distortion of facts can reveal as much as the included facts.

In these circumstances, I want to make sense of reality - I don't want to make sense of your imagination. In that way, I can see how things that actually happened may have impacted me and others, and maybe what I can or need to do about it.

In 1969 I had none of these tools though, and in the case of my sacred “Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid” I keep coming back to the ending.

Up to that point we have ridden across the American West and South American Andes with a kind of pre-Constitution worldview. Available modes of modern economic existence (ranching, soldiering, city life) have been discounted, and the two outlaws, as they bandage and badinage each other up, discuss Butch's proposed next stop on their crime world tour - Australia.

“What about the banks?”
“They're easy – easy ripe and luscious”
“The banks or the women?”
“Well once you've got one you've got the other”

All of their previous jibes at this new hallowed century are crystallised in this one last conversation, that explains exactly why they have come to this point.

How else could it have ended, given that both Etta and the friendly lawman have predicted exactly this all along. But they end up frozen in time, alive. So we either have to trust the story we're being told, or not.

It feels true.