Butch Cassidy & the Sundance Kid

This film is possibly the most entertainment ever captured on and assembled with film. To me, anyway, it is the perfect movie. I know I’m not alone when I say that it could be the best Western, or the best Drama, or the best Comedy of its time. This film quite simply has it all.

Beyond all of its very obvious virtues, however, is its real magic. This film has an aura of charm about it. Maybe it’s due to the legendary subject matter and the romanticization of the Old West. Or, perhaps it’s actually the filmmaking. The still montage, of course, is wonderful. It expresses something that ‘motion picture’ cannot. It summons a sense of sentimental empowerment in me, and makes me happy. It really does, in fact this whole film does that: makes me happily sad or sadly happy.

The score is wonderful, especially during the photomontage, and I’m not typically a fan of score at all. Most films are over-scored, especially nowadays, as they insist upon depriving the imagination of the movie and making it a commercial for something entirely intangible but extremely profitable. This score, songs and all, is so evocative of primal joy and carefree romance that it cheers me up just sitting here writing and thinking about it.

The characters are well rounded, too. Newman and Redford have their famous chemistry in Spades in this film. Working with the tightest script outside of Casablanca, they create heroes out of dust. They pull off playing true legends, something pretty rare. They do so largely because they play Butch and Sundance as two guys who have spent a lot of time together. Our mannerisms rub off on people we’re with and vice-versa, but that is nowhere in filmdom better realized than in this movie. The characters have enormous differences, but it’s obvious to me that they are best friends, at least in the movie. They are two very different people who interact so casually and naturally that there seems to be very little interaction at all. They become one legend; two people who subconsciously borrow each other’s characteristics.

I’ve never met anyone who’s seen this film and not loved it. Most people rave about it, in fact, and I am most definitely one of them. I consider the first time I watched this film as a ritual right of passage for me. Along with 2001, it is one of a small handful of films that so deeply impacted my life immediately. I saw films differently after I saw this for the first time, and it’s maybe the only film I know of that I could watch five times consecutively and not be bored once.