Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid

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Movie Details

• Genre: Action/Adventure, Western
• Release Date: 1969-10-24 Nationwide
• Running Time: 110 min.
• Director: George Roy Hill
• Cast: Paul Newman, Robert Reford, Katharine Ross, Strother Martin, Henry Jones, Jeff Corey, George Furth, Cloris Leachman, Ted Cassidy, Kenneth Mars
• Producer: John Foreman
• Writer: William Goldman
• Distributor: 20th Century Fox
• Official Site: Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid Official Site

Released the same year as Easy Rider, this willfully frivolous bubble-gum Western from 1969 might be the Woodstock to the former's Altamont: It's tuned in, turned on, and not much else. Directed by George Roy Hill and featuring those two icons of Sixties countercultural cool, Paul Newman and Robert Redford, Butch Cassidy transposes the Age of Aquarius to the 1890s, replete with B.J. Thomas singing "Raindrops Keep Fallin' on My Head" as the titular bandit heroes rob trains and trade quips. Redford and Newman are both immensely appealing performers, of course, and Hill doesn't ask them to do anything more than be their charming selves. It's representative of the movie's limited ambition, though, that when the innocent hipsters travel to Bolivia to shoot holes in the locals, there's nary a hint of the then-raging war in Southeast Asia. Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid is, in the hoary Hollywood tradition, a film made in a vacuum and designed to appeal to those with vacuums in their heads. As much a cinematic correlative to the Yippy movement as Easy Rider was to the schizzy end of the Sixties, the movie takes nothing and no one seriously: Even the prefatory note that the story is "mostly true" sounds like a callow wisecrack. (Peter Ritter)