George Roy Hill’s outlaw comedy is as easy to like as its reputation says, and Newman and Redford make it look like no work at all. It is padded in places and knows exactly how charming it is, but the chase and the ending land regardless.
The film opens in sepia, with a card that reads ‘Not that it matters, but most of it is true’, and that sentence tells you the tone. William Goldman’s script takes two real outlaws at the tail end of the 1890s, when the railroads had money for detectives and the West was running out of places to hide, and plays their decline as a comedy. George Roy Hill gets it done in 111 minutes. It is a good film with a few habits we could do without, and its last ten minutes are as fine as anything the genre has managed.
Paul Newman plays Butch as the talker: he plans the jobs, he has never shot anyone, and he cannot pass a stranger without trying to charm him. Robert Redford’s Sundance says perhaps a third as much and does it from under a black hat. Goldman writes them as a married couple who stopped listening years ago and never stopped enjoying it. The knife fight with Ted Cassidy’s Harvey Logan, settled by a question about rules, is the best joke in the film because it is also the most honest thing Butch does. Katharine Ross, as Etta, has the hardest part and the least to work with. Her introduction, in which Sundance appears to be an intruder ordering her to undress before it turns out to be a game between lovers, played uneasily in 1969 and plays worse now.
Conrad Hall photographs all of it through dust and low sun. The gang rides out of haze and the posse rides in it, so that for most of the chase the men hunting Butch and Sundance are a smudge on a ridge and a hat. Hall lets the light flare into the lens and the skies wash out to white. Edith Head puts Redford in a black hat and a corduroy jacket he wears until it is part of him, gives Newman a bowler that sits slightly wrong, and dresses Ross in high collars that make her look like the only adult in the picture.
The chase is where the film stopped being merely pleasant for us. We had laughed through both train robberies, at George Furth’s Woodcock refusing to open the mail car and at the dynamite that follows, and then the posse came, and kept coming through the night, and we found ourselves as unsettled as the outlaws were. It was the silence that did it. Hill never gives the pursuers a face or a line; they are a lantern moving across a dark hillside and, by day, a rider in a white hat who does not hurry. Butch asks who those guys are, more than once, and by the second time it is not a joke.
The padding is real. Burt Bacharach’s ‘Raindrops Keep Fallin’ on My Head’ arrives over a bicycle ride round a farmyard, and for three minutes the Western turns into a Sunday-afternoon light entertainment programme. It is pleasant and it stops the film dead. Later, editors Richard C. Meyer and John C. Howard cover a long journey with a montage of sepia stills. Goldman cannot leave a scene without a curtain line, and Strother Martin’s Percy Garris gets one good tirade and then repeats it. The film’s fondness for its own charm is what kept us, at intervals, from loving it.
Set beside the other outlaw Western of 1969, Sam Peckinpah’s The Wild Bunch, this is the sunnier account of the same fact: the century was ending and the men who lived by robbing it had no idea what to do next. Peckinpah answered with a massacre. Hill and Goldman answer with jokes, and keep them going so long that when the film finally stops making them the quiet is worse.
We will not describe the ending. We will say that we knew it going in, as most people do, and that it still caught us, because of a choice Hall and the editors make in the last seconds that is the opposite of the crowd-pleasing one. Watch it with someone who has never seen it, and do not tell them.
