[Movie Clip]
David Hast: Scott, have you seen Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid?
Scott VanderWerf: I've seen Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid many times, recently revisiting it after probably not having seen it since either the late 1970s or sometime perhaps in the early 1980s. And it was a film that I remember seeing on television. It seemed like it was on all the time in the 1970s.
DH: I imagine it was because it was a huge box office hit and very popular with the public.
SVW: You saw it in the theater as well.
DH: Yes, I was a kid, but it’s a very memorable theater experience. And uh I can remember as a little kid, like there's one four letter word, Robert Redford drops the S-bomb when they jump off this cliff into the rapids uh of a river. And he shouts out the S-bomb.Like that was the greatest thing in the world to me as a kid, because I'd never heard a swear word in a movie before.
SVW: Well, this is an iconic film too. remember this as a, you know, growing up and then going to film school and this was a film that was, that had made a big impression on me.
DH: I think this movie has only grown in stature as time has gone by. I would go so far as to say it's one of the greatest movies ever made. I don't know if you'd go that far.
SVW: I wouldn't go that far. And in fact,I was surprised of revisiting it how in some ways, how light it felt to me. Not meaning that it's not great. I still think it's great. uh But I want to see it again now, even though I've seen it so many times.
DH: Yeah, well, we should uh make a side note here that this is our third of three episodes in a row that we're doing on Westerns, right? We did one on the40s and did a classic Western, uh My Darling Clementine. Then we did these sort of transitional, darker Westerns of the50s. We did The Tall T by Bud Bedeker starring Randolph Scott. And I think the50s was a transitional period leading up to what happened in the late 60s and 70s, which were the revisionist Westerns.We can talk about that whole concept later, but movies kind of turned the Western on their head. And Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid is one of those.
SVW: And perhaps it's the first one.
DH: No, it's not the first one. uh We'll talk about that later. Right, right. But it's one of the, you know,it's true. were a lot of them were in the 70s. So there were a few. The same year was The Wild Bunch, and those were made completely separately and not the same kind of Western at all, but those are both revisionist Westerns. But yeah, Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid is uh this Western that…the critics kind of dismissed it. It got really mediocre reviews when it came out for kind of what you just mentioned, um that they thought it was very light and fluffy and it had goofy music. But when I watch it,see, mean,one of thefour Oscars that it won was for its screenplay by William Goldman, who later on wrote The Princess Bride and many other great movies. And it perfectly walks this line between comedy and drama. And a lot of this movie is very serious, including the ending.
SVW: That is true. And in fact, that's one of the things of revisiting it now. I was struck that as a kid, I...I took it more seriously than as a comedy. So as an adult, the comedy was more apparent to me than the seriousness. But I see what you're saying. It is serious at times.
DH: See, I think you were part ofthe American public is sometimes the critics are right and sometimes the public's right. I think on this one, the public was clearly right. And I think they probably saw the seriousness in it too. They didn't dismiss it as a goofy Western.
SVW: Well, it also, when I say light, I mean in terms of the structure, the plotting that it, the way it segues from one sequence to the other, there is,in that sense, the lightness is very much a positive thing.
DH: Yeah, it is. But we'll get into why, I'll get into why I think it's such a great movie. But for people who haven't seen it, you should.It's the movie that made Robert Redford a star, and it was his first movie co-starring with Paul Newman. Catherine Ross is the other co-star and then there's a host of great character actors and it doesn't feel dated in any way now. It feels like this movie could have been made yesterday.
SVW: I would agree with that.
DH: 60s music a little bit, but mostly it really feels very fresh.concerns, well, let's see, it was directed by George Roy Hill who then went on and did The Sting with Newman and Redford and it's not considered, you know, like necessarily groundbreaking as a Western. What it’s its distinction now I think is that it's widely considered the first modern buddy picture.
SVW: Oh totallyabsolutely it sets the model for all the buddy pictures that we we've seen in the 80's the 90's all the way up till today.
DH: Yeah and there werebuddy picture like things earlier but not really as a as a subgenre you know I mean it wasthere's like the Bing Crosby movies and things like that but Bob Hope being Crosby right but those I really were buddy pictures they were just bad comedies uh but uh yeah there's athere was just a whole I'm notreal familiar with the genre they're not popping into my head but what are what are some of the great buddy pictures that
SVW: oh Midnight Run yeah you know and um
DH: I don't know they'll put they're like the the 48 hours,48 hours.Yeah. Right.
SVW: And usually they are usually these buddy pictures are comedies, right? Not such a mix of drama and comedy
DH: Like this Trains, Planes, and Automobiles with John Candy andSteve Martin. And that that's later. You know, that's after there have been dozens of them. I read one critique that said it hurt women in the in the industry because they made all these buddy pictures where women have to be secondary characters, which in this one, Catherine Ross is great. She's a very important character. It's kind of a love triangle but she's still not the lead. And there's no room really in buddy pictures, there's not room to make the romance the primary thing. It's always a secondary thing. It's about the friendship between the two, almost always males, although there's one great exception that came in the 90s, which was Thelma and Louise. And the screenwriter of that said she was even had Butch Cassidy in mind, that she was kind of making a female alternative buddy picture with Susan Sarandon and Gene Davis.
SVW: And they're outlaws on the run just like in this film. And one of the things is this takes, mean, uh Hollywood Western and creating the buddy picture type ofaesthetic, but it's also, it's built upon the mythology of Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid who were real outlaws.And the Catherine Ross characteris based on a real person named Etta that we know about, we know certain things, but there's all sorts of things that are just mythology. So we really don't know the final truth about these people. We only know sketchesof what their history was. And that was what this was built on.
DH: So Butch and Sundance were train robbers and bank robbers. And in this movie, they start getting chased down by this kind of high-tech posse and they flee to Bolivia. Apparently in real life, you the posse never really followed them to Bolivia or anything and they just sort of disappeared and I think Butch Cassidy sister someone came out, you know much much later and said he lived into the40's he came back under an anonymous name well, it's we don't know what really happened we don't matter…
SVW: There's assertions from all sorts of different people thatboth which Cassidy and Sundance kid came back to the U.S.and and and but there's the scenarios are so. There's so many of them that nobody really knows the truth and there's no they've tried to they've exhumed bodies and done DNA testing and none of it is has cometo any sort ofdefinitive conclusion about this.
DH: Well, here's why I think this is a great movie, not just a good movie. First of all, I think every part of itis essential to the story. There's nothing it doesn't belong in there and they're always surprising you with different things that happen. It's constantly…it's very funny. There's tons of great humorous lines in this movie. Right from the start, the first lines of the movie, we see Butch in basically a silent scene with just this sound effects ofa bank that he's casing. And we hear the sounds of things being locked and a clock dinging and it's the inside of a bank, but he's checking the bank out because he wants to rob it. But he sees right from the start in this movie, we see, that the world is changing around them. It's the end of the West. The movie is set right around 1900, the mythological end of the West in Westerns. And they keep running up against things that one thing after another that keep stymieing them, right? Various forms of advanced technology. And right in the first scene, after the opening credits, uh he checks out this bank and he sees that they've got these, all these super high tech like locks and safes and stuff and he's and he got and on his way out. He says to the guard as they're closing the bank “what happened to the old bank it was beautiful” and the guard says “people kept robbing it” and Butch says “small price to pay for beauty” and the whole movies like that it's not haha funny. It's just thiswitty humor. But it's constantlymovingtowards serious drama all at the same time.
SVW: That particular little bit that happens there at the beginning, sort of sets the tone in terms of his character, Paul Newman's character. He's very sort of flippant about the career that he's chosen. He doesn't look at it as that bad. I'm not, you know, being an outlaw. And we find out later that he's actually never killed anybody.
DH: We find that out in a very funny moment and also a very scary moment simultaneously when they've got a...stand down six bandits, just the two of them, and he tells Sundance, “Kid, there's something I think I ought to tell you. I've never shot anyone before.” They're standing there about to have a gunfight with six people. And Sundance says, “one hell of a time to tell me.” So the movie, it moves, it's about the Old West, but it's about the end of the West. It's also very much, this is where I think in some ways, it's revisionist, right? Because it's very self-consciously about the mythology of the West, the way they've said it, where they've said it.And then it's also self-consciously aware that it's a movie. The opening credits show in sepia, black and white, what's supposed to be, they made it themselves, but it's an imitation of a movie like The Great Train Robbery. So the movie starts, like fade up from black, this movie starts, you hear the click clacking of an old projector, and you see this tiny little square on one side of the screen while the opening credits run on the other side of the screen. And you see it telling the story of Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, the train robbers, just like people would be in a movie theater in the silent era watching a movie about the Old West. So right from the start, it's like, this is a movie about movies.
SVW: And it doesn't change to color immediately either. it's following the Paul Newman character, Butch Cassidy, into the saloon where the Sundance Kid isplaying poker, it remains sepia.
DH: Right. So it's this brilliant thing where you have the sepia tone, old movie, then the first scene is Butch casing the bank in sepia tone, black and white. The next scene is Sundance gambling in a saloon in black and white. And the following scene... the first shot is still sepia tone. They're riding on horses, and as they ride, the camera pans with them, and as the camera pans, it turns from black and white to color. And then the rest of the movie is beautiful, wide-screen color that, you know, was shot in Colorado and Zion National Park, and Mexico and looks amazing.
SVW:Yeah, the film,that was one thing that...I did not remember from my youthful screenings of this, how gorgeous the film looks.
DH: Well, not just gorgeous, but the cinematography was totally innovative and groundbreaking. It won Best Picture for cinematography. Its cinematographer is one of the great mid to late 20th century cinematographers, Conrad Hall. And he's doing things today you'd watch it, and if someone like me or you told someone, oh, you've got to watch the cinematography in this, if you weren't really aware of how cinematography evolved, you'd be like, I didn't see anything. It's a nice-looking movie. But they were doing things that just wasn't done, you know, before that. They were, they were shooting into the sun with lens flares. There's a great scene that the, the raindrops keep falling on my head montage when they're riding the bicycle. He does this long tracking shot through a fence. So everything's like flashing on and off on the screen. It's part of the, the new wave of American cinema in the late sixties where they're breaking all the rules.
SVW: And a little side note, Katherine Ross was actually banned from the set except for when she was going to do her scenes.
DH:What?
SVW: And that was because she was dating Conrad Hall, the director of photography and in one of the two sequences where they're robbing the train, there's an additional camera where they had a camera that they didn't have a cameraman to work the camera and Catherine Ross was very much interested in photography.And again, she's dating uh Hall, and he invites her to work the camera. And when the director, George Roy Hill, saw that, he was very angry after the fact and basically banned her from the rest of the shoot unless it was her.
DH: That's funny. Plus, the crew wouldn't have been real happy because that's pretty much breaking union rules. I mean, you're not supposed to let a non-camera operator operate the camera.
SVW: You mentioned the bicycle scene. So talk about that because that was something that even as a kid when I saw that I was like this doesn't make sense to me like kind of stood out. OK, and now I love it.
DH: Yeah. OK, so Oscars aren't the most important thing, but this movie was nominated for a bunch. the ones that won were for the best screenplay by William Goldman. Cinematography by Comrade Hall. We've mentioned those two. But then Burt Bacharach won two Academy Awards. He won for his really whimsical but interesting musical score and he won for the best song. Burt Bachrach and Hal David sung by B.J. Thomas, I think? Called Raindrops Are Falling on My Head and it became a hit on the radio in 1969. And it's this whimsical montage sequence when Paul Newman and Catherine Ross are riding on a bicycle and just goofing. At the time, people thought, the heck, not the public, the public loved it, but critics were like, this is ridiculous. They just break from the action and do this little like, you know, essentially music video with this goofy song and Robert Redford even said later on, when he saw the movie, he thought, oh my god, this is a disaster.He was wrong and he admits he was wrong and the public loved it, like they love the rest of the movie. What did think of that when you saw it again?
SVW: When I saw it again, think it'swhat you said in terms of the photography is amazing, the editing is great. And then it also sets up the dynamic that there's this sort of uh this relationship between the three of them. You know, it intimates that she even says at the end of the bicycle ride that she could have dated him, essentially if she had met Sundance.
DH: Oh, and that continues throughout the movie. mean, I mean, at one point... It's like a love triangle, and in fact, a lot of people, there's a sort of a gay subtext to, in some criticism of the film, that there's a romance happening between the two male characters as much as with Catherine Ross.
DH: Well, it's the buddy picture thing, so it's certainly, that's what happens in buddy pictures. Whether it's romantic or not, it's certainly a love. But yeah, so I mean,all this stuff adds up to meas this perfect blend. I mean, how many movies do this? This has humor, it has good action, romance a buddy friendship, it has really interesting music, fantastic photography, and editing. It's just like, it does all these things and it's just fabulously entertaining, but at the same time, it's a really innovative film.
SVW: And it's, if you are into westerns, it is one of the great westerns of all time. It's not just in terms of great films of all time, it's in that family of westerns that goes back to the Great Train Robbery, which is one of the first films ever made.
DH: It's telling you right from the start, this is what we're part of, this tradition.
SVW: Yeah, in terms of the western aspect of having gunfights and the heroes being in precarious situations, there's plenty of that.
DH: Yeah, let's talk about revisionist westerns also because this is part of that movement, right? I wrote down a few of them that are the revisionist westerns, the ones that are best known, same year, The Wild Bunch, directed by Sam Peckinpah, Little Big Man in 1970, starring Dustin Hoffman.
SVW: Which is from the perspective of Native Americans. I
DH: It's one of the first movies to truly completely sympathize with the Native Americans. It hasn't made the leap that we've made now where you have, you know, Native Americans in creative control, writing the scripts, directing, and so forth. And obviously, Dustin Hoffman is not Native American, but he isn't playing a Native American. He's playing a white settler who gets, he ends up living with the Indians and becoming like an adopted Indian and living like one, but it’s quite clear what he is, ethnically. McCabe and Mrs. Miller, 1971, Robert Altman.
SVW: Which really in some ways is an extension of Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid in terms of the sort of removing the plot as the primary device in the film.
DH: Yeah, but it's not as funny. I mean, it's a darker film, both in terms of mood and visually. But then you can go back earlier. I think it really, I mean, I haven't really read books about this or anything, but to me, the first really interestingrevisionist westerns were the ones thatthe independent filmmaker Monte Hellman did with Jack Nicholson in 1966, both of them. One called The Shooting and the other called Ride in the Whirlwind. These are low budget films, but these guys were part of, he was part of that sort of movement of independent filmmakers in California that were heading this way. And then of course you get the, like the Sergio Leone films, the trilogy.
SVW: The spaghetti westerns
DH: Once Upon a Time in the West and those are very much part of the revisionist movement as well now see …
SVW: it's interesting to see that this on this list and see the dates 1964 through 66 and then once upon a time in the West in 68 to my mind I'm I would think those were 70s films, but they're not.
DH: No, no, they're on the early end of the revisionist Westerns
SVW: And I would throw in even though it's a John Wayne film I would throw in true grit to as being part of that…
DH: Well, I guess that's fair because even John,you think, how can John Wayne be a revisionist western?He's certainly in some of the later westerns that look very different than the classic ones. The Searchers, The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance and Caesar, both John Ford films, but they're a darker view of the world coming in the50s and 60s. How would you say True Grit is a revisionist western?
SVW: It has a different sort ofa...sprawling structure to it than the earlier films the way that it approaches it it definitely is was harkening to the golden age but it's a buddy picture as well with Glenn Campbell and then you have this female at the true protagonist is a teenage girl
DH: yeah that is different that's true and so that's throwing out a very kind of new modernuh... twist on on the plot
SVW: and she's very critical of of these these uh... swaggering cowboys
DH: And the remake's good too. The Coen brothers remade it.
SVW: Which is more,the Charles Portman novel is represented better in the remake.
DH: Yeah, and that's with Jeff Bridges, right? Yeah, uh that was really good. Butch Cassidy, one of my favorite movies, and I'm glad you got to see it again.
SVW: I'm glad I revisited it, and actually now I want to see The Sting all over again.
DH: Oh, yeah, and that's a fantastic buddy movie with them too. Same director, right? Isn't that also uh George Roy Hill? It is.
SVW: That is correct.
DH: Yeah, it's a great con, long con movie about gambling.
SVW: All right, well thanks for joining us.
DH: Thanks, Scott.
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