#73 ‘Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid’
Charm, Crime, and the Ballad of Boys Who Can’t Quit Each Other (or Capitalism)
Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid (1969) is the buddy movie that launched a thousand smirks and a million slow-motion death scenes. It’s all sun-drenched landscapes, ragtime anachronisms, and manly camaraderie wrapped in enough charm to sell you armed robbery as a form of flirtation. George Roy Hill directs it like a swan song for the Old West, but let’s be clear: this isn’t a western. It’s a capitalist break-up comedy between two men who love each other too much to admit it and a system too violent to let them leave without a bullet-riddled goodbye.
Paul Newman’s Butch is a fast-talking idea man with a twinkle in his eye and no intention of doing hard labor, while Robert Redford’s Sundance is the strong, silent marksman who probably doesn’t know what a feeling is unless it’s attached to a bullet. Together, they rob banks, dodge Pinkertons, and charm their way into the sunset with nothing but charisma and a convenient lack of accountability.
And then there’s Etta Place (Katharine Ross), the woman who exists in the film like a sigh. She’s a schoolteacher, a lover, a third wheel on a bicycle built for two. She gets one song, one scene of sensuality, and then she’s quietly written out before the final shootout—as if the film knows there’s no room for feminine subjectivity once the bullets start flying. Etta is not a person so much as a postcard: beautiful, passive, and destined to be mailed home while the boys chase glory.
The film’s tone is breezy, even when it shouldn’t be. It cuts from gunfights to vaudeville, from exile to banter. It treats violence like a game, even as the stakes mount. When Butch and Sundance flee to Bolivia (because apparently imperialism is fine if the vistas are pretty), the film dares to make foreign poverty a punchline and local people a faceless backdrop to their legend. The myth of the noble outlaw is preserved, but only at the cost of everyone else’s realism.
And yet, it’s all so watchable. Newman and Redford are magnetic—two sides of a tarnished coin flipping through history with nothing but a six-shooter and a punchline. Their chemistry is the heart of the film, their emotional intimacy deeper than any romance the genre dares to explore. Their final freeze-frame is iconic not because they’re brave, but because it’s the moment the film admits: these men will never grow up, never change, and never survive in a world that demands accountability over charisma.
Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid wants to mourn the West, but it also wants to kiss it on the mouth before it dies. It critiques the end of an era while making that end look like the world’s most handsome tragedy. It’s fun, but it’s also cowardly. It lets the boys off the hook with a bang and a freeze, without ever asking who pays the price when men mistake charm for justice.
3.5 out of 5 stolen payrolls
(One for Newman’s smirk. One for Redford’s brooding magnetism. One for the cinematography. Half a star for the sheer homoerotic tension no one was brave enough to write down. The missing stars? Shot offscreen in Bolivia, alongside the film’s conscience and the woman who was never given a last line.)
