Butch Cassidy & The Sundance Kid

Anyone who has been reading this blog for a while should know my love of Butch Cassidy & The Sundance Kid. The movie has shown up on my top 10 films of the 60's list and also was #30 on my top films of all times list. I know this takes a bit of the surprise out of this review, but that is ok. Who would give this movie a bad review anyways? Turns out most critics who saw it before it's original release. One of the many things I learned from this DVD.

What you probably do not know, is why (aside from being great) Butch Cassidy holds a special place in my heart. A handful of years ago I was just your random slacker coasting through junior college when I signed up for an intro to film class. I had always watched movies and liked them, but did not really know much about them and had not seen many of the so called classic. This class would ultimately be the catalyst for me ended up in film school. Among the great films I viewed for the first time in that class are Chinatown, Bonnie and Clyde, It Happened One Night, and...you guessed it...Butch Cassidy & The Sundance Kid. So not only is it a great film, but I have good memories tied to it. So as you can imagine, when the Special Edition of this DVD arrived in my mailbox, it immediate went into my DVD player.

I will give you the cliff notes plot for the 3 people on earth who have not seen this. Butch Cassidy is a jokester and swindler who, along with his good buddy The Sundance Kid (the more serious and dangerous of the two) rob banks and trains for a living. Along for the ride is Etta Place (there is always a girl) who is girlfriend to Sundance and friend to Butch. She is the heart of the group. The guys get into hot water and flee the country to avoid the gang that is hunting them down. They end up in Bolivia where they take up robbing banks there. This may sound like a smart move, but back in the late 60's, the leads in westerns did not run and hide from gangs, they just killed them all. Ask John Wayne or Gary Cooper. This is what sets this movie apart from other westerns. It constantly bucks the trends and becomes as much a buddy film as a western. It is not afraid to be entertaining and even funny. In many ways Butch Cassidy showed what a western could be. Sadly, the genre died out before this knowledge could be put to much use.

Every thing and everyone involved in this movie have rarely been better and are rarely less than great. This is the best movie directed by George Roy Hill, the best performances by the great Redford and Newman, the best score by Burt Bacarach, and possibly even the best job of DPing by the late, great Conrad Hall. Hall's cinematography is brilliant both for being like nothing we had seen in a western and also inherently western looking. He is the greatest cinematographer of all time and this may be his greatest work. That enough is reason to see the film. Katherine Ross also deserves mention for doing a lot with a small part as Etta Place, the woman behind the men.

I know this has not read much like a review and I guess that is because I am not really reviewing the film, more so the DVD. This disc is loaded with extras and both the cover and the content remind me of a Criterion Collection DVD. Anyone who knows Criterion knows that is a very good thing. There are 2 excellent documentaries here. One from the original release period that George Roy Hill mainly narrates and another that looks to be only a year or so old. This second doc is more of a retrospective. I learned some interesting things about the film. Steve McQueen was supposed to be the Sundance Kid but refused to make the movie because he and Newman were bickering about who would get top billing. Some things never change I guess. I also found out something I guess I knew but never realized. While there are 3 memorable musical scenes, the film on the whole only has about 13 minutes on music. Stuff like this is what makes getting these Special Edition's so great for the movie buff. There are also a handful of trailers, deleted scenes, interviews, and even a true story doc about the real Butch and Sundance. All in all this is great stuff. A great film, one of the best in American history, gets a vastly deserved DVD to equal it's greatness.