Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid: Westerns Riding off into the Sunset

In both my Les Miserables and Moulin Rouge! pieces, I made some comment about the musical as the genre that receives the least love in the modern era. I stand by that, but I acknowledge there is one other genre for which you could potentially make a similar case. 

I am referring of course to the western film.

See, musicals at least have Disney keeping them on life support, and maybe one day we’ll get the Wicked movie Universal has been promising us for fifteen years [FUTURE EDIT: All good things, folks]. But westerns don’t really have a place in the modern film world. Occasionally we’ll get films like No Country for Old Men, which use similar aesthetics and themes, but they are heavily modified from the gun-blazing-horseback-racing-wide-open-desert westerns of old. Those died, oddly enough, around the same time musicals fell out of fashion. 

            Professors Susan Kord and Elizabeth Krimmer describe the western problem, saying:

The Lego Movie (2014)

“Because myths are by definition stuck in the past, the Western has become saddled, as it were, with a reputation for being the most backward, traditional, and un-modern of all film genres. For over thirty years now, scholarly consensus has declared Westerns to be a genre in decline. Unable to compete with more sophisticated genres, it survives as self-parody or in revisionist form.”

Hollywood in the mid-late 1960s was undergoing a massive identity crisis with things like the breakdown of the studio system. But the artform also had to start serving an audience whose filmgoing appetites were rapidly changing in the wake of widespread civil protest and general social malaise. There were a lot of casualties in Hollywood during this time, westerns were only part of that lineup. 

Today we're going to talk about one of the last western movies to make its mark: George Roy Hill’s 1969 film, Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid.

This movie imagines the final days of the real-life bank robbers whose adventures in high-stakes crime in the late 19^th century formed the basis of wild west legend. Upon release, the movie was met with mixed reception with popular critics, including Roger Ebert, who said the script was "constantly too cute and never gets up the nerve, by God, to admit it’s a Western." And yet, the movie went on to be a considerate success at the box office. One of the last for a genre on its way out. 

The odd thing is the film seems oddly cognizant of all this. Here’s a film about two cowboys who realize that the wild west is disappearing beneath their feet just as western films are losing their foothold in the imagination of the masses and trying to find if there’s still a place for them. Foreshadowing the eventual extinguishing of the genre, Butch and Sundance will ultimately lose this fight.

    And yet, Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid found a sort of second life in the wake of the film's release. In 2003 the film was ranked as the 73^rd greatest American Film by AFI and the 7^th greatest Western. (The Professor would probably rank it even higher on both counts.) The Sundance Film Festival, the largest independent film festival in the US, was named by Robert Redford's company after his character in this film. The Professor encountered this movie more than once in his academic study of film, even writing his final paper in Intro to Film Theory on the subject. Did Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid ever actually die? (No, this isn't a conspiracy post about cowboys getting kidnapped by aliens or whatever. This aint that kind of blog.)

 Answering that question is about as complicated as answering the question of did westerns ever die. Like westerns, Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid were overtaken by the tidal wave of progress. But, also like westerns, their death only launched their immortality.

 

Once Upon a Time in the West

The Searchers (1956)

    The western genre is so named for the wild, wild West in which these films took place. Whether or not you yourself have even seen a western, you know the hallmarks: Cowboys riding horseback over the vast desert, leaving law and order in their wake, the red sun casting a godlike glow across the horizon, and so on. These heroes were so revered because they existed outside of the safety net of society—they outlasted the bad guys because they were tougher. 

    Westerns as a whole were a symbol for the triumphant American spirit overcoming all odds. What exactly that meant, and how one reconciled that with this country's missteps, that all varied between western. But broadly these films spotlighted the period of American history wherein cowboys brought civilization to the frontier and laid the foundations of this great country we enjoy today. 

    For some authorial context, westerns as a genre are not necessarily favorites in the book of The Professor. I enjoy a good one now and then, as I do with all styles of filmmaking, but it's not like with musicals where reviving the genre would be a part of my presidential platform. But I find their exit from the mainstream to be a fascinating piece of discussion because it reveals a lot about the American psyche--and its evolving relationship with itself.

    I enjoy this particular western generally owing to its exceptionally strong craft, including the chemistry of the leads and the vibrancy of the script. Moreover, there is that layer of internal examination that makes the viewer feel privy to some deep and personal secret. The film's opening places the viewer in an almost voyeuristic position, seeing the conquests of Butch and Sundance play out on an old theater screen with the viewer standing as though from a doorway--you're not sure you were invited to listen in on what is to come. And that's kind of the feeling of the whole film: in this proscenium of burly resilience, this film is one of those precious spaces where you see the western genre truly reckoning with its own vulnerability.

    See, westerns started to lose their footing during a very particular time in both U.S. and cinematic history. This was a period when America was collectively starting to question the status quo and seeking to restructure the systems in place. Hollywood was certainly one of those systems, and it was undergoing its own kind of changes. Censors were allowing a wider range of content previously considered "objectionable." Artistic power started to transfer from studios to filmmakers. Hollywood was going through a lot of changes. 

Midnight Cowboy (1969)

    Films made during this time were much more open with their anger than previous eras, reflecting the deep-rooted frustration America was experiencing at the time. But they were also more open to deconstructing the conventions of film language. Filmmakers were willing to challenge audiences in unprecedented ways.

    Of course, one of the consequences of this massive upheaval was the widespread rejection of total genres. Musicals, for example, went out of fashion around this time. As prophets of the mythical happy ending, the aim of the musical was already under suspicion by a post-Vietnam America. Moreover, studios were having a harder time keeping up with the massive investments these movies required, and these combined hits left the genre unable to find a place in this new Hollywood. Westerns, meanwhile, had their own path to deterioration.

In his piece for The Atlantic, "How the Western was Lost (and why it matters)" Michael Agresta notes:

The Professionals (1966)

“The other great theme of the Western, after that of the conquering of native peoples and the establishment of civilization in the desert, is that of loss and of nostalgia for a certain way of life--the early freedoms of the West, the idea of riding across an unfenced landscape, the infinite possibilities of the frontier. That ‘West,’ of course, is already gone, fallen, conquered. It has been for decades, even though holding onto some sense of it seems crucial to our identity as Americans. Movie Westerns have been tracking that loss for a century.”

Agresta’s comment also foreshadows where westerns run into their first problem with modern audiences. Did you catch it? 

Westerns are known for being a uniquely American genre. Their setting places the stories in an environment that is unmistakably American and appeals to a sense of pride that is specific to the descendants of the American settlers. And as the American melting pot continues to house peoples of many nationalities and origins, the settling of the wild west becomes a smaller part of the American story.

            Moreover, in this era of manifest destiny, who was it doing most of the conquering and settling? White men. And who were they often conquering and settling? Everyone else ... but especially Native Americans. In the interest of being fair, classical westerns weren’t necessarily more racist than any other movie or genre of that time. They were subject to a pre-critical race theory world just like everyone else. But it’s harder to ignore their offenses given that the plots of the films themselves were focalized on racial relations, particularly Native Americans. 

It should also be noted that not all westerns employed this narrative. Just as many, like True Grit (1969), presented white outlaws as the main antagonists. Other films that did feature Native Americans, like Fort Apache (1948) acknowledged the greed of the white man and condemned characters who did not show due respect for the rights of the natives. Later westerns like Dances with Wolves (1990) presented the topic of colonization from the perspective of the Indians. It’s a complex subject.

    When I come across modern audiences who pass on or outright reject westerns as a whole, they will usually report taking issue with the genre's romanticization of not only this country's bloody history but the figures who forged it. But many of classic Hollywood's most revered westerns actually employed a more critical look at the American story. John Ford's The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance, for example, questions whether those credited for bringing civilization and order to this great nation, were actually as great, noble, or powerful as the history books suggest. 

There is truth to the idea that the western film serves as a kind of temple of reverence for the American legacy, but popular imagination has also distorted how the genre crafted that image. Even when the cowboys are the good guys, there's usually some shadow tinging that scarlet sunset. The eye with which films like "Liberty Valance" viewed history are generally better classified as critical rather than outright scathing, and I think that is where some modern viewers find their examination unsatisfactory. But it is this duality that makes them such essential documents.

That kind of internal examination is certainly on display here as well. Butch and Sundance float within a sort of rapscallion nirvana, but their race to stay alive forces them to acknowledge their own handicaps, the things that ought to disqualify them from their pedigree. When faced with the choice to surrender or trying escaping into a raging river, Sundance confesses that he can't swim. Butch? Well, he's never shot a person before. The celebrity they have been coasting on has had holes all along.

The Big Trail (1930)

   In his article for The Atlantic, “What the Western Means Now,” writer Noah Gittel notes: “The underlying subject of nearly every western is the tension that erupts when an ascending civilization comes into conflict with the savage wilderness. Whether it is a sheriff chasing an outlaw or a homesteader fighting off an Indian attack, classical westerns depict an America trying to balance its frontier spirit with the need for manmade justice and order. Films like “Stagecoach,” “My Darling Clementine,” and “High Noon” show the difficult process of extending a young nation into new territory. Perhaps that’s why westerns resonate less and less: Precious few among us would still call America a country on the rise.”

    What's maybe most stinging about this whole decline of the western, especially as seen through this movie, is that the same era which would render the genre irrelevant gave this film some really fun toys to play with. Early John Ford westerns didn’t necessarily think to deify their subjects by starting the film out in black and white or sepia tones and then transitioning into color. This sort of thing made movies like 2001: A Space Odyssey “high art.” These same techniques didn’t make "Butch and Sundance" arthouse--they just made it more fun. 

    The film oscillates between these naturalistic sequences with no score alongside these borderline avant-garde segments, like the Coney Island bit showcases the passage of time with carnival music and still photographs. One of the more interesting stylistic choices sees a very deliberate sound design where the vast majority of the runtime is without musical score. Music surfaces in very specific segments, and the main musical motif that unites most of these moments, it's a slow and mournful melody, very counter to the tone of the rest of the film. Just listening to it with no context, your mind instantly goes to whatever it is you're missing most. This is probably not the music Butch and Sundance would have chosen to underscore their life story, but it's somehow the perfect framing for something being lost to time.

    It’s in these more artistic sequences,  that you really start to miss what the genre could have been had it been allowed to survive in some form and greet new Hollywood along with everyone else. You get the idea that, yes, there could have been room for the genre to grow if it had been given that chance.

    But because the western is, as Kord and Kramer say, “saddled in the past,” the new wave of Hollywood never really bothered to find new ways to tear the genre apart and put it back together. This would make Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid a very rare entry into the genre, and all the more precious for it. 

     This is the world in which Butch and Sundance find themselves. This is the world in which they must fight for the right to exist. This film asks whether they are legends or merely relics.

 

Two-Bit Outlaws

    The film could have easily taken a derisive tone to Butch and Sundance's fall from Olympus. In addition to all these fanciful artsy style choices, this period of film was also big on subverting and deconstructing genre truisms. This was the era in which we had horror pics like The Bird with the Crystal Plumage sort of ha-ha-ing the audience for taking it for granted that if a woman and a masked figure are fighting over a knife, the guy in the mask just has to be the aggressor in this situation. 

But this film doesn't feel that way toward the subject it's studying. It's not really trying to outsmart westerns, or the people who love them. We can perhaps speculate why, but it probably has something to do with the fact that these guys are just so darn likeable. 

Said Director George Roy Hill of the historical outlaws: “I don’t know exactly how [Butch Cassidy] did it, but he led and controlled the most vicious gang in the west at the time and still somehow remained the most affable and good-natured outlaw in frontier history. Everybody liked him, even the Pinkerton men . . .

    “Sundance was Butch’s opposite in almost every way. He was a deadly killer, a man of sudden violences, and titanic drunks. He had no friends really, except Butch, and the extraordinary thing was the closeness of their friendship and the fact that it lasted all their lives.”

Of lead actors Paul Newman and Robert Redford, Hill said: “Actors can sometimes be a terrible pain in the ass with their jealousy of each other. But on this one, even though they didn’t know each other before they started, Bob and Paul consciously established a relationship that was excellent. It included Redford’s having to laugh at all of Newman’s god-awful jokes, and Newman had to put up with Redford showing up anywhere from ten to fifteen minutes late all the time. But to have that kind of relationship offscreen is damned important because it’ll show up onscreen as well.”

And it does. Butch and Sundance have some of the greatest chemistry in film history. There's not a scene with the pair of them that is anything less than hilarious. Paul Newman and Robert Redford have such diametrically opposite energy that any scenario where they have to work together is just going to have chemical reactions abounding. You could easily imagine following these characters all across the frontier. 

With any film you want the relationship between the characters to feel organic. But the relationship between Butch and Sundance has implications beyond just these two clowns just being funny for the audience. Their unconventional bond becomes this sort of focal point for the vanishing west. 

The resemblances between our leads here and traditional western heroes are very focalized. Butch and Sundance are not overflowing with righteousness or patriotism. They mostly just look out for themselves while robbing their local banks and passing locomotives. And they're also not above loading the dice to get a favorable outcome.

Their real defining characteristic, the one virtue they do have covered, is the loyalty they have to one another. These two characters embody everything we love about westerns through their boldness, their charisma, their cleverness, and their sense of brotherhood. We hope these two will pull off one final grand escape because we're not sure if the new frontier will have room for such antiquated qualities. 

And this is another area where it’s easy to cry “whitewashing,” but the parts of the wild west that the film reminisces on … they don’t really have much to do with the displacement of native communities or the institutions that have enabled systemic abuses. Butch and Sundance are criminals, yes, but they exist within a very liminal bound of lawlessness. They don’t kill anyone, and the victims of their exploits are large corporations. Their story isn’t really about the preservation of any kind of patriarchal status quo. Really, it’s the opposite.

    You could almost compare the cowboy outlaw archetype to something like the depiction of piracy in “Pirates of the Caribbean.” We celebrate the lawlessness of Jack Sparrow, knowing that real life pirates killed women and children, because they exist in the popular imagination as the face to adventure and liberation. Like outlaws, pirates were counteragents in the rigid societies they were a part of. They represented freedom that felt out of reach to members within that society, and maybe still do. 

That’s also probably why both movies are the same kind of fun. Both move between modes of high tension and genuine levity without compromising on either. And even as both films are billed on their high-octane action, they both make full use of snappy dialogue and character interaction. Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, and its antiheroes, would serve as a model for lots of action-adventure films in the post-classical landscape, a world it would never partake in itself (but I'm getting ahead of myself ...) 

 

“John Wayne Don’t Run Away!”

There’s a scene early on in the film wherein the town marshal unsuccessfully attempts to rally the townsfolk into charging Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid out of town. The townspeople know better than to think they have the manpower to force the bandits out of town, and they’re more or less resigned to their occupancy. The failed rally soon gives way to a bicycle salesman upstaging the marshal as he pitches this new invention to the town, and Butch and Sundance laugh the whole thing off from the safety of their balcony. 

There’s a sad irony to this scene as bicycles, like the one the salesman is hyping, will soon overtake the horse as the standard mode of transportation. A world that has moved on from horseback certainly has no place for two-bit outlaws like Butch and Sundance. 

In their desert paradise, Butch and Sundance don’t really worry about being outgrown or overtaken. Charismatic and masters in the field, their bank and train robberies feel more like house calls. When they’re not staking their next job, Butch and Sundance are surveying the local bars and brothels with their gang or taking turns romancing schoolteacher Etta Place (who is actually a very fun character brought to life beautifully by Katherine Ross but unfortunately she doesn’t get a lot of coverage in this essay, which I lament). It’s a paradise, yes, but it’s one that can’t last. 

The iron hand that threatens to propel Butch and Sundance out of the West is the enigmatic Lefors and his task force of lawmen. Lefors and his men are presented as almost supernatural forces. We never see the faces of any of the horsemen for example. The task force is introduced in the form of a black train car spouting a cloud of black smoke, the grinding of its many mechanical parts screeching loudly. 

    In this way, Butch and Sundance are fleeing less from a character than a concept. They are fleeing from the force of progress itself. And progress is merciless, killing off their entire posse and chasing them through the desert for nights on end. Their wits and guns are useless against the turning of the wheel.

Their ally, Sheriff Bledsoe, says it best: “You should have let yourself get killed a long time ago when you had the chance. See, you may be the biggest thing that ever hit this area ... but you're still nothing but two-bit outlaws on the dodge. It's over, don't you get that? Your times is over and you're gonna die bloody, and all you can do is choose where." 

    Butch and Sundance will spend the rest of the film trying to prove this wrong. Their efforts steer them, and Etta, into Bolivia where they think they will be beyond the reach of Lefors and his task force, or any form of authority. When critics complained about this film being so diametrically different from your standard western, they usually pointed to this plot point. From Turner Classic Movies’ Overview of the film:

“The finished script of Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid was shopped around to several studios. One executive famously rejected it because of the flight to South America. He wanted the outlaws to stay in the U.S. and fight the super-posse to the death. When Goldman argued it really happened the way he wrote it, the executive insisted he didn't care because ‘John Wayne don't run away.’”

    There’s a biting sense of poetic justice that Butch and Sundance ultimately have to break a sort of cowboy’s code in order to stay alive in a post-western world.

Once in Bolivia, the three of them attempt to restart their robbing spree, rehearsing their hold-up scripts in Spanish, and for a time they are successful. But as the authorities continue to close in on them, Butch and Sundance are forced to compromise more and more until they hang up their bandit guns for real working-class jobs, and it is here as they try wearing the guise of modernity that they are confronted with their incompatibility with this new world.

While transporting gold down the mountain for a job, Butch and Sundance are ambushed by bandits who kill their guide, and it becomes clear that the only way they will survive is if they take on their assailants, but it will require both of them to shoot. It is here Butch confesses that through all their conquests, he has never actually killed a man before. (As far as we know, this reflects the reality of the historical figure, who was never documented as having shot or killed anyone during their plundering.) Surrendering himself to this inescapable course of action, Butch kills the bandits—and with them a key part of his own code, his identity.

    Butch and Sundance walk away from this skirmish defeated. Yes, they’re alive, but they see for themselves how just how unfit they are for this world. It’s clear that violence will follow them wherever they go. The world in which they can just smooth talk their way out of an uncomfortable situation no longer exists. Now they know what surviving in this new age would cost them. 

    And depicting that deterioration is what stops the film from feeling arrogant or conceited. It pops its own bubble. This also reveals the use of something like film in the first place--it documents what we lost when the automobile replaced the horse. This is made more imperative since no one in this party can articulate their own feelings about this imminent sense of demise: John Wayne don't run away, and he don't talk about his feelings neither. 

Etta cannot bear to name their last interaction for what it is: a goodbye. And they cannot ask her to.  She has to cut ties under the pretense of going back home "ahead of them." Butch and Sundance know they are about to die, and die together, but parsing through those emotions is the one skill set they are not trained in. 

That is the curse of those who rode the frontier. Being tough enough to make it out in the wild west means suppressing the parts of yourself you might call a heart. Even more than building any kind of memorial to them, or the landscape over which they ruled, putting this all into a film creates a space where someone can experience the emotions that the situation demands.

Butch and Sundance eventually meet their end at the hands of the law when the local police force recognize them at a marketplace. Butch and Sundance instantly come under gunfire and fight for their lives. They find momentary refuge inside a store, but the police summon an army to exterminate these outlaws once and for all. As the gunmen gather outside, Butch offers up one more crazy idea: Australia. Once they’ve outrun this new assailant, they’ll make one last escape to Australia. With that, Butch and Sundance dash out of their hiding place, right into a rainstorm of bullets.

The frame freezes while we hear the chief give orders to shoot, and the roar of gunfire plays over the still image of Butch and Sundance. The frame dissolves into sepia tones as the exit music plays and we linger on the image Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid as their deification manifests in real time. 

Referring back to TCM’s overview of the making of the film:

“While writing Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, Goldman said he had in mind the notion of ‘stupid courage,’ ... That notion emerged in his screenplay in the famous jump off the cliff into the rapids and the final dialogue scene in which Butch and Sundance, trapped and badly wounded, tend to their injuries and talk blithely about their next move before charging into the open with guns blazing for what is quite likely their fatal last stand.”

Of the finale, Goldman said “It's the best ending I've ever been involved with.”

There’s a mercy in freezing the image the moment before the bullets ravage their bodies, but it’s also loaded with symbolism. Literally their lives end when the rain of gunfire consumes them, but that's not what they will be remembered for.  Even when they were "running away," they never surrendered. That final stand, that final moment of "stupid courage," will be their legacy.

    Ultimately, the wheel of progress doesn’t stop, and not everyone can turn with it. Frontiers are settled. Societal interests change. Genres fall out of fashion. When this happens, we can either try to assimilate, or we can remain faithful to our inner truth. Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid imagines what happens when you choose to go down with the ship. By refusing to submit to the authorities, Butch and Sundance lose their lives, but they consecrate the western spirit that they lived for, and this spirit will live on long after they, and the mythical wild West, are gone. 

Beyond the Sunset

Around the time Westerns started falling out favor, the space race was heating up, and outer space became the ultimate stage for our collective imaginations. TV sci-fi epics like Star Trek and Lost in Space took the place of John Ford western epics. 

This is actually a very logical progression. Outer space is one frontier we haven’t yet conquered. But the elephant in the room that space epics will never acknowledge is that such films and series borrowed heavily from the western genre. (The final frontier? That’s not a coincidence.) That’s true of today as well. Characters like the 2009 version of Captain Kirk or Guardians of the Galaxy's Peter Quill certainly take inspiration from lovable western rogues like Butch and Sundance. Even when we’ve lost interest in the wild west, we still describe our aspirations and ambitions using the vocabulary of the western.

    The fantastical tool-boxes of science fiction also give filmmakers enough wiggle room to borrow western scenarios while ditching some of their loaded baggage. Think how The Mandalorian tells the story of a master gunslinger living outside the law travailing an unforgiving frontier that more often than not looks just like the unsettled West, only he’s not blasting Native Americans, he’s blasting literal aliens. Think also how casting a minority actor in the lead role further diffuses uncomfortable subtext associated with traditional westerns. Though the parts are rearranged, the show effectively tells a western story with spaceships and laser guns.

    These examples speak to an unacknowledged fascination with the refining fires of the open deserts overflowing with lawlessness. Even when we're "over" westerns, we will never stop depending on them. 

Could westerns proper ever make a comeback? It’s always possible, but like Krimmer and Kord said, they are saddled with a reputation of being outdated and irrelevant. The closest things we see are genre parody/mashups like Cowboys vs Aliens, neo-westerns like Hell or High Water, or whatever you want to call The Ballad of Buster Scruggs. 

Shenandoah (1965)

Even so, claiming that westerns could never ride again supposes that America’s story is done. Even if we are no longer a country on the rise, we are still a country with a legacy, much of which was formed out on the open West. Yes, modern installments would naturally have to adapt to contemporary sensibilities (likely sharing the frontier with neglected communities) but that’s not too far removed from musicals doing away with blackface or similar examples of genres adapting to modern ideologies. Who knows, maybe in two hundred years after space travel has become commonplace, space films will fade into irrelevance themselves and a renewed sense of nostalgia for the wild, wild west will bring us back to John Wayne and the age of the cowboys.

    But while we're waiting for the stars to align, the library of westerns is still on the books. They are still here for us to examine, to learn from, to enjoy. Watching old movies in general is just a reliable way to deepen one's appreciation for the modern film scene, but the contributions of westerns specifically tend to go undervalued, and that absolutely doesn't need to be the law of the land. By all means, check them out some time.

Fort Apache (1948)

Returning to Agresta’s piece for The Atlantic.

“For a century plus, we have relied on Westerns to teach us our history and reflect our current politics and our place in the world. We can ill afford to lose that mirror now, especially just because we don't like what we see staring back at us.”

     I think it’s fair to mourn the death of Butch and Sundance, not simply as characters but as the flagbearers of a certain kind of liberation. And yet, one wonders, if Butch and Sundance could see the frontier they left behind, if they could see their successors now blazing across the stars, would anything make them more satisfied?

            --The Professor