Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid (1969)
Directed by George Roy Hill
As the west rapidly becomes civilized, a pair of outlaws in 1890s Wyoming find themselves pursued by a posse and decide to flee to South America in hopes of evading the law.
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What critics compared Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid to
Kitsch, Johnson and Lively are all young, beautiful actors, but they have the combined screen presence of a cactus: During a dinner scene, when Ophelia name-checks Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, your mind drifts for a moment, wondering what Savages might have been like if Paul Newman, Robert Redford and Katharine Ross in these roles.
But in a film that overtly references “Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid,” it’s only natural for the filmmaker to be thinking of other Newman/Redford pictures and how they conclude.
In the novel, Winslow had the gall to blatantly compare their seemingly ill-fated threesome to “Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid” (as did Stephen King in a generous pull quote) and the movie makes the same brash connection.
And also by disastrously name-dropping Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid , because those people were also glamorous, gorgeous law-breakers - that they were played by better actors and given better things to say in a more entertaining plot is something we are presumably meant to ignore.
And, in what many will recognize as a very Old Bohemian trope (the girl of the trio does indeed bring up " Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid "), they share the affections of O, a beautiful, poor little rich girl ( Blake Lively ).
When you consider what Hall did for exceptional films such as, Searching For Bobby Fischer, Marathon Man, Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, In Cold Blood, Cool Hand Luke, and American Beauty , you know that his work, when combined with the right material, can be mesmerizing.
This film draws on so many precedents that I can only list a few: Unforgiven for the grim revenge tale with no limits set on that revenge; Seven Samurai for the story of assembling a motley crew in order to achieve a mission; Lone Wolf and Cub for the theme of the few battling the many and for the almost absurd excesses of the final battle; Ran for the attention to period feel and detail; Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid for the theme of people stuck in the ethos of a past era while the world has moved on; and any number of exploitation horror films (the Saw franchise, The Human Centipede) for the grotesque mutilations that are depicted in 13 Assassins.
Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid , another pairing of golden movie idols, was the top-grossing film of 1969, a fact certainly not lost on Tarantino.
In genre terms, Once Upon a Time is a buddy film, a mode that reached its apogee in 1969 with the enormously successful Western Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid.
They come off as a lower-rent version of Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid-era Redford and Newman, all laconically snappy patented QT dialogue, Red Apple cigarettes, and booze-fueled late-night bullshit sessions.
DiCaprio and Pitt are a total joy to watch; both actors — weathered, wry and hangdoggish, on the cinematic cusp of crossing over from beautiful and sexy into handsome and distinguished — capture the casual insouciance and telegraphed sympathies of longtime running partners (think Redford and Newman in Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid).
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The widely reported carryings-on in Brokeback Mountain also reminded some reviewers of the supposedly subtextual implications of Howard Hawks’ Red River (1948), with John Wayne and the posthumously “outed” Montgomery Clift, as well as George Roy Hill’s Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid (1969), with Paul Newman and Robert Redford—the latter lacking even the gossipy whispers of Clift’s sexual orientation to sustain the subtextual suppositions.
Of course, bromantic action movies were around before we even knew what bros were; Black's idol, William Goldman, wrote the first modern one, "Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid."
The modern buddy comedy originally kicked off with “Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid,” but the screenwriter who juiced it up into its current knockabout voltage is Shane Black, when he wrote “Lethal Weapon” in 1987.
Here he draws from Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, L.A. Confidential, American Hustle, and many others, and feeds his influences through today’s postmodern comedic styles to get a potent result.
The camaraderie between Holmes and Watson will remind you of “Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid.” Holmes’ deductive clue processing is depicted in jarring, quick-cut, “CSI”-style flashbacks of things he’s seen, assimilated and filed away in his head.
They might even survive British gangster film director Guy Ritchie's effort to graft action-film architecture, digital effects and "Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid" camaraderie onto their legacy.
David Dobkin’s Wedding Crashers, from a screenplay by Steve Faber and Bob Fisher, is the most exhilarating entertainment to emerge this year from the failed, forlorn factory town of Hollywood, largely because of Owen Wilson and Vince Vaughn, the best high-low comedy team since the hey-hey days of Paul Newman and Robert Redford in George Roy Hill’s Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid (1969) and The Sting (1973).
…even dare to rip off the bicycle scene in Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid .
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Another great scene takes place in one of those big-box stores you see all over suburbia, a setting whose Middle American vibe gives director Doug Liman ample opportunity to have fun while staging the film's exciting, violent and deadpan-witty climax, which evokes everything from "The Wild Bunch" and "Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid" to the "Kill Bill" films.
“News of the World” casts an intimate gaze on the Western genre, and though Greengrass usually dabbles with action thrillers ala “Jason Bourne,” it’s remarkable to watch him expand on his filmography and use inspiration from “True Grit” and “Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid” to deliver an old-fashion Hollywood movie that, simply, doesn’t get made in the age of streaming.