Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid
Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid is a 1969 American Western buddy film directed by George Roy Hill and written by William Goldman. Based loosely on fact, the film tells the story of Wild West outlaws Robert LeRoy Parker, known as Butch Cassidy (Paul Newman), and his partner Harry Longabaugh, the "Sundance Kid" (Robert Redford), who are on the run from a crack US posse after a string of train robberies. The pair and Sundance's lover, Etta Place (Katharine Ross), flee to Bolivia to escape the posse.
In 2003, the film was selected for preservation in the United States National Film Registry by the Library of Congress as being "culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant".[5][6] The American Film Institute ranked Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid as the 73rd-greatest American film on its "AFI's 100 Years...100 Movies (10th Anniversary Edition)" list, and number 50 on the original list. Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid were ranked 20th-greatest heroes on "AFI's 100 Years...100 Heroes & Villains". Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid was selected by the American Film Institute as the 7th-greatest Western of all time in the AFI's 10 Top 10 list in 2008.
Production[edit]
Screenplay[edit]
William Goldman first came across the story of Butch Cassidy in the late 1950s and researched intermittently for eight years before starting to write the screenplay.[7] Goldman says he wrote the story as an original screenplay because he did not want to do the research to make it as authentic as a novel.[8] Goldman later stated:
Release[edit]
Premieres[edit]
The world premiere of the film was on September 23, 1969, at the Roger Sherman Theater, in New Haven, Connecticut. The premiere was attended by Paul Newman, his wife Joanne Woodward, Robert Redford, George Roy Hill, William Goldman, and John Foreman, among others.[18] It opened the next day in New York City[1] at the Penthouse and Sutton theatres.[19]
Reception[edit]
Box office[edit]
The film grossed $82,625 in its opening week from two theatres in New York City.[19] The following week it expanded and became the number one film in the United States and Canada for two weeks.[20][21] It went on to earn $15 million in theatrical rentals in the United States and Canada by the end of 1969.[22] According to Fox records the film required $13,850,000 in rentals to break even and by December 11, 1970, had made $36,825,000 so made a considerable profit to the studio.[23] It eventually returned $45,953,000 in rentals.[24]
With a final US gross of over $100 million, it was the top-grossing film released in 1969.[25]
It was the eighth-most-popular film of 1970 in France.[26]
Critical response[edit]
At the time of release, reviewers gave the film mediocre grades, and New York and national reviews were "mixed to terrible" though better elsewhere, screenwriter William Goldman recalled in his book Which Lie Did I Tell?: More Adventures in the Screen Trade.[27]
New York Times film reviewer Vincent Canby wrote that the film is "very funny in a strictly contemporary way," but said that "at the heart of the film there is a gnawing emptiness that can't be satisfied by an awareness that Hill and Goldman knew exactly what they were doing---making a very slick movie." He described the "Raindrops" sequence as part of an effort to "play tricks on the audience" by "taking short cuts to lyricism." The performers, Canby wrote, "succeed although the movie does not."[28]
Time magazine said the film's two male stars are "afflicted with cinematic schizophrenia. One moment they are sinewy, battered remnants of a discarded tradition. The next, they are low comedians whose chaffing relationship—and dialogue—could have been lifted from a Batman and Robin episode." Time criticized the "Raindrops" sequence and the "scat-singing sound track by Burt Bacharach at his most cacophonous," which it said made the film "absurd and anachronistic."[29]
Roger Ebert's review of the movie was a mixed 2.5 out of 4 stars. He praised the beginning of the film and its three lead actors, but felt the film progressed too slowly and had an unsatisfactory ending. But after Harriman hires his posse, Ebert thought the movie's quality declined: "Hill apparently spent a lot of money to take his company on location for these scenes, and I guess when he got back to Hollywood he couldn't bear to edit them out of the final version. So the Super-posse chases our heroes unceasingly, until we've long since forgotten how well the movie started."[30] Ebert reaffirmed his review in 1989 stating that he still thought it was a "turkey" and was baffled by its success.[31]
Gene Siskel also disliked the film stating he thought it was predictable and writing that it was “too cute to be believed … not memorable.”[32] Siskel would later admit in 1989 that publishing his negative review was one of his first challenges as film critic recalling that the editorial assistant was shocked that he was giving a bad review to a film starring Paul Newman and would give him a lesson that he had to be honest as a critic, no matter how unpopular his opinion would be.[33]