Review of Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid
My initial interest in watching this came from the costars: I figured I couldn't go wrong with Robert Redford and Paul Newman together. But I also watched it because the university movie theater in my new town (Madison, WI) is going to be playing a bunch of classic movies over the next few months, including Sam Peckinpah Westerns. In their online blurb for Peckinpah's The Wild Bunch, the movie theater people explicitly contrasted that movie's blood and grit with Butch Cassidy's freeze-frame, doomed-but-heroic ending. They further suggested that anyone who hadn't seen Butch Cassidy should watch it to get an idea of what "ordinary" Westerns were like in 1969, to more properly appreciate the contrast presented by a revisionist Western like The Wild Bunch that came out the same year.