Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid (1969)

There's a moment early in Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid where you realise you're not watching a Western in any traditional sense. The guns are there, the wide open landscapes are there, but the whole thing is draped in such effortless cool, such dry, deadpan wit, that it feels closer to a hangout film than an outlaw picture. And honestly, that's precisely what makes it work as well as it does.

Paul Newman and Robert Redford are the engine of everything here. Newman's Butch is all smooth talk and half-baked schemes, the kind of man who could talk his way into a bank and probably talk his way back out again. Redford's Sundance is his perfect foil: quieter, quicker on the draw, with a dry humour that lands because he never seems to be trying for it. Together they're electric. The chemistry between them doesn't feel performed. It feels like two blokes who've genuinely been riding together for years and have long since stopped needing to explain themselves to each other. You believe in the friendship completely, and that belief carries the whole film.

The early sections are where the film really sings. The heists are stylish and fun, the chase sequences are genuinely thrilling, and George Roy Hill shoots the Utah landscape with a painter's eye. There's a freewheeling energy to it all that's completely infectious. This is the kind of film that makes you sit forward in your chair without quite realising you've done it.

But I'd be doing you a disservice if I pretended it was flawless. The middle section, particularly once the action shifts to Bolivia, loses a fair amount of momentum. There's a repetitive quality to it that, yes, serves the theme of two men slowly being overtaken by a world that no longer has room for them, but knowing why something is slow doesn't make it less slow. The spark of that first act dims, and it takes a while to get it back.

I've got similarly mixed feelings about the Burt Bacharach score. "Raindrops Keep Fallin' on My Head" is a lovely song in isolation, but dropped into this film it sits awkwardly, too breezy, too soft, never quite matching the weight of what the story is building towards. It's one of those soundtrack choices that became iconic precisely because it was so unexpected, but unexpected doesn't always mean right.

Still, none of that undoes what the film gets right, and what it gets right it gets magnificently. If you've seen Newman and Redford reteam in The Sting, you'll know just how rare that kind of double-act chemistry is. Here it's every bit as good, perhaps even a little more raw around the edges, which suits the material perfectly.

And then there's the ending. I won't describe it for anyone who's somehow managed to avoid it, but that final freeze-frame is one of the most haunting images the Western genre has ever produced. It's the kind of ending that stays with you, that turns everything you've just watched into something slightly elegiac. Two legends, caught forever at the moment before the world catches up with them. It's quietly devastating.

Three and a half stars.

Brilliantly acted, beautifully shot, and absolutely worth your time, with the caveat that you might want a top-up on your pint for the Bolivian stretch. A defining film of its era, and proof that charm, real charm, never really goes out of style.

Rating: ★★★½  | Year: 1969  | Watched: 2025-09-28

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Related on Movies With Macca

More from George Roy Hill: The Sting (1973)
More with Paul Newman: The Sting (1973) · Cars (2006)
More from the 1960s: Viy (1967) · Persona (1966) · Carnival of Souls (1962) · Daisies (1966)
More adventure: Alice in Wonderland (1951) · The Eagle (1925) · Louisiana Story (1948) · The General (1926)
More western: The Ox-Bow Incident (1943) · Rio Bravo (1959) · Ride Lonesome (1959) · The Great Train Robbery (1903)