Film Stories From The Book:
Hollywood of the Rockies
By: Frederic B. Wildfang
Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid
1969 — 20th Century Fox — produced by John Foreman — written by William Goldman, directed by George Roy Hill, photography by Conrad Hall, music by Burt Bacharach — starring Paul Newman, Robert Redford, and Katharine Ross
Academy Award Nominations: Best Picture, Direction
Academy Awards: Best Screenplay, Photography, Music, and Song (“Raindrops Keep Fallin’ on My Head,” Music by Burt Bacharach, Lyrics by Hal David)
Humorous, cheerful, poetic, cinematic account of two semi-legendary outlaws, winningly acted and directed. One of the decade’s great commercial successes, not least because of the song ‘Raindrops Keep Fallin’ on My Head.’ — Halliwell’s Film Guide
This popular western (for the most part based on historical fact) doesn’t really have much of a plot. Butch Cassidy (Paul Newman) and The Sundance Kid (Robert Redford) try to rob one too many trains and find themselves on the lam — along with Sundance’s girlfriend (Katharine Ross) — ultimately ending up in Bolivia, where — after several humorous attempts at robbing banks — they are caught in one of the most famous shoot-outs ever filmed.
As Director George Roy Hill points out (in an article published in the Durango Herald in 1968), Butch Cassidy and The Sundance Kid is really more of a “character study.” It’s “more than even an ‘adult’ western,” Hill continues, “it’s not a western at all”:
‘The western became an American morality play and practically up to today, good guys wore white hats; they were clean-living men who could outride, outshoot and outfight any villain because their hearts were pure and bad guys were real varmints, black-hearted, one dimensional villains who paid for their crimes before the hero walked into the sunset, with or without the preacher’s daughter or a now-reformed dancehall girl in the saddle....’
Butch Cassidy was just too likeable to fit into this kind of traditional Western.
‘...as a character study, Butch Cassidy’s story couldn’t have been put on the screen before. He was an affable man, who chose to be an outlaw as others decided to be lawyers or dentists. He never killed anybody until he and the Sundance Kid were in South America and in fact once rode away from a train robbery when it became apparent that bloodshed would be unavoidable....
‘Basically, Butch Cassidy was a too complex character to be molded into the morality play of early screenfare.... His story simply couldn’t have been told before.’
Moreover, the plot itself (what plot there is) is also non-traditional — “reversed with twists and revised cliches.” Take the scene when Butch and Sundance dynamite the boxcar and accidentally blow up the whole train. This scene — shot on the Florida Mesa, 15 miles southeast of Durango — was a surprise for everyone, including the actors and the crew. As reported in an article published in the Durango Herald in 1993:
According to the screenplay, the express car is guarded by Woodcock (George Furth), a sandy-haired young man with an unusual amount of loyalty to Mr. Harriman of the Union Pacific. When Woodcock refuses to open the express car, the gang dynamites the car, blowing it, the safe and Woodcock to hell and gone. They gather up the loot, leaving a very shaken Woodcock behind.’
According to Don Demarest, who worked with movie companies on location and served as the Durango Film Commissioner from 1956 until 1986 the mailcar was a movie ‘extra’ built of balsa wood at the roundhouse.
Dollar bills were taped to the roof, and big fans were placed along the track to blow the money up in the air because the explosion wasn’t expected to be very strong.
Demarest says the special effects men laced the mailcar with black powder — too much powder — and everyone was surprised by the powerful explosion. Cameramen had to stop filming so crew members could pick up the pieces of the car and throw them back into the camera’s frame.
Probably one of the reasons this movie was such a commercial success was because it broke with tradition. Probably is was also a success because of the warm and good-humored nature of the relationship between Cassidy and Sundance — as portrayed by Newman and Redford. Remember the scene where they make their long jump into the river, for instance. Just before the jump, we hear Sundance confessing that he can’t swim. “Hell,” replies Cassidy, “the fall’s gonna kill ya.”
Interestingly, as the Herald reports, “Through movie magic, Newman and Redford jump off rocks near Baker’s Bridge,” but in the next frame, two stunt me “are sailing through the air and landing in a river in California.”
‘This is a very risky sequence,’ said technical adviser Fred Zendar, who is in charge of water safety for the movie company....
‘In this picture,’ he said, ‘the bandits take a long, long leap into the water. It will be done by stunt men, of course. My job has been to make the water a little more turbulent than it actually is; we’ve created a few rapids.
Zendar went on to say that he and his crew have set a V-shaped block in the Animas. The water builds up behind it, rushes around it and creates rapids.
‘The camera will give the illusion of going down with the jumpers. In other words, the audience too will fall 70 feet. It’ll be a stunning scene....’
One of the most successful Westerns of all time, Butch Cassidy and The Sundance Kid won two Academy Award nominations — Best Picture and Direction — and four Academy Awards — Best Screenplay, Cinematography, Original Score and Best Song.
