Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid Review

Goldman's screenplay is the reason this endures and it is worth being specific about why. He wrote two men who talk like modern people in 1899, quick and self deprecating and constantly undercutting each other, so the eventual tragedy lands on characters you have been laughing with rather than merely admiring. Newman and Redford have chemistry that no amount of rehearsal produces, and Katharine Ross is given more to play than the genre usually allows before the Bolivia section forgets about her.

Conrad Hall shoots the pursuit sequences in washed sepia and the freeze frame ending is one of the few times a stylistic trick has genuinely improved on showing the thing itself. The bicycle interlude with the Burt Bacharach song is the film at its most 1969 and the part that has aged worst. The middle of the picture drifts, and the superposse chase goes on long past the point where it has made its argument. Then the last shot arrives and the drifting turns out to have been the point.