Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid (2-Disc Collector's Edition)

Rating PG Formats DVD Genre action Starring Paul Newman, Robert Redford, Katharine Ross, Strother Martin, Henry Jones Directed by George Roy Hill Publisher 20th Century Fox External Links Official 20th Century Fox Website

I have a friend who is a sommelier. Recently, there was a big noise about an international blind taste test that compared aged French wines to new American vintages. The American wines won in all five categories. I asked my friend if he thought this meant that American wines were now the standard. No, he told me. The difference between them is that the French wines age beautifully, but the American imitations suffer from a short shelf life.

Expanding this metaphor to the movies, it's easy to see George Roy Hill's Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid (1969) as a very fine California red. Full-bodied and tasty, this homage to the power of blue eyes and nice teeth still goes down well but is also a little worse for having lain upon the shelf.

When Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid first arrived, it felt like a revelation. Throughout the late 60's, American filmmakers were gleefully adapting the cinematic grammar of the French New Wave to hidebound genres. Arthur Penn's Bonnie and Clyde (1967) led the charge by deconstructing the gangster film and rebuilding it into a zippy yet elegiac myth. Two years later, Hill would use Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid to adapt the same approach to the western. The result was a film that added a modern-day sensibility to the age-old structure of one of American cinemas' preeminent contributions to world culture. Gone was the deliberate mythologizing of John Ford and Howard Hawkes, Hill and screenwriter William Goldman replaced this with a knowing and ironic wit, a wink to the audience that said, "C'mon, we know this is false. Let's just enjoy it."

The inspirations for Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid are manifold and at times incongruous. For this reason alone it would seem to be more New Wave than Hollywood. The movie's most famous sequence, Newman and Katharine Ross cycling to the strains of B.J. Thomas' "Raindrops Keep Falling on My Head," deliberately jolts our sense of time and place by introducing a modern song to a story of the old west. Structurally and thematically, Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid plays like an old west version of Francois Truffaut's Jules and Jim, clearly a greater source of inspiration than anything starring Randolph Scott or John Wayne.

Such borrowings made Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid a breath of fresh air. 1969 was still early in Hollywood's "Second Golden Age" and so this film's overwhelming success was both unexpected and inspirational. Hollywood's schizophrenia at this point is clearly seen when looking at its fellow nominees for Best Picture that year. Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid would have to compete against two other modernist works, eventual winner Midnight Cowboy and Z, and two traditional, galumphing and moribund studio spectacles, Hello, Dolly! and Anne of a Thousand Days.

But what about 2006? How has this particular wine fared now that it has sat upon the shelf for nearly forty years?

Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid is still fun, but like most things that pride themselves on modernity, it has certainly aged. At this point, the fresh stylistic advances that made the film so pertinent to 1969 seem as calcified as the then-outdated ideas that they were setting out to sabotage. Unseen at the time, the fatal flaw of drawing so much inspiration from one specific source is that Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid is about Truffaut's film more than it is about anything personal to the filmmakers or pertinent to the audience. The result is that Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid comes across as a quaint reflexive period piece, a pleasant throwback to the 60's that evokes more nostalgia than actual amusement.

Is this a bad thing? Not really. Pleasures found are pleasures enjoyed, but one does watch Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid with a twinge of desire for the more timeless vintage of a French classic.

Fox Home Video has released Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid in a Special Edition...for the second time. This one includes the same commentary track and "making of" with the addition of a few short appreciations to make it different from the first one. The transfer is fair to middling. Much of Conrad Hall's dappled sunlight imagery comes across as too diffuse for the exacting resolution of a 16x9 screen.