Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid

Not that it matters, but most of it is true.
Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid (1969)
Timing: 1:51 (111 min)
8/10
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7.6/10
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8/10
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Release date
Country
Budget
$6 000 000
Revenue
$102 309 026
Website
Director
Scenario
Producer
John Foreman, Paul Newman, Paul Monash
Operator
Composer
Artist
Audition
Michael McLean
Editing
John C. Howard, Richard C. Meyer
All team (54)

Short description

As the west rapidly becomes civilized, a pair of outlaws in 1890s Wyoming find themselves pursued by a posse and decide to flee to South America in hopes of evading the law.

What's left behind the scenes

  • The sister of the real Butch Cassidy often visited the film set and readily shared stories about her brother. After filming wrapped, she even agreed to appear in an advertisement for the film for a nominal fee.
  • To show how riders on horseback jump out of the train, they left a door open on the opposite side of the train and placed ramps leading up to the train so they wouldn’t be visible in the shot. In reality, the horses wouldn’t have been able to jump out of the train so picturesquely, as there wouldn’t have been enough room for them inside.
  • During the filming of the final shootout, stuntman Jimmy Arnett (who was also Paul Newman's double) was injured in a fall from a height. The fall put him out of action for three months.
  • Harvey Logan (played by Ted Cassidy) is portrayed in the film as a brainless thug, although in reality, he was extremely polite and courteous to women, but this politeness concealed the nature of a cold-blooded killer. He was known for his famous escape from the Knoxville, Tennessee prison in 1902. As with Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, his officially announced death during a train robbery in 1904 was disputed by a variety of mutually exclusive and contradictory witness accounts, who in subsequent years claimed to have seen him on different continents.
  • Screenwriter William Goldman made Katharine Ross's character a schoolteacher because he saw her photograph and decided she was too young and beautiful to be a prostitute. On all the pictures of prostitutes in the Wild West that he had seen, they invariably looked exhausted, unhealthy, and vulgar.
  • When it turned out that Paul Newman’s stunt double couldn’t ride a bicycle, Newman had to perform all the bicycle stunts himself. He performed all the stunt scenes except the one where he crashes into the fence. In that scene, cinematographer Conrad L. Hall was in the bicycle seat instead of him.
  • The river jump was filmed at a ranch near Malibu, California, owned by the film studio. Paul Newman and Robert Redford's stunt doubles jumped from a crane, which was hidden behind a painted cliff in the shot.
  • Robert Redford wanted to perform all his stunts himself. His co-star Paul Newman was particularly worried about Redford's desire to jump onto the roof of a moving train and run across the car roofs. He told Redford not to play the hero and that he didn't want to lose his co-star.
  • Redford named the mountain estate he acquired with his film earnings after his character, and a ski resort of the same name subsequently arose there. Now, it hosts the American Sundance Film Festival, founded by Redford.
  • All the Bolivian scenes were filmed in Mexico, where almost all the actors and crew members, including director George Roy Hill, suffered from diarrhea caused by drinking dirty water (the quality of drinking water there was always poor). Only Robert Redford, Paul Newman, and Katharine Ross escaped this affliction, as they never drank the water delivered to the set and only consumed bottled water and alcohol.
  • On the first day of filming, when they were shooting the train robbery, Katharine Ross came to watch the proceedings on set. There were five cameras but only four camera operators, so operator Conrad L. Hall enlisted the actress and briefly explained to her how to operate a camera. Director George Roy Hill was angered by this, but he remained silent during filming and only at the end of the day did he finally give vent to his feelings and forbade the actress from coming to the set on days when scenes involving her were not being filmed.
  • It is known that Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid were killed on November 7, 1908, in Bolivia, but no exact information about the location of their burial has been preserved. This has given rise to various "conspiracy theories" about whether their deaths were actually staged, or whether someone else was killed in their place.
  • Robert LeRoy Parker's (Butch) and Harry Alonzo Longbaugh's (Sundance Kid) criminal gang was actually called the “Wild Bunch.” However, since another film with that title had been released earlier that year, the creators of “Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid” decided to rename the gang to “The Hole in the Wall” in their film.
  • Butch Cassidy (whose real name was Robert LeRoy Parker) received the nickname “Butch” because he once worked as a butcher (from the English “butcher”). The Sundance Kid (whose real name was Harry Alonzo Longbaugh) received the nickname “Sundance” because he was once arrested in the town of Sundance, Wyoming.
  • Paul Newman didn't want to play Butch, and to prove his point, he even asked director George Roy Hill to watch Leo McCarey's 1958 comedy, "Rally 'Round the Flag, Boys!", in which he played the lead role, considering it one of the worst of his acting career. Hill replied that Newman wouldn't have to crack wise constantly in his film.

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