Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid
Not that it matters, but most of it is true.
Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid (1969)
Budget
$6 000 000
Revenue
$102 308 889
Director
Scenario
Composer
Producer
John Foreman
Actors
Paul Newman
Butch Cassidy
Robert Redford
The Sundance Kid
Katharine Ross
Etta Place
Strother Martin
Percy Garris
Henry Jones
Bike Salesman
Jeff Corey
Sheriff Bledsoe
George Furth
Woodcock
Cloris Leachman
Agnes
Short description
Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid is a Western set in the late 1890s, as the American frontier is closing. Butch leads a gang of train and bank robbers, with Sundance as his trusted partner and the group's best shot. After they rob the same Union Pacific train twice, the railroad company hires a posse of skilled trackers to hunt them down. Unable to shake off their pursuers, the two men, joined by Sundance's companion Etta Place, leave the country for Bolivia, hoping to escape the law and start again. The film was directed by George Roy Hill from a screenplay by William Goldman, and produced by John Foreman. It stars Paul Newman as Butch, Robert Redford as Sundance, and Katharine Ross as Etta, with supporting turns from Strother Martin, Henry Jones and Jeff Corey.
The film was released in September 1969 and runs 111 minutes. It was made for about 6 million dollars and earned roughly 102 million dollars worldwide, a large return on its budget. It sits second in Hill's filmography, between Hawaii and Slaughterhouse-Five, and preceded his later work with Newman and Redford on The Sting.
On IMDb it holds 8 out of 10 from around 239,000 votes, while on TMDB it scores 7.6 out of 10 from roughly 2,500 votes. A critics' rating of 8.4 out of 10 from 63 reviews places it above the audience scores.
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.
- 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.
- 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.
- 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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