Matinee: Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid

(George Roy Hill, US 1969, 110 min., DCP)

Newman, already nominated for five Academy Awards at this time, teams up with rising actor Robert Redford for the first time in this revisionist Western. Butch (Newman) and Sundance (Redford) are directionless outlaws in the last year of the 19th century. Butch robs only to support his lifestyle of booze and women, while Sundance envisions a future with lovely schoolteacher Etta Place (Katharine Ross). When the duo and their gang decide to rob the Union Pacific train both coming and going the company decides to hire the best men to track them down and kill them. Fleeing for their lives, the outlaws head to Bolivia, but the looming specter of their downfall isn’t so easy to evade. The chemistry between the leads belies a meditation on both the end of the Wild West and of the 1960s.