BUTCH AND SUNDANCE’S BLAZE OF GLORY

Though William Goldman’s screenplay gave real-life train-robbers Robert LeRoy Parker, AKA Butch Cassidy, and Harry Longabaugh, AKA the Sundance Kid, a death scene (“Butch dodging and cutting and, as a pattern of bullets rips into his body, he somersaults and lies there, pouring blood...”), audiences never saw it.

Instead director George Roy Hill chose to keep the duo’s myth intact, freeze-framing them in their 1969 prime as the wounded outlaws run from their cover, defiantly shooting their last as they face the Bolivian army’s lethal gunfire. Although we know the historical truth – that Butch and Sundance died in a hail of bullets and were buried in unmarked graves – Paul Newman and Robert Redford had created such a bromantic, indelible onscreen twosome that we perhaps hope that, in preserving them in sepia, they never really die. That effect wasn’t intentional; Hill put his back out during filming in a market square in Tlayacapan in central Mexico, and was being carried around set on a stretcher. Wanting to wrap up fast, and admitting “I have no stomach for violence”, he devised closing on a freeze-frame. “While being driven to and from location, I managed to figure out the whole ending, and I don’t think I would have done so had I not been so incapacitated.”

The charisma and chemistry of his two leads may not have worked out quite as well had the roles gone to the original choices. Goldman researched the script on and off for eight years – “[Butch and Sundance] ran to South America and lived there for eight years and that was what thrilled me: they had a second act. They were more legendary in South America than they had been in the old West... It just seems to me it’s a wonderful piece of material” – and intended the role of Butch for Jack Lemmon. When he passed on it, Steve McQueen was pencilled in alongside Newman. The king of cool backed out after topbilling disagreements and relative newbie, 30-year-old Redford – fresh off his success with Barefoot In The Park – stepped in. “I didn’t feel in rehearsal that anything special was happening, but then I never do,” Redford reflected later of the special bond between him and Newman that made the film such a hit, “but we developed a lifelong friendship out of it.” JC