And, in point of fact, I have a hard time thinking of it as a Western, despite the desert settings, the horse-chases, the posses, the train robberies, the clapboard houses, the sense of a passing age, all the traditional acoutrements of the classic westerns, but done coyly, cutely, and with an eye towards having a good punch-line (but not much point). It's a Western trying to be modern, but saying it's true to the period.
Where it does bear the stamp of a traditional western is its through-line of Butch and the Kid being temporary things, caught in the period between the Civil War and the Industrial Age, where the "old ways," with their easily slipped-through dependence on civilization (and the inherent difficulties achieving it in a frontier environment), are replaced by organization, technology, and machine-like precision that are a threat to outliers, dependent on improvisation and fast getaways. The advancements of the 20th Century—bicycles and streets and (gulp!) dynamite—while all well and good, are an impending threat to scraping out an existence on the land, even if the way you do it is scraping other people's existence.
"Think ya used enough dynamite, there, Butch?" |
No wonder they go to Bolivia. It's still the Wild West down South, while the U.S. becomes gentrified and outgrows outlaws. There's a serious thought in there amongst the yuck-lines and the counter-intuitive Bacharach bubba-bubba choruses glossing over the action sequences. As much as Hill, Goldman and Bacharach try to make it larky and fun, it's still doom-laden, without the inherent triumph of civilization over chaos that provides the spine and invigorates—and makes hopeful—most Western films.
"You crazy? The FALL'll probably KILL you!" |
One thing you can't fault is the cinematography of Conrad Hall. |
The Final Shot |
Period photography in the film (above)
and the real Sundance, Etta (Ethel) and Butch at Cholila Ranch (below)
* Just the year before, Sam Peckinpah made another Western about another Hole-in-the-Wall gang with the same arc of old-timers growing too old to see times change and survive. That movie was his masterpiece, The Wild Bunch, which created a revisionist kind of Western, that, along with Sergio Leone's Italian Western series, re-made the Western genre from the form that had become ubiquitous on American television sets in the late 1950's and early 1960's..
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