Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid is a 1969 American Western buddy film directed by George Roy Hill and written by William Goldman.
Based loosely on fact, the film tells the story of Wild West outlaws Robert LeRoy Parker, known as Butch Cassidy (Paul Newman), and his partner Harry Longabaugh, the "Sundance Kid" (Robert Redford), who are on the run from a crack US posse after a string of train robberies.
The pair and Sundance's lover, Etta Place (Katharine Ross), flee to Bolivia to escape the posse.
Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid was selected by the American Film Institute as the 7th-greatest Western of all time in the AFI's 10 Top 10 list in 2008.
The two return to their hideout at Hole-in-the-Wall to discover that the rest of the gang, irked at Cassidy's long absences, have selected Harvey Logan as their new leader.
Cassidy defeats him using trickery, but embraces Logan's idea to rob a Union Pacific train on both its eastward and westward runs, agreeing that the second robbery would be unexpected and thus reap more money than the first.
The crack squad pursues Cassidy and Sundance, who try to hide out in the brothel, and then to seek amnesty from Sheriff Bledsoe, to no avail.
The posse remains in pursuit, and it includes renowned Indian tracker "Lord Baltimore" and lawman Joe Lefors, recognizable by his white skimmer.
Cassidy suggests "going straight", and he and Sundance land their first honest job as payroll guards for a mining company.
The pair charge out of the building, guns blazing, into a hail of bullets from the massed troops who have occupied all the surrounding vantage points.
William Goldman first came across the story of Butch Cassidy in the late 1950s and researched intermittently for eight years before starting to write the screenplay.
[8]The characters' flight to South America caused one executive to reject the script, as it was then unusual in Western films for the protagonists to flee.
[9] According to Goldman, when he first wrote the script and sent it out for consideration, only one studio wanted to buy it—and that was with the proviso that the two lead characters did not flee to South America.
"[10] The role of Sundance was offered to Jack Lemmon, whose production company, JML, had produced the film Cool Hand Luke (1967) starring Newman.
Lemmon, however, turned down the role because he did not like riding horses and felt that he had already played too many aspects of the Sundance Kid's character before.
These areas remain popular film tourism destinations, including the Cassidy Trail in Red Canyon.
The premiere was attended by Paul Newman, his wife Joanne Woodward, Robert Redford, George Roy Hill, William Goldman, and John Foreman, among others.
Time criticized the "Raindrops" sequence and the "scat-singing sound track by Burt Bacharach at his most cacophonous", which it said made the film "absurd and anachronistic".
But after Harriman hires his posse, Ebert thought the quality declined: "Hill apparently spent a lot of money to take his company on location for these scenes, and I guess when he got back to Hollywood he couldn't bear to edit them out of the final version.
[32] Siskel would later admit in 1989 that publishing his negative review was one of his first challenges as film critic, recalling that the editorial assistant was shocked that he was giving a bad review to a film starring Paul Newman and would give him a lesson that he had to be honest as a critic, no matter how unpopular his opinion.
The site's critical consensus reads: "With its iconic pairing of Paul Newman and Robert Redford, jaunty screenplay and Burt Bacharach score, Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid has gone down as among the defining moments in late-'60s American cinema.
[49] The film inspired the television series Alias Smith and Jones, starring Pete Duel and Ben Murphy as outlaws trying to earn an amnesty.
[citation needed] In September 2022, Amazon Studios announced a television adaptation, starring Regé-Jean Page and Glen Powell.