The Film
Butch Cassidy and The Sundance Kid was director George Roy Hill's 1969 reinvention of the flagging Western genre. Taking as its protagonists the historical train robber figures Butch Cassidy (Paul Newman) and The Sundance Kid (Robert Redford), the film tore down the clichés of the Western, focusing less on gunplay and good versus evil and more on humor and camaraderie.
The story follows Butch and Sundance in the late 19th and early 20th century and finds them as outlaws who have outlived their time. As they rob one train too many, they are eventually hunted down by a super-posse of lawmen, and so decide to head to New York City, hometown of Sundance, with Sundance's girlfriend, schoolteacher Etta Place (Katharine Ross). They try to go straight, but they soon get a hankering for more action, which leads them to South America - Bolivia, to be exact. From there the trio set to robbing banks, at first a humorous endeavor given the little Spanish that Butch and Sundance speak.
In Bolivia, Butch and Sundance, now known as los banditos Yanquis, become more infamous than they were in the United States, and quickly have the Bolivian officials in pursuit of them. All the while their friendship is tested and they stay together through it all, with their senses of humor intact.
At the time of its release, Butch Cassidy and The Sundance Kid was widely panned by most critics for being a farce of the Western genre. Many saw it as an affront to the values of Western filmmaking. It was as if George Roy Hill, they thought, was deliberately parodying the form. On the contrary, Hill, not being familiar with the genre at all, was the perfect person to breathe new life into a genre that had grown stale and was doing a perfect job at parodying itself.
Butch Cassidy and The Sundance Kid is a pleasure to watch still, because it stands out from the rest of the genre and does not simply recycle the same themes and reuse the same scenes from every other Western. It is comedic, lighthearted, and yet serious all at once. I recommend it to anyone, even those who think they don't like Westerns.
The Picture
Butch Cassidy and The Sundance Kid is presented on this Blu-ray Disc in its original theatrical aspect ratio of 2.35:1 in a high definition 1080p/24 MPEG-2 encoding. Although the transfer looks very film-like, capturing much of the source's original film grain, it also portrays the original film's softness with great accuracy as well. This is not a sharp-looking film whatsoever.
The color palette is quite vibrant -- greens and blues nearly explode from the screen, but flesh tones suffer as a result looking too red and unnatural. Black levels are tempered, with blacks looking washed out in the darkest of scenes and shadow detail being lost in a bit of low-level compression noise. Fox could have done a little bit more work cleaning up the source for this film as there are a few scratches and dust particles that appear every so often as well. Overall, it's not the worst I have seen, but it is not top-tier either.
The Sound
English DTS-HD MA Lossless 5.1, as well as English, Spanish, and French Dolby Digital mono mixes are offered on this release. I listened to the DTS-HD MA 5.1 mix for the purposes of this review, but as I do not yet have the capability of decoding DTS-HD MA in my player (Panasonic DMP-BD10) nor streaming it to my receiver, I could only access the "core" lossy DTS track (1.5 Mbps).
I start by saying that, although the 5.1 mix does add a bit of air to the soundstage, there is not much of a benefit over the original monaural mix. Not much use is made of the surround channels, but for some ambience and the occasional "escape" of some gunfire into the rear. The LFE is, however, put to very good use, adding much weight to the sound of the special effects, making them seem very realistic. Dialogue sounds a bit dull and squeezed with a tendency to distort slightly in the louder passages.
The Extras
The extras proffered are mildly entertaining, but unfortunately all video extras are in standard definition. The "Making of" featurette actually offers a surprising amount of interesting background information on the film, such as how Steve McQueen and Marlon Brando were originally considered for the role of The Sundance Kid. It is well worth a watch. Extras included on the disc are:
Where to Buy
Final Thoughts
This is a classic genre-bending film that any fan of good filmmaking should see at least once in their life. Although the picture and sound quality are not absolute demo material, they surely are above any previous release, making this Blu-ray Disc release well worth it for any fan of this film or of the Western genre in general.
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