Rain Drops Keep Fallin'

Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid (BCBK) is perhaps the best western movie I have ever seen! That’s saying a lot coming from someone who can’t sit through a western. I am not aware of how this story was created. The film does mention that what follows is mostly true, but in any case, it’s a great film. It stars Robert Redford and Paul Newman with a supporting role from Katherine Ross. The story is of two men who rob banks for a living but do it in a quite unconventional manner. The comedy is first rate. The two exchange zingers and one liners in highly stressful situations.

The premise sounds a bit boring, but the story gets interesting when a train is robbed twice and the owner of the stolen money hires a posse to round up the criminals. The pair ride and hide for days, but the heat on them never dies down, so they decide to move to Bolivia and do the same there. They even go straight and get jobs analogous to armored truck drivers for a while in Bolivia. I won’t give away the ending, but it does these characters justice because it makes them legends.

The best part of this film is how it never attempts to make a point or send us a message. It simply offers an account of these character’s lives. How they know what they are doing is wrong but do it anyway is amazing. I suppose we generalize and think of criminals as individuals who resort to crime because they lack the ability to make an honest living, but here the skills of these two make it possible for them to be involved in crime. That was quite a unique spin; I thought.

Another aspect of this film that is striking is how bank robbery seems so easy yet so difficult. In the days before cameras and laws barring persons from carrying firearms into banks, robberies seem to be very easy to commit. However, we come to see the new plethora of problems the bank robber encounters. Blood thirsty posses and having to make a run in the wilderness are just two of the things that are shown so well. Oh, I also loved how Bolivia was incorporated into the story. In the US, we have this silly idea of the rest of the world not seeming to exist prior to the 1900’s or so. Since we are such a young county, we kind of feel like all of the other countries are the same. In any case, this film kind of screamed that other nations existed and had all of the social components we have and have had.

The acting is first rate, the sets and locations are awesome, and the way time is elapsed is very clever. Still life photographs in B&W are show to give background information. Going from a color film to this was a nice idea. I can’t explain how, but in a way, the viewer kind is fooled in to thinking he knows the characters personally since he has seen their personal photographs.

You just have to see it for yourself! I can’t put into a review how good this is. The “Rain Drops” sequence is the best 2-5 minutes of filming ever! Katherine Ross never looked better!