Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid (1969)

Released the same year as The Wild Bunch, Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid covered similar territory about the end of Western myths, but it expressed its revisionism with tongue firmly in cheek rather than with the brutal violence of Sam Peckinpah's offering. Butch and Sundance never lose their gift for one-liners, even when they have to jump off that gorge; George Roy Hill and screenwriter William Goldman send up the image of outlaws heading south of the border with bank robberies conducted in broken Spanish from crib notes. Still, violence impinges on Butch's and Sundance's world, intimating the fate that modernity held for charming bandits who cannot master a horse-replacing bicycle. The jocularly clear-eyed approach to the pair's exploits, combined with the chemistry between Paul Newman and relative newcomer Robert Redford, vastly appealed to audiences; Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid became the most popular film of 1969 and won several Oscars, including one for Goldman's script. Like Bonnie and Clyde in 1967, glamorous outlaws Butch and Sundance were in tune with the late-'60s counterculture, but the movie's humor -- and its Oscar-winning Burt Bacharach/Hal David song "Raindrops Keep Falling on My Head" -- softened the revisionist blows amid impending tragedy. ~ Lucia Bozzola, All Movie Guide