Sightlines · how to watch
How to watch Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid
1969 · George Roy Hill · Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid on Sightlines
5 things to watch and listen for on a first viewing, without spoilers, and 3 more once you have seen it. Each names something you can see or hear, the pattern it belongs to, and what noticing it gives you. How these keys work.
On a first viewing
Watch the film start in scratched black-and-white sepia. (light)
The opening plays like a degraded silent film, title cards and all, before color arrives with the main titles.
Payoff: The film tells you up front that you are watching something already treated as history. In the reading: chronosign (time held). The reading calls this a chronosign: a picture stamped as already past, telling you up front that these men are already history.
Notice the amber, ochre, and dust in every frame. (light)
Hall lights interiors with natural sources and keeps the whole palette warm and golden, softer than a classical Western usually looks.
Payoff: The image already feels nostalgic before anything in the story asks it to.
Listen for a pop song with no period flavor. (sound)
Bacharach's score is light and melodic rather than orchestral, and a contemporary pop song plays over a turn-of-the-century bicycle ride.
Payoff: The music refuses to pretend this story happened a long time ago.
Compare how much each man talks and how much he watches. (performance)
Newman plays Butch as constant verbal energy while Redford's Sundance stays compressed and watchful, letting silence do his work.
Payoff: One man talks his way through danger, the other simply outlasts it.
Watch them joke their way through an actual gunfight. (staging)
Hill stages the shootouts with more interest in the two men's comic timing than in precise, heroic gunplay.
Payoff: The comedy is not a break from the danger, it is how they survive it. In the reading: consciousness-of-clichés. The reading calls this consciousness of clichés: men half aware they are living inside a genre whose old rules no longer protect them.
Once you have seen it
Watch the posse that never gets closer or falls behind. (structure)
The chase runs long and nearly wordless, and the pursuers are never identified or shaken, so the sequence itself becomes exhausting to sit through.
Payoff: You are made to feel the exhaustion of men who have run out of road. In the reading: crisis-of-the-action-image. The reading calls this the crisis of the action-image: two men who see clearly but have no action left that actually works.
Compare the robberies in Bolivia to the ones back home. (structure)
The same crimes recur in a smaller, dustier, sadder version of the same setup, so the flight delivers them right back to where they started.
Payoff: They travel a very long way just to arrive at their own doom again.
Watch the image freeze in the middle of the charge. (structure)
Hill stops time at their last defiant instant instead of showing the deaths, holding the frame while gunfire continues underneath it.
Payoff: The film arrests the moment instead of resolving it, so it can be looked at forever.
Carry this in: Watch the dust cloud behind them. The film never lets you see who is actually chasing them.