Monday, February 3, 2014

BUCKET LIST UPDATE No. 120: Watch “Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid” (1969)

Last summer, one of my favorite Web sites, “The Art of Manliness,” published a best-of list called the “17 Best Western Movies.” On that list, they ranked 1969’s “Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid” at No. 2, right between “The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford” and “The Good, the Bad and the Ugly.” It dawned on me at the time that while I’d seen parts of “Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid,” I couldn’t honestly say that I’d seen the entire movie from start to finish.


For that reason, I put “Watch ‘Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid’” on my bucket list a couple of years ago, and I finally got around to watching it during the past week. Thanks to NetFlix, I received the movie in the mail early last week, just in time for the winter storm that hit Alabama and kept me from getting out of the house for a couple of days. It was during that time that I scratched this classic Western film off my bucket list.

For those of you unfamiliar with the movie, it was directed by George Roy Hill and debuted in theatres in October 1969. The cast included Paul Newman as Butch Cassidy, Robert Redford as the Sundance Kid and Katharine Ross as Etta Place. Sam Elliott also played a bit part in the movie.

The movie is loosely based on the real life exploits of Robert LeRoy Parker and Harry Longabaugh, two outlaws who went by the nicknames of “Butch Cassidy” and the “Sundance Kid,” respectively. Etta Place was one of their sidekicks and was Longabaugh’s girlfriend in the movie. Along with the Hole in the Wall Gang, they carry out a long string of successful bank and train robberies.

They’re so successful that a group of bounty hunters are hired to track them down and kill them to bring an end to their reign of terror. For this reason, Parker, Longabaugh and Place take off for Bolivia, but it isn’t long before their tracked down there too. No one knows for sure what happened to this trio of robbers, but its believed that Parker and Longabaugh were killed in a shootout in Bolivia in 1908.

As you might have imagined, “Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid” can be found on a number of best-of lists. In addition to its “17 Best Western Movies” list, “The Art of Manliness” also listed it on a June 2011 list called “100 Must See Movies: The Essential Men’s Movie Library.” You’ll also find “Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid” ranked No. 15 on “AMC’s Greatest Westerns” list and No. 8 on “IGN’s Top 25 Westerns of All Time” list. The Library of Congress has also placed it on the National Film Registry.


In the end, how many of you have seen “Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid”? What did you think about it? Did you like it or not? Let us know in the comments section below.

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