Butch Cassidy And The Sundance Kid

There were two films made about the infamous Hole-In-The-Wall Gang in 1969. The first of these, Sam Peckinpah's The Wild Bunch was a brilliantly bloody affair which, with its hi-tech killing and gangsters dressed as US servicemen, seemed to have something to say about America's involvement in Vietnam. The other film, George Roy Hill's Butch Cassidy And The Sundance was a far more sedate, far less corpuscle-packed affair, which revelled in the romance rather than the reality of the Old West - while the Bunch's anti-heroes are whore-screwing, women-beating sons-of-bitches, Paul Newman's Butch and Robert Redford's Sundance are the sort of outlaws you could bring home to meet your parents.

With Peckinpah's film being so far ahead of the game, it was little wonder that Hill's picture triumphed over it at the Oscars - Butch picked up four gongs to the Bunch's pair of nominations. But while history has elevated Peckinpah's film to deserved classic status, the lighter, brighter Butch Cassidy also occupies an important station in cinema's evolution, what with it marking the birth of the buddy movie.

For those who are too young or have just come out of comas ('Morning, guys - Churchill's dead), William Goldman's Academy Award-winning script casts Butch and Sundance as the leader and first lieutenant of the Hole-In-The-Wall Gang, the nicest groups of gangsters ever to hold America's railroads to ransom. Modern-day Robin Hoods to some, Butch and Sundance are like myxomatosis to America's money men who hire a super posse to hunt them down. With the likes of Joe LeFors on their tail, Butch, Sundance and the Kid's schoolteacher girlfriend Etta Place (Katharine Ross) decide to pack their bags and hop a train to Bolivia, where they hope to commence a new campaign of aw' shucks skull-duggery armed with their six-shooters and a Spanish-English phrasebook.

When Butch Cassidy came out, the common criticism was that it was distasteful to make two notorious gunslingers seem so likeable. Now when the film is called into question, debate tends to surround its glibness. A film that revels in cracking wise, Butch Cassidy is less annoyingly lightweight than it is the film that gives glib a good game. With so many awful sitcoms and lukewarm satirists having run glibness into the ground, William Goldman's superbly funny screenplay restores one's faith in the throwaway just as Diane Keaton prized 'kookiness' out of the clutches of the infinitely less gifted, but ironically far kookier, Goldie Hawn.

Criticism of the film's lack of substance also masks the scale of Hill & Goldman and Newman & Redford's collective achievement. With two such incredible teams working in tandem, it's perhaps no wonder the film feels effortless, but a quick look at the pictures that have tried and failed to model themselves on Butch shows just how much talent is required to make something look this easy. As for a man-of-the-match award in really ought to go to screenwriter Goldman, who, no content with creating marvellous roles for Redford and Newman, cooks up two memorable supporting characters in the shape of George Furth's diligent clerk Woodcock and Strother Martin's Percy Garris, a sort of pleasanter version of the diseased inbreds he often played for Peckinpah.

Less a typical Western than a superb superstar showcase, Butch Cassidy And The Sundance Kid is one of cinema's greatest ever advertisements for pure entertainment - which is amazing given that Bacharach And David's 'Raindrops Keep Falling On My Head' (although excellent) stands out like Eldridge Cleaver at a Klan rally, and the celebrated ending couldn't be more downbeat unless it featured the putting down of a devoted dog.