Actually, it's a bomb

Saw the movie when it came out in 1969.
I was a college freshman.
The night I saw it, I was on a date with a new girlfriend - some big things happened that night - let's just say that I was in the process of becoming an adult.
Everything clicked that night - it was magical - I had a car - I had a girl - I was in COLLEGE - and I just loved loved loved the movie.
Thought it was the greatest thing I'd ever seen on the screen.
It had entrenched itself as one of my favorite movies of all time.

I hope I've aged better than this movie.
Re-watching it for the first time in many years last night - I could not get over how awkward it actually is, how sloppy, how corny - how contrived, how dopey - how Butch and Sundance are NOT the groovy cool dudes I once thought (but they are actually robbers, murderers, and low-lifes - however much I still like Paul and Robert), how Katherine Ross's character doesn't work for me, how the montage sequences don't really work, how the music doesn't work, how pretty much EVERYTHING doesn't work.
The poor props - phony plastic looking saddles on all the horses.
Bad pacing.
No development.
This movie has no soul, stands for nothing (except putting pretty star's faces on the screen), and would best be forgotten.

I'm not saying it's a total piece of trash like some of today's pointless action hero movies - it has some entertainment value, good chemistry between the two main actors (who are, let's face it, fantastic together or apart), nice cinematography, and some good spoken lines. But a GREAT movie or even a GOOD one, it is not.

Long segments of repeated action - robbing banks, then fleeing on horseback as they are pursued by inept posses, miraculously escaping as they laugh, and then sitting in a saloon across the street from the bank they just robbed.
Keystone cops stuff.

Part comedy, part Western, part romance, part road movie, part period piece - and it works at none of them.

This was when movies started really going bad. This was not the first, but certainly a fine example of: Let's get some big stars and put them on the screen. We'll worry about what we're going to do with them at some point!

I don't say that's how it actually went, but it may have been for all the dubious content in this picture.

I had to give it 5/10.
I have to wonder now about my other unimpeachable favorites from that era:
The Graduate
The Sting
Easy Rider
Slaughterhouse Five
Midnight Cowboy
One Flew Over the Coocoo's Nest


Are they all really just turkeys?
Sorry, but Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid is a bomb.
A pleasant bomb, maybe, but a bomb nonetheless.
I don't know how it could succeed today, much less years from now, as a true classic would.