Both Siskel and Ebert panned it

It was evidently the Number One hit of 1969, but something about it rubbed a lot of critics the wrong way.

I think part of it was that it never REALLY felt like a Western. With that "Raindrops Keep Fallin' On My Head" Burt Bacharach interlude, the movie had a bad rep. It wasn't rough and tough like The Searchers or filled with action like The Magnificent Seven or "conservative" like a John Wayne film would be(in the "positive" movie manner -- good guys versus bad guys.)

It was filled with one liners and squabbling -- like "The Odd Couple on horseback."

Which reminds me -- then, as now -- that whole middle sequence where Butch and Sundance are chased by "the SuperPosse" seems overlong and dull, all designed to pay off with that great scene on the cliff before jumping.

Only a coupla months before "Butch Cassidy," Sam Peckinpah's ultra-violent "The Wild Bunch" told pretty much the same story(in real life, Butch's gang was CALLED "The Wild Bunch" sometimes) with much more realism. "Butch Cassidy" rather hid its eyes at the end.

No matter. Grown women and teenage girls swooned at longtime star Newman and newly minted Redford. Boys saw this as a great buddy film. It was a fine date movie -- "a Western for girls who don't like Westerns." And it was a very funny comedy before it got dark.

Still, Siskel and Ebert (and Pauline Kael and more than a few others) got some things right about what was wrong with Butch Cassidy. The story is rather flaccid and repetitive, the action is minimal, the talk maximal.