Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid

“The horse is dead.”

It’s the middle of a tense scene in the 1969 smash Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid. The town sheriff is attempting to round up a posse to track down Butch and Sundance, leaders of the Hole-In-The-Wall Gang, which has been robbing banks and trains with such impunity that they’ve become an embarrassment for lawman across the frontier. Unbeknown to everyone, these celebrity outlaws are watching the scene unfold from a perch across the street, where they’re blowing their loot on liquor and whores, but the sheriff’s recruitment efforts were doomed to run aground regardless. There just isn’t much appetite for going after an elusive and dangerous pair that seem to be generous in spreading their stolen loot around.

There is, however, time for a brazen salesman to make a pitch: “The horse is dead,” he says. The future is bicycles.

The sequence everyone remembers from Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid follows shortly afterwards, when Paul Newman, as Butch, pedals Katherine Ross’s Etta Place around on the handlebars of a new bike, with the jaunty Oscar-winning song Raindrops Keep Fallin’ on My Head playing in the background. It may not be accurate to call the film a “revisionist western” – a term reserved for less commercial visions like Monte Hellman’s The Shooting, Robert Altman’s McCabe & Mrs Miller, and Sam Peckinpah’s The Wild Bunch, released the same year – but even before our heroes meet a hail of bullets in the final freeze-frame, the end of an era is nigh. It’s no wonder Butch winds up chucking the bike into the woods later on.

Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid is such a rollicking good time that it takes a while to notice it’s about the end of the line for its heroes, whose celebrity is already widespread when the film opens and ultimately hastens their demise. “Your times is over and you’re gonna die bloody,” warns a sheriff, prophetically, in an early scene, and the film is mostly about Butch and Sundance getting chased out of America by hired guns and dying at the hands of the Bolivian army. They’re mostly guilty of stealing from the wrong guy: EH Harriman, the railroad tycoon, spends more trying to catch them than they rob from his safes, but it’s an opportunity for a powerful man to send a message about who’s really in charge. Guys like Butch and Sundance can handle local lawmen and half-hearted posses, but they can’t fight progress. The EH Harrimans of the world will make certain of that.