had a fun-time drawing @sheisawantedman
8 notes
·
View notes
Still planning on editing this digitally later but for now here is @sheisawantedman ‘s oc Redford Wild! her art is so cool and the 60’s/70’s aesthetic is absolutely beautiful. Redford’s birthday was yesterday which is when I posted this on tiktok but I just got to getting it here, happy belated to this menace to society!!
12 notes
·
View notes
Butch: What happened to the old bank? It was beautiful.
Guard: People kept robbing it.
Butch: Small price to pay for beauty.
- William Goldman, Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid: Screenplay (1970)
In a brilliant William Goldman script peppered with memorable lines, the first exchange sets the tone of this classic Western movie. Butch looks around a bank at closing time, chatting with the security guard as he perhaps sizes up his next job.
“What happened to the old bank? It was beautiful.”
“People kept robbing it.”
“That’s a small price to pay for beauty.”
Right away, Goldman establishes Butch as a charismatic mouthpiece for the quip-ready screenwriter, contrasting nicely with the Sundance Kid, Robert Redford’s taciturn sharpshooter. But he’s also created two heroes who break the western mold, neither justice-seeking white-hats nor grizzled, sneering black-hats, and not as traditionally masculine as either party. Butch is a man who appreciates beauty and art, but doesn’t have the stomach for violence; it’s not until late in the film that we (and the Kid) discover that he’s never shot a man before and he looks sickened to have to do it. He’s a pleasure-seeker above all else: robbing banks and trains are his way to make an easy living and enjoy whatever sinful freedoms his vocation affords him.
Audiences in 1969 were all too happy to embrace the light, quippy irreverence of Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid after a turbulent summer, and Goldman, director George Roy Hill, and the two impossibly handsome stars made them feel cool for doing it. True Grit had performed well earlier in the year as a throwback to the genre’s past, giving John Wayne a proper victory lap, but Butch Cassidy was thoroughly modern, a star-making vehicle for Newman and Redford that reflected a need for the genre to turn the page and that feels as much of its time as it does authentic to Wyoming in the late 1890s. With Katherine Ross at the centre of a love triangle between friends, the film attempted to bring a French Jules and Jim vibe to the American mainstream, taking a lesson from the French new wave on how to revive old Hollywood craft.
It still works spectacularly well. There’s an alchemy up and down the production. Redford possesses easy charm, which parries so well with Newman’s smarts that the two would run it back again with Hill a few years later in The Sting.
The pop doodling of Burt Bacharach’s musical score is about as far from a traditional western score as possible, but it somehow meshes with the sepia sheen of Conrad Hall’s photography, which burnishes the legend of these two men while their story is still being told. And while Goldman’s screenplay dances on the edge of glib, it’s lively and sophisticated, with a strong theme about the capitalist forces that really tamed the Wild West.
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 along with the the Rockefellers, JP Morgans, and the Carnegies and of the world - the original robber barons - would make certain of that.
152 notes
·
View notes
Serial Killers of the Wild West!
Serial killers in the Wild West like John "Liver Eating" Johnson got clean away with their crimes as Tony McMahon discovers
If you were a serial killer with an insatiable appetite for murder – then the Wild West of 19th America was about the best place you could exercise your passion for slaughter. Below I describe three very different examples of serial killers in the Wild West and yet they have one common feature – they got away with it because their victims were often held in such low regard.
One murdered members…
View On WordPress
0 notes