Diverse Output

It must be one of the most famous finales in an American film. Two expatriate outlaws are surrounded by what appears to be the entire Bolivian army. They are outnumbered and doomed but, in one last gesture of defiance, they burst into the sunlight, firing on all sides at their enemies. As the returning gunfire crackles on the soundtrack, the image freezes; bleeds from colour into black and white, and the duo appear not to die as such, but to pass from life into the prairie of Western legend.

This memorable ending to Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid (1969) was not in William Goldman’s original screenplay. It came from the director, George Roy Hill, a multi-faceted Hollywood pro who kept tight control over every aspect of his productions. Andrew Horton’s film-by-film study shows how Hill’s diverse output is underpinned by a collection of unifying themes and concerns. The director may have been dismissed by some critics as nothing more than a slick commercial operator, but, like Howard Hawks before him, he was an artist hiding behind the mask of an American salesman.

As a man, too, Hill came from a very American tradition of action and art, popular storytelling and intellectual engagement. Born in Minneapolis to Irish parents, he was at various times in his early life a newspaper reporter, a music major at Yale (he studied under Paul Hindesmith), a naval aviator during the Second World War, and an actor at the Abbey Theatre in Dublin. After an apprenticeship as a director of live television drama and on Broadway, he made his first film, Period of Adjustment in 1962. This was an adaptation of a Tennessee Williams play, but within a few years Hill was turning to more cinematic material, such as Hawaii (1966), an historical epic featuring the unlikely combination of Julie Andrews and Max von Sydow, and Thoroughly Modern Millie (1967), a pastiche 1920s musical, which also starred the world’s favourite singing nun. Both these films were marred by studio interference, but with his famous Western, Hill became a box office champion, able to demand more control of his subsequent projects.

Today, it is impossible to imagine Butch and Sundance without Paul Newman, Robert Redford and their various blue-eyed charms. Horton shows, however, that things could have been very different. Casting the film was quite a saga. At first, while the script was going the rounds of other directors, Newman did not want to do it at all. Then Steve McQueen came on board; he had his eye on playing Butch with Newman as Sundance. Then Hill was approached to direct, but he believed that the actors should switch roles, and had to convince a reluctant Newman to play the comedy of the Butch character. Then McQueen, unhappy with the changes, walked away. Other actors were mooted for Sundance (including, heaven help us, Marlon Brando), but Redford, a less starry figure at the time, only got the role because Newman threatened to withdraw if Warren Beatty were chosen. As so often in film making, luck and circumstance were as important as artistic judgement.

Nevertheless, the film would have been nothing without Goldman’s skill and Hill’s stylistic assurance. Horton believes that all the director’s work is rooted in duality of some kind; it exists in the border country between innocence and experience, the playfulness of childhood and the maturity and responsibility of adult existence. It is an ironic, bittersweet vision. One could argue that many of the finest Westerns share these concerns to some extent, so it is no surprise to learn that Hill found himself very much at home in the saddle. Horton reveals how the film uses distancing techniques, like false newsreels, stills sequences and music, to heighten our sense that the film is a film.

This means that while sympathising with Butch and Sundance on an emotional level, we are aware, also, that these rather solipsistic characters are operating in a wider, ironic context. The outlaws...