“When I was a kid,” Butch (Newman) muses — and he does a lot of musing in this pointedly larkish Western — “I always thought I’d grow up to be a hero.” Instead, he and his pal Sundance (Redford) became Hollywood’s answer to the much darker, better Bonnie and Clyde two years before. The crooks still crack wise, but here their relationship is less complicated, they being both ostentatiously heterosexual men, played by the King of Movie Cool and his blond dauphin. Between heists they dally with sunshiny moll Etta Place (Ross), ride bikes to Burt Bacharach’s Raindrops Keep Fallin’ on My Head and dream of retirement in Bolivia. Audiences devoured the stars’ camera-derie like two scoops of ice cream; their banter was the fudge topping.
Redford and Newman somehow made only a pair of films together, this gigantic hit and the even more popular The Sting. By the time the stars came up with another congenial project, the studios wouldn’t finance it — who’d pay to see two old men? But plenty of good came out of this first pairing. Redford named his Institute, which would become the fountainhead of U.S. indie filmmaking, after his character. And when Newman, as one of his many philanthropic undertakings, created a summer home for children with life-threatening diseases, he named it the Hole-in-the-Wall-Gang Camp.
Another Newman-Redford jape. This time the con men are in Depression-era Chicago, inexplicably motoring to Scott Joplin rags of an earlier time and another city. Midst much bustling, they pull scam after scam over the eyes of the cops, rival gangsters and most of a large, delighted audience. Redford played it younger and more winsome, while Newman looked comfortable being cast as a relative elder statesman of mendacity.
The film is genial enough: breezy, cleverly written, lavishly mounted; in fact, overproduced. That The Sting won the Oscar for Best Picture, sandwiched between the two Godfather films — and in the year of Mean Streets, Badlands, American Graffiti, The Exorcist, Serpico, Paper Moon and a couple of Robert Altman films, not to mention Bertolucci’s Last Tango in Paris, Bergman’s Cries and Whispers and Truffaut’s Day for Night — was old Hollywood’s signal that it would surrender to the ornery new generation only after a rear-guard fight and this royal nose-thumbing. The Oscar was also an implicit tribute to Newman’s undiminished box office luster, which he would trump the following year with the disaster film The Towering Inferno, where he traded in Redford as a partner in charisma for Steve McQueen.
As we prepare for the Game of Thrones finale, we recognize Joffrey and nine other baddies who showed us that terrible, horrible things can come in small packages
