The year 1969 was a particularly interesting one for the American Western, as the three most commercially notable examples of the genre demonstrate a grand variance in the dramatic shift into the revisionism movement which would all but consume this particular brand of film to the present day. If one might regard Henry Hathaway’s film of “True Grit” as the last stand of the traditional westerns (seamlessly interpolated into the traditional mold by screenwriter Marguerite Roberts, despite the surface revisionist roots of it’s source novel- the book was, in fact, a satire of traditional western conventions) and Sam Peckinpah’s “The Wild Bunch” as the “straw that broke the camel’s back” of American Western revisionism, then what do we make of George Roy Hill’s “Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid”, which seems to tread lightly between both extremes of the genre, happily skipping from foot to foot from one end to the other, but without purpose, insight nor contribution to the expansion of the genre itself?
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