Butch Cassidy & the Sundance Kid (1969) is an American Western starring Paul Newman as Butch, Robert Redford as Sundance (in one of his breakthrough roles), and Katharine Ross as Etta, Sundance’s school teacher girlfriend. Based on the real-life story of two bank robbers, the movie joins Butch and Sundance as lead up the legendary Hole-In-the-Wall gang. But when they rob a certain train one too many times, they find themselves relentlessly pursued by bounty hunters across the American West. Written by William Goldman and directed by George Roy Hill, Butch Cassidy & the Sundance Kid won four Oscars and nine BAFTAs, and is considered a Western classic.
The two title bandits have contrasting styles and personalities. Butch is equally comfortable in city clothes or trimmed-down riding gear, usually wearing a bowler hat with a clean-shaven look. Meanwhile, Sundance has more of a traditional cowboy feel (including his hat) and sports a dark mustache.
Butch and Sundance are clearly attracted to women. We see Butch involved with working girls (including a young Cloris Leachman as Agnes), while Sundance is close with Etta. Butch is also tender with Etta, and the two joke that if they’d met first without Sundance, they might have become a couple. At the same time, there is also a queer romance in the subtext between the two bank robbers. The boys bicker over every single decision, express discomfort and even jealousy when one puts a move on a woman in front of the other, and are emotionally intimate on a level that may go beyond friendship — including revealing their true names to one another.
As Newman mentioned in his Inside The Actors Studio interview, both actors were good-natured about the idea of doing a movie where they would go to bed together. (Around the 36:00 mark)
Though Redford seems to be straight by all accounts, there has long been a rumor that Newman was queer and, in fact, had a memorable threesome with Eartha Kitt and James Dean, as Kitt recalled. It doesn’t seem so far-fetched, as we see Dean and Newman downright flirting in the video above during their screen test for East of Eden (1955).
To some, this queer reading of Butch Cassidy & the Sundance Kid may seem like a stretch. Surely these two bank robbers were just good chums and not #HistoricalRoommates, right? Yet, there remains enough evidence to make a decent case that more is going on between the lines. Is it spectacular bi representation? No. But considering the era in which the film was made and the hyper-masculinized nature of the Western genre, it stands to reason that any depiction of queerness would have had to be subtle. At the very least, it’s worth thinking about. Which, of course, is what Butch should keep doing — that’s what he’s good at.