[100 years ago this week, the criminal duo who came to be known as Leopold & Loeb set their murderous plan in motion. So this week I’ll AmericanStudy L&L and four other criminal duos, leading up to a repeat Guest Post on the genre of true crime!]
On beautifying
ugly men and deeds, and why we shouldn’t.
In George Roy
Hill’s film Butch Cassidy and the
Sundance Kid (1969), birthday boy Butch (the nickname of Robert
Leroy Parker, one of the late 19th century’s most infamous bank
and train robbers) was famously played by Paul Newman; Robert Redford played
his partner, Harry “The Sundance
Kid” Longabaugh. Newman and Redford were, while unquestionably talented and
interesting actors, also two of their respective generations’ most attractive
stars, charismatic heartthrobs with marquee movie-star good looks. The same
could be said for many of the young men featured in the Young Guns films, of course, from the first film’s Emilio Estevez,
Kiefer Sutherland, and Lou Diamond Phillips to the second film’s additions such
as Christian Slater and Balthazar Getty. And in recent years the trend
continued with the casting of matinee idol Brad Pitt as Jesse James in Andrew
Dominik’s The Assassination of Jesse
James by the Coward Robert Ford (2007).
Such casting
choices can no doubt be explained in part by the simple realities that movie
stars tend to be good looking, that some of the most famous are also some of
the best looking, and that the most famous are often good box-office draws. But
if we consider the example of Butch
Cassidy and the Sundance Kid specifically, it’s worth noting that it’s not
only the titular characters’ physical appearances that have been beautified. The
film’s entire tone is light and comic, mostly in the vein of a buddy comedy with (in the
famous, ground-breaking
musical interlude in particular) the occasional interruption of a romantic
comedy as well. There are of course moments of violence and darker turns, but
even in the darkest of them—such as (SPOILER alert) the two men’s gun-blazing demise
that concludes the film—Hill takes a more upbeat and cheery tone than we might
expect. That lightness becomes even more striking when we compare Butch to a film released in the same
year and featuring many of the same characters and events: Sam Peckinpah’s dark,
hyper-violent The Wild Bunch
(1969).
The stylization
of violence in Peckinpah’s film isn’t necessarily realistic, and certainly
could be seen as exploitative (in a
similar critique to that which has been leveled at a filmmaker who learned
a lot from Peckinpah, Quentin
Tarantino). But at the same time, it’s difficult to watch The Wild Bunch and not remember that
Butch, Sundance, and their outlaw peers were by and large hardened
criminals for whom violence and the threat of it were principal tools and
daily realities; a lesson that it’s far easier to forget when we’re watching
Newman and Redford smile their movie-star smiles. Similarly, while the casting
of Pitt as Jesse James allows the film to make some interesting points about
the aging outlaw as a celebrity, it also depicts a man who has survived decades
of violent crime and still looks like, well, Brad Pitt. If we’re going to keep
telling the stories of American outlaws in our popular culture—and it seems
likely that we will—it would help to find ways to include in our portrayals the
darkness and ugliness that were central parts of those stories.
Last duo
tomorrow,
Ben
PS. What
do you think? Other duos you’d highlight?
No comments:
Post a Comment