The Screengrab

4. BUTCH CASSIDY AND THE SUNDANCE KID (1969)



Straddling the line between the revolutionary filmmaking of the 1970s and the tail end of classic Hollywood, Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid is one of those movies that isn’t legendary because it’s important, or because it’s meaningful, or because it broke some rich new ground in the language of filmmaking. It’s legendary because it’s funny, fun, and incredibly entertaining. It’s also one of those films where everyone seems to be firing on all cylinders; the sly buddy-western could easily be counted as a career high for Robert Redford, director George Roy Hill and his cameraman Connie Hall, screenwriter William Goldman, and even composer Burt Bacharach. But Paul Newman is the glue that holds everything together: taking on Goldman’s witty dialogue, he gives it just enough of a human, weary edge that it doesn’t seem as over-the-top as it might coming from some actors. Some performers go their whole lives without snaring a part like Butch Cassidy, and others get one, but handle it all wrong. You sometimes hear actors referred to as intelligent, but rarely movie stars; it’s a testament to how bright Paul Newman was that he was handed a role as rich as this one and figured it out immediately, playing it on screen as perfectly as it could be played. This is a real movie star role, and Newman handles it like a real movie star.

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So you're in a high-stress profession.  You work all day and all night to try to make the world a better place, but to protect some very important people, you have to keep certain things about your job secret.  But the strain of such a massive secret, a thing that some people would kill to know, can't be borne forever by just one man.  So you turn to the one person you think you can trust, the one man you believe will keep your secret:  your faithful butler.  And then he goes and blabs it to the whole world.

Ever since Christopher Nolan's latest Batman flick, The Dark Knight, made its first trillion dollars, speculation has been rampant about who's going to play the villain role in the next installment.  Heath Ledger's untimely death makes it an unlikely, albeit intriguing, possibility that he'll return as the Joker; the two hottest rumors are that Angelina Jolie will be the draw, slipping into a Catwoman costume, and that Johnny Depp and Phillip Seymour Hoffman will tag team as the Riddler and the Penguin.  Both have generally dismissed as fan-driven wishful thinking until yesterday, when Michael Caine -- currenty paying his club fees as Bruce Wayne's butler Alfred -- took a moment at the Toronto International Film Festival to cite an unnamed Warner Brothers exec and insist that the latter rumor is true.

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Truman Capote's In Cold Blood:  A True Account of a Multiple Murder and Its Consequences was born to be a movie.  The book was an immediate best-seller on its release in 1966, and plans were afoot to film it almost before it rolled off the presses.  Capote's improbable inspiration was a 300-word piece in the New York Times — then, as now, little more than a blurb — about a murder in a remote corner of Kansas; something about it captivated his imagination, and he spent the next seven years crafting, along with his friend and fellow novelist Harper Lee, a masterful true-crime story about the pointless killing of the Clutter family.  Just as Capote had no idea at the time how obsessed he would become with the story of the Clutters and the murderous drifters, Dick Hickock and Perry Smith, who took their lives, the public had no idea that the book he wrote about them would launch a new genre of fiction — the 'non-fiction novel' — and stand out as an early example of what would become known as 'the New Journalism'.  It would also cast a huge shadow over Capote's life and career; of all his works, none save Breakfast at Tiffany's would so resonate with the public.

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