"The last time we tried a ranch was during our rustlin' days.
And even then we weren't much good at it. It's hard.
Hours are brutal. No, you gotta be a kid to start a ranch."
Butch Cassidy

It's astonishing how many films are willing to tip their hands, as long as one is willing to listen.

Take the classic 1969 Western film Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, for example. A highly mythologized retelling of the exploits of the two notorious bandits from which it gets its name, the film's central message is revealed in the first few lines of dialogue. Wandering aimlessly through the local bank (or so he wishes his observers to believe), Butch Cassidy (Paul Newman) asks the security guard: "What happened to the old bank? It was beautiful." When the guard replies, "People kept robbing it," Butch reveals the principle that guides him throughout much of the film: "Small price to pay for beauty."

It is not Cassidy's pursuit of beauty that drives the film, however; it is his desire for the beautifully idealized romanticism of the Old West and the pride-of-place he and his fellow lawbreakers once held there. From the film's wonderfully-shot opening onwards, Butch is in pursuit of the life he once had—a life he feels slipping through his fingers despite his best efforts to preserve it. No sooner do he and his trusty companion, the Sundance Kid (Robert Redford), return to their hideout at Hole-in-the-Wall, Wyoming than he is confronted by a rebellion from the Wild Bunch Gang—a group that once followed him with unquestioning allegiance. The promise of a series of highly lucrative train robberies quickly restores his supremacy, but when the implementation of these robberies proves unsuccessful, the two find themselves pursued relentlessly across the rugged landscape by a faceless posse of the area's most revered lawmen and trackers.

After a nearly miraculous escape, Cassidy and the Kid flee to Bolivia in search of a more peaceful setting for their bank-breaking ways. Yet while their earliest South American attempts meet with considerable success, the country's lawmen grow resistant to the Americans' careless brand of thievery. Even their half-hearted efforts to "go straight" end in violence, and the two eventually find themselves surrounded by the Bolivian army, ruefully recalling their friend's earlier prophecy that "Your times is over and you're gonna die bloody, and all you can do is choose where."

On the surface, Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid tells of a battle between two charismatic ne'er-do-wells and a society that has rejected their particular brand of economic advancement. And in the years since its release, much has been made of its attempts to follow in the footsteps of its genre's greatest storytellers, chronicling the societal and moral changes occurring in the Old West at that time. But its most insightful moments are not those that deal with the shifting landscape of an entire era; they are the ones that catalogue a man's stubborn refusal to recognize the reality of his own condition.