Daily Dialogue — August 25, 2019

Sundance Kid: [Butch and the Kid are on the edge of a cliff preparing to take on the posse pursuing them] Ready?
Butch Cassidy: No, we’ll jump.
Sundance Kid: Like hell, we will.
Butch Cassidy: No, it’ll be okay. If the water’s deep enough and we don’t get squished to death, they’ll never follow us.
Sundance Kid: How do you know?
Butch Cassidy: Would you make a jump like that if you didn’t have to?
Sundance Kid: I have to and I’m not gonna.
Butch Cassidy: Well, we got to. Otherwise, we’re dead. They’re just gonna have to go back down the same way they come. Come on.
Sundance Kid: Just one clear shot, that’s all I want.
Butch Cassidy: Come on.
Sundance Kid: Uh-uh.
Butch Cassidy: We got to!
Sundance Kid: Get away from me.
Butch Cassidy: Why?
Sundance Kid: I wanna fight ‘em!
Butch Cassidy: They’ll kill us.
Sundance Kid: Maybe.
Butch Cassidy: You wanna die?
Sundance Kid: Do you?
Butch Cassidy: Alright. I’ll jump first.
Sundance Kid: Nope.
Butch Cassidy: Then you jump first.
Sundance Kid: No, I said.
Butch Cassidy: What’s the matter with you?
Sundance Kid: I can’t swim!
Butch Cassidy: [laughs] Are you crazy? The fall will probably kill ya’.

A long beat. Then they start running to the edge.

Sundance Kid: OOOOH SHIIIIIT!

— Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid (1969),

The Daily Dialogue theme for the week: Swimming.

Trivia: William Goldman first came across the story of Butch Cassidy in the late 1950s and researched it on and off for eight years before sitting down to write the screenplay. He later recalled, “The whole reason I wrote the thing, there is that famous line that F. Scott Fitzgerald wrote, who was one of my heroes: ‘There are no second acts in American lives.’ When I read about Cassidy and Longabaugh and the super posse coming after them, that’s phenomenal material. They ran to South America and lived there for eight years, and that was what thrilled me: they had a second act. They were more legendary in South America than they had been in the old West. It’s a great story. Those two guys and that pretty girl going down to South America and all that stuff. It just seems to me it’s a wonderful piece of material.” Goldman said he wrote the story as an original screenplay because he did not want to do the research to make it authentic as a novel.

Dialogue On Dialogue: This is a personal favorite swimming scene. The interplay between Newman and Redford is pitch perfect and Redford’s delivery of the line — “I can’t swim” — followed by that little head tilt is absolutely superb. Great scene.