Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid

Gr 8 Up—Though slightly repetitious in a Dateline way (same photos shown multiple times), this thoughtful hour-long examination of the lives of Robert Leroy Parker and Harry Alonzo Longabaugh, better known by their monikers Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, is at once sad and cautionary. With their deaths now more than 100 years in the past and income inequities once again equaling the worst divergence of the Gilded Age, these two careful and methodical outlaws are reminiscent of no one so much as Robin Hood and his crew. Parker, raised in a strict and religious home, was the mastermind of the carefully planned and virtually bloodless robberies of banks and railroads executed in the mid to late 1890s. He and his followers, called the Wild Bunch, succeeded because of the support of the hardscrabble ranchers in the western states. Eventually defeated by technology used by the Pinkerton detectives, Parker and Longabaugh fled the United States, but were eventually tracked to a tiny town in Bolivia, where they died. The use of period photos and selected reenactments, as well as interviews with subject experts, could have made this dry and less than engaging—but it does not. The story is involving from the beginning to the end, and young viewers will find themselves rooting for these last two desperadoes of the American West.—Ann Welton, Helen B. Stafford Elementary, Tacoma, WA