Sam Shepard in ‘Blackthorn’ myth
Blackthorn resurrects Butch Cassidy as a gristly old gringo (Sam Shepard) who survived his storied massacre at the hands of the Bolivian army in 1908 and hid out in the mountains long enough to go native and repent his outlaw ways—at least to the point of constraining his criminality to Marxist principles of expropriation.
Less concerned with his legend than his legacy, a possible son he has never seen but to whom he writes longing letters as a distant “uncle,” Cassidy horse trades with the local gentry one last time under the alias James Blackthorn, dismounts his indigenous woman Yana (Magaly Solier) and sets out for the States across a bleak Bolivian chaparral, a suddenly lonely expat headed home. In one of the few hints at his notorious past, his bankers ask Blackthorn if he’s cashing out because they’ve somehow offended him and he wryly replies, “I can’t remember being so well treated at a bank.” Otherwise Spaniards Mateo Gil and screenwriter Miguel Barros mercifully avoid cornball expert banditry and winky inside jokes that disrespect the genre, a lesson a few dozen American filmmakers could learn.
On his way out the country, Blackthorn is ambushed by Spanish mining engineer Eduardo (Eduardo Noriega), running from a posse after supposedly stealing money from a robber baron and scaring off Blackthorn’s horse, along with the saddlebags of his honestly earned retirement fund. Eduardo promises Blackthorn a split of his loot in return for aiding in its retrieval and escorting his escape. Watching the young crook’s giddy thrill at the getaway kindles wistful memories of Cassidy’s outlaw days when the Sundance Kid (Padraic Delaney) and cohort lover Etta (Dominique McElligott) outsmarted Pinkerton man MacKinley (Stephen Rea)—between riding bikes to the groovy sounds of the Swingle Sisters (not really). For real, Butch remembers having to put down a dying Sundance like a lame horse and comes to regret reviving the inner outlaw beast that he’d successfully tamed.
No impoverished paella Western, director Gil—with Spanish cinematographer Juan Ruiz Anchía—handsomely evoke classical genre, with treks across sweltering salt flats shimmering ice blue; stops at lonely railroad watering stations and dramatic buttes; and a score by Lucio Godoy that nods to Ennio Morricone.
In the end, that’s not quite enough to redeem the final act. Cassidy decides that he can only steal from heartless, faceless corporations, not the peasants running their mining cooperative (though “ownership” puts a couple of the women hostiles on a greedy murder mission right quick). Surely, Gil makes a point of converted-Christian influence on Butch, showing him traversing cross-marked terrain to period hymnody (“Take your burden to the Lord, and leave it there”) and seeming to have found peace in living right. And the plain sincerity of Shepard’s performance takes the edge off his critique of America’s halcyon days when “there was room for everybody,” before, he says, ranchers and railroads ruined it.
All the same, post-reeducation-camp Cassidy as a hero of the People is a Walter Brennan-size hoot unheard on the Western plain since Fritz Lang tried to rehabilitate Confederate rogue Frank James by having him risk life and limb to rescue his black servant Pinky. The mythmaking never ends.
