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Freeze framed forever: The classic 1960s Western, Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid.

Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid

A screening of the classic film starring Paul Newman and Robert Redford. Screenwriter William Goldman will be on hand afterward. Reception at 6 p.m. 7 p.m. Whitney Humanities Center, Yale University, 53 Wall St., (203) 432-0670, yale.edu/whc. Free.

The major critics of the time — like Vincent Canby and Pauline Kael — were less than enthusiastic, but George Roy Hill's Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid became the top-grossing film of 1969 and is today regarded as one of the major entertainments of the era.

Why? First of all, Paul Newman, 44, and Robert Redford, 30, were in, or entering, their charismatic prime. Their amiable bickering drew on any number of buddy movies going back to Hope and Crosby, but this time in the West, and in a hipper way.

The Western, ever a venerable Hollywood genre, had been having trouble addressing the new "youth culture." The hawkish Western icon John Wayne had ceased to have "relevance." But consider: 1969 was the year Wayne played Rooster Cogburn in True Grit and received his first and only Academy Award as Best Actor, a telling Hollywood endorsement of Wayne's forte: the irascible, manly man, a good guy who succeeds in a gruff, no-nonsense way by doing the right thing.

But other versions of the Western were becoming more popular with the young. First of all, the "spaghetti Westerns," so-called because they were shot cheaply in Italy by Sergio Leone, introduced Clint Eastwood as a silent, vengeful, steely-eyed force for justice in a world in which, as in The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly (1966), good was a highly relative term, and shoot-'em-up was the ethos.

Then there was Sam Peckinpah, a maverick out to revitalize the genre in the Vietnam era by showing the conquest of the West as bloody, arrogant and invasive, fueled by morally deficient men with no qualms about killing. Peckinpah's best-known film, The Wild Bunch, released around the same time as True Grit, used unique editing during its gunfights to suggest both the speed and brutality of the violence.

In most Hollywood Westerns up to that time, killing had been largely bloodless: a shot, some smoke, a body slumping to the ground. Peckinpah changed all that and, some argue, made killing artistic, thus beginning the tendency toward ever more visceral and "cool" violence that is with us to this day. This wasn't Peckinpah's intention, but the final shoot-out in The Wild Bunch, one of the biggest bloodbaths ever put on film, is, whatever we might argue its point to be, simply great filmmaking.

But there was another kind of "Western" that debuted in 1969: Peter Fonda and Dennis Hopper's Easy Rider, in which two motorcycle-riding dope dealers, "Captain America" and Billy, travel cross-country from L.A. to New Orleans, along the way becoming emblems for youth of the day, outside the norms of society, forever on the move.

Filmed by Laszlo Kovacs, the movie is the ultimate counter-culture road picture, showing that two lesser genres — the bike picture and the youth picture — had grown up, combining the glamorization of what is "cool" with the notion of the outlaw as hero. Easy to do when smoking grass, a major youth pastime, was illegal, and when being on the run from the draft, either in fact or in theory, occupied many a young man's mind.

Then there's that ending.

When Captain America gets blown off his bike by a gun-toting redneck, subtlety is not the point.

The moment chimes with the close of Arthur Penn's Bonnie and Clyde (1967), in which Warren Beatty played the prototype figure for the glamorous, everyman outlaw fated to die at the hands of small-minded authoritarians.

The brilliance of Butch and Sundance is to register all these changes, but without undermining either the "straight" Western or its counter-culture version. It plays to both. Butch (Newman) and Sundance (Redford) are the "bad men:" outlaws whose time is ending, as in The Wild Bunch, but they are thoroughly charming and, what's more, enterprising. Butch doesn't want to go back to rustling or ranching, because "the hours are brutal." The phrase sums up the justification for every get-rich-quick scheme or pursuit of fame and fortune: to be your own boss, to work only when you have to.

The train robberies pit Butch against Woodcock, a slavish company man who can't see that protecting his boss's money is pointless. In Bonnie and Clyde, the banks, in foreclosing on the little guy, were clearly the culprits, not the bank robbers; in Butch and Sundance, the boss is an evil entity almost by definition. Of course he can hire the relentless posse to pursue our affable heroes. So, instead of standing and fighting, like in any great Western you can name, they hit the road — to Bolivia, not Canada.

The duo are so simpatico, they can take a woman along who doesn't undermine their friendship. Katherine Ross plays Etta Place, Sundance's girlfriend, as a demure beauty, so that notions of having both men don't surface. Yet her situation is a vicarious thrill. Her straight-laced demeanor makes the scene in which Sundance has her undress at gunpoint one of the greatest foreplay moments in all of cinema.

Sundance, the fast gun, isn't so much a killer as a man with a talent who only uses it when necessary. With his moustache and feathery mane of blonde hair, Sundance, who has to "move" when he shoots, is clearly hip. Butch, like Beatty's Clyde, is likeable, essentially "harmless" — both are distraught when they finally have to kill — and extremely cute. Even more ironic: Butch kills while working a regular job, trying to retrieve a payroll stolen by Bolivian bandits. The bloodbath is almost comical, a joke on the stupid bandits who don't know who they're up against, and filmed in what seems a deliberate take-off on Peckinpah.

Then there's that ending.

We know what to expect, but Hill, though he lets them go out with guns blazing, doesn't give us the Peckinpah or Penn slow motion slaughter: the freeze frame leaves our heroes there, ageless and iconic for all time.

Donald Brown writes about theater and books for the New Haven Review (newhavenreview.com).