I used to know this movie like the back of my hand. Unfortunately—and here’s a good case for never watching a movie more than twice in a single decade—I saw it so many times I eventually grew bored of it. That was right around the time I discovered The Wild Bunch, which made this film seem a little too sleek in comparison. Fast forward to my thirties and I’ve forgotten just enough of it to enjoy it again, but not quite love it.

Like many westerns, Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid is set in a time when the gunslinger is becoming obsolete. In The Wild Bunch, the main characters knew it the moment they laid eyes on their first car. In this film, Butch (Paul Newman) and Sundance (Robert Redford) should have known it from the moment they acquired their first bike. After botching a train robbery, the duo realize the rules of the west have changed, but they didn’t get the memo.

Knowing there’s no way they’ll be able to survive if they continue their outlaw ways, Butch and Sundance find themselves at a crossroads. They reluctantly discuss their options around a table owned by Sundance’s patient love interest (Katharine Ross), who probably would have been Butch’s love interest if he’d been the one to meet her first. Butch, who’s always the know-it-all of the duo, suggests they should pack up and head for greener pastures in Bolivia. When they arrive, they find their destination is little more than abandoned farmland and dust.

There’s a reason William Goldman’s screenplay is analyzed to death in screenwriting classes. The story, which indulges in and pokes fun at the idea of myths and legends, has a lean simplicity to it. The banter is a not-very-distant ancestor to the kind of humorous dialogue that appears in Hollywood blockbusters as recent as The Force Awakens. The plot quickly establishes the main characters, the female lead, and the gang, whose leadership is hanging by a thread. It won’t be long until Butch and Sundance are on the run, chased down by an all-star team of man-hunters whose faces we never see.

The first half of the film deserves its classic status and then some. Unfortunately, the best scenes dry up in the second half. Everyone loves the long sequence of chase scenes in which they’re desperately trying to throw the unseen antagonists off their trail, crossing desert, rock, and water to do it. They occasionally pause to watch their pursuers from afar with an even mixture of dread and awe. “Who are those guys?” they ask repeatedly. Nothing else really compares until, of course, that iconic freeze frame at the end.

Despite its bottom-heaviness, Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid is a hugely entertaining popcorn flick. That’s pretty much all I feel like saying about it at this point in my life, which is part of the reason I like movies so much—sometimes they change as much as I do. Maybe I’ll love it again the next time I see it, but I don’t plan on watching it again for a very long time.

“All America lies at the end of the wilderness road, and our past is not a dead past, but still lives in us. Our forefathers had civilization inside themselves, the wild outside. We live in the civilization they created, but within us the wilderness still lingers. What they dreamed, we live, and what they lived, we dream.” 

— T.K. Whipple (As quoted in the beginning of Larry McMurtry’s Lonesome Dove.)

Billy Crystal’s character is thirty-nine, an age which seemed ancient when I first saw City Slickers at the drive-in theater twenty-five years ago. Like Logan’s Run, it’s a movie I can better appreciate now that I’ve gained perspective on this funny thing called age. I’m going through a phase in which I’m drawn to reading and watching westerns almost exclusively. Taking a couple of weeks off to drive cattle actually sounds more attractive than a trip to Disney World (though to be perfectly honest, this city slicker would prefer to do neither).

It’s suggested that every year, Crystal’s less neurotic friends (Daniel Stern and Bruno Kirby) concoct semi-idiotic vacations and drag him along. Their latest scheme indulges a western fantasy, in which well-to-do city folk can pay for the opportunity to become temporary cowpunchers. Crystal is reluctant to go until his patient wife points out that he’s forgotten how to smile. She thinks this goofy adventure might be good for him.

City Slickers isn’t terribly successful at being a comedy, but it’s a surprisingly deep character story. The three friends are much more than their archetypes would suggest. Stern, for instance, pretends he’s fallen asleep so he doesn’t have to speak to his overbearing wife; he possesses more wants and fears than the two-dimensional characters in most comedies. Kirby, who’s an even better actor than Crystal, proves to be more interesting than the playboy owner of a sporting goods shop we’re initially introduced to—particularly when he reveals why he’s so weird about women. A lot of comedies would have mined his strange job for cheap laughs. This one doesn’t.

Then you have Curly, who’s played by Jack Palance. Palance is one of my all-time favorite actors due to his uncanny ability to chew scenery in a believable way (I still think he would have made a better Joker than Jack Nicholson). In lesser comedies, he would have parodied his former screen persona for a cheap laugh. Thankfully, City Slickers isn’t content with being “just a comedy” because he warms up to these guys about halfway through. It’s refreshing what the filmmakers do with Palance, despite the fact they completely undo all that hard work in the inferior sequel.

So yeah, as a comedy it’s kind of slow—the goofy music can be as insistent as a bad laugh-track while a lot of the minor characters are unbelievably over-the-top, particularly Stern’s wife, whose face is often filmed with a bit of a fishbowl lens, which is a comedy technique that’s never been funny. Although I’ve seen much funnier comedies than City Slickers, few of them were as good. I feel prepared for thirty-nine.