New Movies: Double Vision

"I got vision," brags Butch Cassidy, "and the rest of the world wears bifocals." Unfortunately, the rest of the world includes the makers of Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid. Every character, every scene, is marred by the film's double view, which oscillates between sympathy and farce.

The sympathy is understandable. Cassidy and the Kid were two gen-u-wine outlaws whose future narrowed along with the Frontier. By 1900, the West was getting settled, the banks and trains were well guarded, and there was no place to go but down—to South America. In the...