Blackthorn

Directed by: Mateo Gil
Written by: Miguel Barros
Full credits at IMDb

Nothing strips the romance from a Western quite like Butch Cassidy showing up at a bank to make a withdrawal from his savings account. That's one of the earliest scenes in the weary, melancholic and elegiac Blackthorn, which revisits the Cassidy and Sundance myth and rewrites a new last act for George Roy Hill's classic: instead of meeting their ends at the hands of the Bolivian Army in 1908, the outlaws live on. This movie finds Butch in 1927: grizzled, calling himself by the alias of the title, and raising horses on a ranch in the rugged mountains of Bolivia—the American West's erstwhile wild terrain rediscovered South of the equator.

Blackthorn revises the revisions, embracing many facets of the mythos rejected by most modern, progressive-minded Westerns...

Keep reading this dispatch from the 2011 Tribeca Film Festival at The L Magazine


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