Spinning Yarn

By RICHARD SCHICKEL

BUTCH AND SUNDANCE: THE EARLY DAYS Directed by Richard Lester Screenplay by Allan Burns

In its curious way, this is a daring movie. It is a "prequel," as the neologism has it. The Early Days tells the story of how the title characters met and formed the partnership celebrated in that mighty hit of (can it be?) a decade ago, Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid. In the circumstances it would have been sufficient merely to evoke the antic cheerfulness of the old movie and then coast home on its reputation. Instead, Director Richard Lester, a master of off-the-wall historical japery (The Three Musketeers), has chosen to make Butch and Sundance an exercise in style; he tries to find the cinematic equivalent of oral tradition and legend making, or, less fancily, yarn spinning. This means that the film's pace is leisurely and digressive; dramatic incidents that might be told melodramatically are rather flat. The result may be disappointing to people expecting the brisk cheekiness of the first Butch-Sundance adventure.

The picture is not really a success. Especially in the first half, several scenes take too long to get to the point, which often turns out to be not very sharp. There are also gag sequences that could easily have been richer and more firmly developed. But Tom Berenger and William Katt are persuasive as the younger look-alikes of Newman and Redford (the latter's mannerisms are even gently parodied by Katt). When the pair finally get down to robbing banks and trains, their learner's clumsiness strikes an endearing note.

So does the relationship between Butch and his wife (Jill Eikenberry), who must, because Sundance is wounded, cease their wanderings and sample the pleasures of domesticity. If, in the end, one finds the movie attenuated and a little self-indulgent, it is still an amiable entertainment, its modesty a relief from a glut of hopped-up action epics.

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