Blackthorn

Blackthorn is a fictionalized "what if" story. The story supposes that Butch Cassidy, believed to have died in the early 1900s against the Bolivian army, actually survived and disappeared.


We see him living now under the name James Blackthorn (Sam Shepard), an old man ready to retire and hopefully return home to the United States. His character, while still posed as a criminal, seems to have softened. Blackthorn chances upon a Bolivian engineer, Eduardo Apodaca (Eduardo Noriega), who is on the run--he claims that he robbed his coal miner employer of $50,000, and men are after him to take it back. At first Blackthorn sees him as a millstone, someone looking for protection and who will slow his own return home. But when an ex-Pinkerton man (Stephen Rea) recognizes Cassidy and gets the army involved, Blackthorn finds an ally is handy.

Shepard was a good choice for the role, I find he is a very convincing physically as a western type and gives credence as an old man who can still fight and ride. Noriega played it well as the unknown element that Blackthorn has to trust, and Stephen Rea especially well as a drunk, washed out detective who is at odds as to whether to turn Cassidy in or not. Overall though I didn't think the film gave us enough of the "Butch Cassidy story," despite some flashbacks, to matter whether this story was based on Butch Cassidy or some other old ex-renegade. I did not have the importance of Cassidy as the myth although the film was entertaining and well-made.