Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid Special Edition

Excepting Toy Story, they don’t make buddy movies better than Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, a valentine to the Wild West’s most dashing thieves. And with a passel of supplements (lifted from a 1995 laserdisc edition), you can sort through the ingredients that baked up just right. In he leads, Paul Newman and Robert Redford toss around William Goldman’s bantering dialogue with perfectly matched poise — for which Newman got little credit in reviews and Redford was crowned a superstar (he was cast after Steve McQueen fell out). The camera lingers especially long on Katherine Ross as Sundance’s girlfriend, in part because cinematographer Conrad L. Hall (who won an Oscar for this, as well as for last year’s American Beauty) was her boyfriend at the time. But in their commentaries, all involved give chief credit for the film’s success to director George Roy Hill — even Ross, whom he kicked off the set after Hall let her run one of the cameras while filming a key stunt.The stars, deposed singly in 1994 camera interviews that mercilessly point up the passage of time, remain charming as ever, making this disc doubly nostalgic: You’ll pine not just for the Old West, but for the old New Hollywood, too. A