I always feel like I catch new things each time I watch the really good films, or my favorites. Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid is both, standing at #6 on my Flickchart and a masterpiece by just about any standard.

What struck me most tonight was Conrad Hall's Academy Award-winning cinematography. I always knew it was a beautiful looking film, but sometimes I've wondered whether that's because Hall did such a great job or if it was more the gorgeous scenery makes the film look great regardless of the photography.

Tonight eradicated any doubt. Being an XD exhibition, this was about as large a viewing screen as there is. I was able to get a much clearer sense of Hall's framing and lighting than the TV screen at home could ever have provided.

In a lot of Westerns, the cinematography tries to keep us from realizing just how small the town set really is, afraid to go too near to the edge of buildings or to pull back very far unless the scene takes place on the open range. There aren't a lot of close-ups in Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, though. Most shots show the actors from the waist up. There are an awful lot of full body shots, too.

The upshot of all this is that Butch and Sundance themselves are shown to be small figures in a larger world. Sheriff Bledsoe articulates this visual commentary in his heated chastisement of the duo: "Your times is over! Don't you get that?" These are big fish in a little pond, and that pond is getting a lot larger with every rail line and bicycle to encroach on the western territories.

Hall keeps them small every step of the way, ensuring that we see the world around them in every frame. The most obvious example is the famed chase by the super posse across the western landscape, where the pursued bandits are dwarfed by the sheer scale of the shooting locations, but that's not even the most interesting showcase.

The handiest microcosm is actually that first scene in town after they've robbed the flyer, with Butch and Sundance looking on from the balcony as the erstwhile town marshal fails to rally the townspeople. We're never very close to Butch and Sundance, who are surrounded at all times by the rest of the balcony and/or the party just visible inside the brothel.

There are, however, a few close-ups of the marshal. He's helpless, of course, and represents no actual danger to the titular duo himself, but symbolically we know that the kind of determined lawman he represents looms very large in their world and the film. William Goldman's terrific dialog tells us the marshal is the unknowing butt of the scene's joke, but Hall's cinematography begs to differ. It's the determined lawman who will get the last laugh, and that is indeed what happens.

There's also, of course, the way that Hall shot the super posse; always at a distance, until the chase reaches its nearly deadly conclusion. Even then, we can only make out the shapes of hats and the impressions of faces. These lawmen mercenaries exist more in abstraction than in reality, at least for us. We don't need to see their faces. We need only to know that they mean to apprehend and kill our law-breaking protagonists.

Lastly, there's Katherine Ross. The story goes that she incurred the wrath of both Hall and director George Roy Hill for getting a camera operator to let her work his camera during one shot on one of the very first days of photography. They were so furious that only the fact it was too late to recast her role prevented her being thrown off the film entirely.

Despite the personal and professional anger, Ross is absolutely beautiful in every shot. Whether forlorn or having the time of her life, Ross is lit and framed to melt our hearts...which, of course, she does. She has wonderful chemistry with both Paul Newman and Robert Redford, and her interactions with the two actually do indicate to us the differences of the dynamics of their various relationships.

Though she's ostensibly Sundance's girlfriend, she's at her warmest with Butch. Even though she outright asks Butch about the possibility of it having been the two of them to have become romantically involved, we never really feel that there's any risk of a love triangle or Butch and Sundance coming to blows over her. It's not until you stop and think about the fact that the story doesn't go in that direction that you realize how peculiar it is that it doesn't. At least partial credit for keeping us from even suspecting that's where things will go must go to Hall, who photographed Ross with Newman in such an innocuous, almost familial fashion.

When Cinemark announced that they were doing a wave of Best Picture winners for their Cinemark Classic Series, I hoped that Schindler's List would be among them. It was not. But then they announced that June would be a "Spielberg Spotlight" and there it was in the fourth and final week of the schedule! I finally had my chance to see this on the big screen. I haven't been in great shape lately, but I was able to make it to (and through) the 2:00 showing.

This was the fourth time I've seen Schindler's List. It was my first since I finally read Thomas Keneally's novel earlier this year. I anticipated that between the nature of seeing the film in a theater and having the insights of the source material, I would react differently than I have in previous viewings. I was right.

I previously read it that the film was a bit ambiguous about whether Schindler had in mind all along to use the cover of a business to help Jews. That was one of the things I hoped Keneally could resolve. There, he makes the argument that it's unclear just when and why Schindler had the idea. It's only clear that he did a lot to help different people over the years. I appreciated after reading the book that the film didn't invent an epiphany scene for the sake of drama.

This time through, though, I felt that Cinematic Schindler really did start off just being in it for the profit and only later was he brought around to using his power to help. There's a willful obtuseness in the first hour or so that previously played to me as a guy not quite comfortable with what he's really doing but this time it came off a lot more as a selfish guy trying to cover his ears and yell "la la la la la la!" at the very idea of doing anything more than just profiteering.

The film also downplays the extent to which Schindler flirted with his own trouble. We see him arrested after having kissed the Jewish girls at his birthday celebration. That did happen, and he did get out of trouble through the help of high ranking Nazis he'd schmoozed, but he was arrested a second time as well. There was a persistent threat that he would be taken away as a Jewish sympathizer. He burned through a lot of favors staying out of prison. By avoiding this, Cinematic Schindler comes off as more influential and also as less heroic since there's not much sense of the danger he risked.

I also had a stronger sense of Mrs. Emilie Schindler this time through than in previous viewings. She's not particularly well established within the film, only appearing a few times without being acknowledged or discussed throughout any other scenes. I admit, I laughed today when she tells him that if he'll promise her no porter or doorman will ever mistake her for anyone other than his wife, she'll stay with him in Krakow. That line cuts directly to her being on an outbound train. Terrific moment of levity.

One area where I felt the film could have benefited from expanding the narrative is that there's a sense that the Jews were jerked around in a flurry of incidents so regularly that one does begin to wonder why they wouldn't react accordingly. The answer is, things happened slowly enough that they didn't perceive the true nature of what was being done to them.

We do see that things keep going from bad to worse, but what Keneally emphasized is how each time, the Jews had reason to believe that things were as bad as they could and would get. There are a couple of brief exchanges between Jews in the film to that effect ("I think this is the worst it will get"), but they come off as naivete rather than people who have really had time to process their experiences.

Amon Goethe here (menacingly portrayed by Ralph Fiennes) is a sort of stand-in for all Nazi horrors. Keneally makes the case that Goethe's depravity was actually outside the accepted scope of a Nazi official. He was kept at arm's length by his peers and superiors. Here, he's the life of the party. Maybe rough, but so what?

We see Goethe exhume and burn thousands of Jewish corpses, but there's no indication of why that was done. The truth is, the Russians were advancing and the Nazis were terrified of the Russians discovering evidence of what had taken place. We don't get a sense of that. Everything looks like a perfectly typical Nazi community or concentration camp. The truth is, Krakow was a backwater town in Poland where there was almost a sense that being assigned there was a banishment. Goethe's obscene cruelty was disallowed by the Nazi code of conduct (stunning to know they bothered with such a thing, isn't it?).

So these were the basics of the what crossed my mind about the difference between Spielberg's film and Keneally's novel. They don't diminish the power of the film, of course, and at 3 1/2 hours, I can certainly understand the need to abridge and streamline the narrative. One wonders: If Spielberg had it to do today, would he have made this as a film, or as an HBO mini-series? The chief appeal to me of expanding the scope of the narrative beyond what's in the film is that we don't get a clear enough sense of the risks to Schindler, the reasons why the Jews acclimated and accepted each wave of their destruction, or the complexities of the Nazi hierarchy.

This was the first time I've ever seen Schindler's List without having to either switch out tapes or flip over a DVD. As happened last year when I finally got to see Lawrence of Arabia on the big screen, I found the pace brisker in the setting of a theater. Everything that takes place after the women arrive at Auschwitz (i.e., tape 2/disc side 2) seems to go by in a particular hurry. It doesn't play like the second half, but rather just as the final act. (Which, really, it is since it's half the length of what constitutes tape 1/disc side 1).

John Williams's score is thoughtful and elegant. It's certainly the most nuanced work of his with which I'm familiar. Janusz Kaminski's cinematography is alternately frenetic and stoic, serving the scene at hand and the film at large. The performances, the costumes, the sets; all flawless. Aside from what information is or is not in the film, I think my only quibble is with some of the depictions of murder. I've never shot anyone or even seen someone shot, so maybe if you shoot someone in the head they do spray out blood as though from a hose, but there were a few, uh, shots that looked a bit overdone to me. The architect, for instance, didn't just spray blood. Her blood flow looked completely artificially rigged, like something out of a slasher film.

I've said it before, but it bears repeating: Schindler's List isn't just a powerful film. It's why film is classified as an art, and art as "humanities". We can discuss Steven Spielberg's filmography all day long, but any talk about his best work has to be with the understanding that the answer is Schindler's List. Anything else is just a matter of determining the runner-up.

Schindler's List was re-ranked to #3/1517 on my Flickchart