Click on a picture to enlarge it

Lizards in Movies   Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid (1969)   Spoiler Alert ! Some of these pictures and descriptions may give away plot details that you might not want to know before watching the film.   This is that goofy buddy western about two lovable thieves and killers, the one in which Butch (Paul Newman) does tricks on a bicycle and he and Sundance (Robert Redford) jump off a cliff into a river and bicker like an old married couple. It was nominated for several Oscars and won four, and it was a huge hit, making more money than any other movie in 1969. I watched it again on its 50th anniversary and was surprised to see a Gila Monster in it. (People think that it's a snake, and they keep putting "snake" as an IMDB keyword, but as you can see in the pictures above, it is clearly a Gila Monster.) The Gila Monster shows up after Butch and Sundance botch a train robbery because they blew up the cash and because the owner of the railroad hired a super-posse with an expert tracker to ride out of a second train to chase them and kill them. The posse has been close on their trail for days. Butch and Sundance ditched one horse hoping to send half the posse in the wrong direction, but that trick didn't work, so they both ride on one horse into a giant rocky outcrop where they and sit on the edge and scan the vast distance below for the posse. They are tired and on edge from being chased for so long, and they're trying to be quiet so the posse won't discover their location. They don't even talk at all in this scene. Sundance, an expert shot with a revolver, hears a rustling sound, spins around, and shoots a Gila Monster that is sitting on a small rock ledge. The camera follows the dead lizard as it falls down the rock wall. It lands on the ground before the sound of the gunshot stops reverberating. Obviously, the posse heard the sound and now knows where they are. Sundance makes a face that shows he's disappointed in himself, and they quickly ride off together on their one horse. A Gila Monster probably would not be up on a small rock ledge high off the ground in a high rocky outcrop as we see here, but at least they used a real Gila Monster, not a fake one. It's hard to know if it was alive or dead when it was filmed. As it falls down we see it leave some blood on the rock, but that could have been faked. Whether it was dead or alive, the lizard was probably rigged with a small explosive charge to simulate a bullet strike.