They may not have survived the final gun battle, but this is Hollywoond--now Butch and Sundance are riding off into the sunset.
Paul Newman and Robert Redford's 1969 western romp Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, Mel Brooks' 1974 horror spoof Young Frankenstein and George C. Scott's indelible performance in 1970 Best Picture winner Patton are among this year's crop of 25 cinematic classics headed for the National Film Registry.
Inspired by the National Film Preservation Act, the folks at the Library of Congress annually pick 25 classic flicks deemed "culturally, historically or aesthetically" significant to be preserved in perpetuity. This year's list brings the registry's rolls to 375 movies.
"Our film heritage is America's living past, librarian James Billington in a statement. "It celebrates the creativity and inventiveness of diverse communities and our nation as a whole. By preserving American films, we safeguard a significant element of our cultural history."
To paraphrase the Sundance Kid, Who are those guys?
If there's one obvious trend among this year's slate, which spans the years 1894 through 1988, it's the buddy genre.
Besides Redford and Newman, other films featuring memorable pairings include Elizabeth Taylor and Mickey Rooney in the 1944 horse-racing family drama, National Velvet; 1935's Naughty Marietta, featuring song-and-dance tandem Jeanette MacDonald and Nelson Eddy together for the first time; 1934's then-steamy pre-Code pic Tarzan and His Mate, starring Johnny Weissmuller and Maureen O'Sullivan; and 1956's One Froggy Evening, Chuck Jones' animated masterpiece about a man and his singing bullfrog.
Other notable entries include Rudolph Valentino's fantasy vehicle The Son of the Sheik (1926); Erich Von Stroheim's drama The Wedding March (1928) starring Fay Wray; King Vidor's comedy Show People (1928); Mervyn LeRoy's Depression-era musical Gold Diggers of 1933 (1933); and John Ford's Young Mr. Lincoln (1939), with Henry Fonda playing the prez.
Gangsters also figured prominently with Raoul Walsh's crime drama White Heat (1949), featuring a towering performance by James Cagney, tapped by the Registry along with Louis Malle's noir-romance Atlantic City (1980), starring Burt Lancaster and Susan Sarandon.
With an emphasis on diversity, the library usually confers with the National Film Preservation Board to ensure the selections not only represent popular favorites, but also more obscure titles from a variety of eras, regions and ethnicities, as well as ground-breaking technical achievements.
Case in point: 1924's The Checanos, an independent regional film whose title derives from an Inuit word meaning "tenderfoot" or "newcomer" and was the first feature ever made in Alaska, capturing settlers' life in the tundra.
Produced in 1894-95, the Dickson Experimental Sound Film is by William Dickson, who worked for Thomas Edison. The film, lasting about 25 seconds, shows Dickson playing a violin into a large Edison phonograph recorder while two men dance in the foreground. The brief short, which was never released, symbolizes a milestone in filmmaking as one of the first examples of early cinematography and also the earliest known "talkie."
With more than 80 to 90 percent of films made before 1920 are now gone forever, one early silent treasure singled out for protection was 1909's Princess Nicotine; or The Smoke Fairy, a turn-of-the-century comedy-fantasy.
This year's most modern choice was Pixar's innovative 1988 computer-animated short Tin Toy, which paved the way for such modern CG-blockbuster 'toons as Toy Story and Finding Nemo.
On the documentary front, the library selected 1957's The Hunters, which captured footage of a giraffe hunt by Kalahari Desert tribesmen, and a Fox Movietone newsreel about the Jenkins Orphanage Band, a group of touring African-American musicians from South Carolina. There's also 1970's Antonia: Portrait of a Woman, which documented the life of musician-conductor Antonia Brica and her struggles to become a conductor despite her gender.
On the flipside, is Haskell Wexler's 1969 drama Medium Cool, which nearly passed itself off as a documentary by cleverly making a TV news camera man its main subject and using real footage from 1968's chaotic Democratic National Convention.
On the avante-garde side are Nostalgia (1970) and Film Portrait (1971), experimental classics by, respectively, Hollis Frampton and Jerome Hill that explore the nature of memory and family.
The final enshrinee is 1913's Matrimony's Speed Limit, a comedy short by Alice Guy Blance about a man who must marry by noon or lose his inheritance. Blance is considered the world's first female filmmaker.