#Raindrops keep falling on my head movie

“The studio didn’t realize how it would connect with the public and it became a huge hit almost overnight,” Burlingame said.

#Raindrops keep falling on my head movie

In an email to Vanity Fair, Herb Alpert, the label’s cofounder, said, “In the movie you didn’t know how these two likable bandits would end up and Burt Bacharach’s unusual and creative music had the same flavor, and then out of the blue comes ‘Raindrops Keep Falling on My Head.’ Now, that’s art.”Ī single version of “Raindrops” was released in October 1969. The Butch Cassidy soundtrack was among A&M Records’ best-selling albums that year. “We got through five takes I couldn’t have done one more,” he said with a laugh. When Thomas performed the vocal for the film’s soundtrack, he was recovering from an acute case of laryngitis. David tried to come up with another title, as the sun is shining brightly throughout the sequence. “I wrote the entire melody, and the only words that kept running through my mind from top to bottom were ‘Raindrops keep fallin’ on my head,’” he recalled. Watching the scene on a moviola, Bacharach knew the song would start with a ukulele, he wrote in his autobiography, Anyone Who Had a Heart. To give Bacharach an idea of what he was looking for musically, Hill had cut the sequence to Simon & Garfunkel’s jaunty “ The Fifty-Ninth Street Bridge Song (Feelin’ Groovy).” The bicycle scene was shot as a playful musical interlude. And that brings us to “ Raindrops Keep Fallin’ on My Head,” which arrives about 30 minutes into the film while the goings are still loose and affable. Hill did not want music playing under the dialogue, which means the soundtrack runs less than a half hour. “There are only seven music sequences in the entire film,” said film-music expert Jon Burlingame. “The characters are modern rather than traditional in approach and temperament, and dialogue…has a very contemporary rhythm and sound to it, and we didn’t want a traditional Western score.” “The picture was designed for a contemporary feel,” Hill, a Yale music major, said in a documentary about Butch Cassidy filmed in 1968-69. It remains an irresistible earworm and perfectly suited to a film that was made for its rebellious, radical times and went against the traditional Western grain. But thanks to its charismatic leads-Paul Newman and Robert Redford as “two-bit outlaws on the dodge”-William Goldman’s puckish, Oscar-winning script, and, especially, Bacharach’s unconventional score, the film went on to be the biggest box office hit of 1969 and has since been embraced as a classic.Ĭomposed by Burt Bacharach and lyricist Hal David, “Raindrops” is the film’s breakout hit and its legacy song an upbeat and indefatigable ode to feeling free. When it premiered 50 years ago this week, George Roy Hill’s revisionist Western initially struggled with critics. Stevens was far from the last person who didn’t quite get “Raindrops Keep Fallin’ on My Head”-or Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, for that matter. “I don’t know why anyone would pass on a song that’s going to be in a Paul Newman movie,” Thomas said in a recent interview. Though it’s Thomas’s voice, scratchy from laryngitis, that sings “Raindrops Keep Fallin’ on My Head” over the classic bicycle sequence in Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, composer Bacharach initially brought the song to Ray Stevens, best known at the time for such novelty hits as “Along Came Jones” and “Gitarzan.” Stevens passed, and his loss was Thomas’s gain. Thomas knows he wasn’t Burt Bacharach’s first choice.