Midnight Cowboy

Winner of the Oscar for Best Picture in 1970 (it beat Hello Dolly and Z), John Schlesinger’s film is still the only X-rated movie to bear that distinction. Why was it rated X in the first place? The film is not graphically explicit, and looks PG beside Last Tango in Paris, made two years later, but it’s candid about the sleaze in late 60s New York City in a way that was shocking at the time, and it’s frank about the business of male prostitution, which is how Texan cowboy Joe Buck (Jon Voight) gets by in the big city, turning tricks with both women and men, under the guidance of his “manager” Ratso Rizzo (Dustin Hoffman).

British director John Schlesinger came from the school of British kitchen sink realism, and brought an outsider’s clarity to the material. He was also gay, and that sensibility informs the film’s pathos and humour.

Midnight Cowboy was about loneliness. It was about dreams, sunny yet broken. It was about gay male sexuality and the shock of really seeing it, for the first time, in a major motion picture. It was about the crush and alienation of New York City: the godless concrete carnival wasteland, which had never been captured onscreen with the telephoto authenticity it had here. The movie was also about the larger sexual revolution — what the scuzziness of free love really looked like, and the overlap between the homoerotic and hetero gaze. It was about money and poverty and class and how they could tear your soul apart. It was about how the war in Vietnam was tearing the soul of America apart. It was about a new kind of acting, built on the realism of Brando, that also went beyond it.

And it was about love. Jon Voight’s Joe Buck, that rangy Texas good ol’ boy with his fringed buckskin jacket and his jutting-front-teeth grin and his sexy bright naïveté, and Dustin Hoffman’s Ratso Rizzo, sweaty and unshaven, long hair greased back, hobbling through the streets, hording his change in a shoe with a hole in it and no sock — these two had nothing in common except that they were losers, hanging by a thread, and only after a while did they realize that they had nothing in the world but each other.

The risky, offhand greatness of Midnight Cowboy is that the movie, while it knew it was about a lot of these things, also didn’t know it was about a lot of these things. More, perhaps, than any other formative New Hollywood landmark (Bonnie and Clyde, The Graduate, Easy Rider), the film channeled the world around it.

Owen Gleiberman, Variety

To watch Midnight Cowboy is to find one of the great rewards of the movies, two of the finest performances ever seen, and a city made new every time you watch it.

Film Threat