Midnight Cowboy

It's not quite the timeless masterpiece you would hope it would be based on the acclaim it garnered, but 1969's "Midnight Cowboy" is still a powerhouse showcase for two young actors just bursting into view at the time. Directed by John Schlesinger and written by Waldo Salt, the movie seems to be a product of its time, the late 1960's when American films were especially expressionistic, but it still casts a spell because the story comes down to themes of loneliness and bonding that resonate no matter what period. The film's cinematic influence can still be felt in the unspoken emotionalism found in Ang Lee's "Brokeback Mountain".

The meandering plot follows Joe Buck, a naive, young Texan who decides to move to Manhattan to become a stud-for-hire for rich women. Full of energy but lacking any savvy, he fails miserably but is unwilling to concede defeat despite his dwindling finances. He meets a cynical, sickly petty thief named "Ratso" Rizzo, who first sees Joe as an easy pawn. The two become dependent on one another, and Rizzo begins to manage Joe. Things come to a head at a psychedelic, drug-infested party where Joe finally lands a paying client. Meanwhile, Rizzo becomes sicker, and the two set off for Florida to seek a better life. This is not a story that will appeal to everyone, in fact, some may still find it repellent that a hustler and a thief are turned into sympathetic figures, yet their predicaments feel achingly authentic.

In his first major role, Jon Voight is ideally cast as he brings out Joe's paper-thin bravado and deepening sexual insecurities. As Rizzo, Dustin Hoffman successfully upends his clean, post-college image from "The Graduate" and immerses himself in the personal degradation and glimmering hope that act as an oddly compatible counterpoint to Joe. The honesty of their portrayals is complemented by Schlesinger's film treatment which vividly captures the squalor of the Times Square district at the time. The director also effectively inserts montages of flashbacks and fantasy sequences to fill in the character's fragile psyches. Credit also needs to go to Salt for not letting the pervasive cynicism overwhelm the pathos of the story. The other performances are merely incidental to the journeys of the main characters, including Brenda Vaccaro as the woman Joe meets at the party, Sylvia Miles as a blowsy matron, John McGiver as a religious zealot and Barnard Hughes as a lonely out-of-towner.

The two-disc 2006 DVD package contains a pristine print transfer of the 1994 restoration and informative commentary from producer Jerome Hellman since unfortunately neither Schlesinger nor Salt are still living. There are three terrific featurettes on the second disc - a look-back documentary, "After Midnight: Reflections on a Classic 35 Years Later", which features comments from Hellman, Hoffman, Voight and others, as well as clips and related archive footage such as Voight's screen test; "Controversy and Acclaim", which examines the genesis of the movie's initial 'X' rating and public response to the film; and a tribute to the director, "Celebrating Schlesinger".

This is the sort of movie that would get a minor, unremarkable release in a couple of cities, lots of plaudits, and largely ignored by audiences today. In 1969, though, it went very wide in its rollout release and made $44 million, making it the third biggest movie of the year, just behind The Love Bug and just ahead of Easy Rider. The movie industry was in the middle of a tumultuous change, and both Midnight Cowboy and Easy Rider were two major epicenters of that change. Famous for being the only film to win Best Picture while also rated X (knocked down to an R without cuts two years later), it treated sex explicitly in what was a daring fashion at the time. That shock value is long since gone, though, and what's left is an interesting though not entirely engrossing story of loneliness.

Somewhere between Fritz the Cat's cynical look at 60s counter-culture and Martin Scorsese's and Paul Schrader's look at isolation and madness in the sewer of New York City that was Taxi Driver lies Midnight Cowboy. Joe Buck (Jon Voight) is a self-proclaimed hustler (hustler's don't usually self-proclaim this, Buck) who decides to leave his home in Texas for a life of bedding older, rich women in New York City. His past is told in brief flashbacks and a couple of dream sequences that paint a portrait of a young man attached to his grandmother, Sally (Ruth White), after his mother abandoned him at her house, who found some connection with a young woman Annie (Jennifer Salt) which ends in tragedy when she's taken away by police, and who returned from a stint in the army with no connections left (reading a summary of the novel, it seems like all of this is told in more precise detail in the source material by James Leo Herlihy). Detached from anything, he seeks a better life in an exotic new place where he can live on his own terms: purely through his senses.

It's quickly evident that he's way out of his depth, knowing nothing of the city, how older, richer women want to be treated or approached, or how to hold his own in any confrontation. It's a hard road of education that begins when he picks up a woman, Cass (Sylvia Miles), who ends up getting money from him at the end of their sexual encounter instead of her paying him. Things get worse when he meets up with Rico "Ratso" Rizzo (Dustin Hoffman), a cripple of a conman who quickly bilks Joe out of $20, leaving Joe penniless, quickly homeless, and without a friend in the world. It's through happenstance that Joe meets Rizzo again, attaching himself to the smaller man in an effort to get back his money by forcing Rizzo to be his manager.

So begins the core relationship of the film: two lost men finding each other around 42nd street in New York. John Schlesinger, an Englishman and the film's director, wanted to bring to life what he saw on that strip of rundown New York, and as a time capsule for a dilapidated section of a failing city the film succeeds best. The hunger for success, the closeness to wealth, and the desperation for any kind of connection, manifested in the burgeoning relationship between Rizzo and Joe, is palpable and wonderfully realized on screen. However, the actual two characters I don't find particularly compelling which, I think, is where my resistance the film's, say, charms comes from.

Joe Buck is an idiot, and he's kind of hard to watch. Rizzo is a piece of trash who seems to only attach himself to Buck because he's falling apart physically and knows he can't survive on his own much longer. When Buck finds him again at the diner, confronting him for his $20, Rizzo looks like he's given up on life, staring blankly out the window, and his initial reaction to seeing Buck is actually a happy one like he's thinking that he's glad to meet someone who knows him, no matter who. I'll say that the pair are well-drawn, but I just don't find them the most compelling to pull on this narrative. They're tragic figures that are both so pathetic in their own way as to minimize the tragedy. There's no strength or intelligence in either of them. There's desperate stupidity in Joe and weak cunning in Rizzo.

Still, the journey is fascinating with the showstopper being an Andy Warhol-esque party that Joe gets invited to because of his unique look. It's the high-end bohemian side of the life that flaunts its own wealth in the faces of the lesser people, and it's obvious that Rizzo feels like he's being made fun of every time he gets interviewed, even though he shoving salami down his pants in order to find some food to last for a few weeks. Joe ends up getting his first successful score with the socialite Shirley (Brenda Vaccaro), getting paid $20 after a night of lovemaking that gets started slow when Joe can't perform (probably because he's concerned with Rizzo's health after Rizzo fell down a flight of stairs). Desperation kicks in mixed with Joe's sense of loyalty to his only friend, and he gives up the second step of his new life as a hustler to rob an older man and get the money to take Rizzo down to Miami.

That the film begins and ends with bus rides, both towards supposed points of freedom and wealth, is interesting, and that both end up being empty in their own way is obviously intentional. There's no greatness in the future for someone like Joe Buck. Just misery and death, although, it's kind of his own choice.

The prevalence of religious iconography is mostly subtly placed (there's Joe's early meeting with a zealot on his room that's obviously different), but there are pictures of Jesus in the flashbacks in Texas as well as sitting above Rizzo's bed as he lay dying. These are obviously intentional, and I kept thinking of how Joe had completely rejected all attachment he had before, and how those attachments were all material, centered around specific people (his grandmother and Annie). I seriously doubt that Schlesinger was trying to say anything positive around religion, so I'm guessing that they're meant to be empty symbols ("Where is your God now?" sort of stuff), but I also find it interesting that Rizzo, the one closest to death, is the only one who actually talks about religion ever. It's only once, and he talks about how his sins are between him and his confessor who he obviously doesn't go to. These are people without religion, who are lost in the modern world, who have no support otherwise, and end up just being miserable materialists. I don't think Schlesinger was intentionally calling materialism empty, but that does seem to be the implication.

So, there's a lot to chew on. The film was obviously made from a well-written novel, and the adaptation by Waldo Salt does a good job of distilling down a large work into a smaller film. I really appreciate the use of montage in flashbacks and, in particular, the dream sequence showing Annie taken away. It doesn't provide the literal details of what happens, but it's enough emotional truth to get the sense of what drove Joe away from Texas. I just cannot get invested in either main character. They are alternately too dumb and too pathetic to want to see succeed, especially since their whole vision for a life of plenty is to become a gigolo and a pimp.

Virile, but naive, big Joe Buck leaves his home in Big Spring, Texas, and hustles off to the Big Apple in search of women and big bucks. In NYC, JB meets up with frustration, and with "Ratso" Rizzo, a scruffy but cordial con artist. Somehow, this mismatched pair manage to survive each other which in turn helps both of them cope with a gritty, sometimes brutal, urban America, en route to a poignant ending.

Both funny and depressing, our "Midnight Cowboy" rides head-on into the vortex of cyclonic cultural change, and thus confirms to 1969 viewers that they, themselves, have been swept away from the 1950's age of innocence, and dropped, Dorothy and Toto like, into the 1960's Age of Aquarius.

The film's direction is masterful; the casting is perfect; the acting is top notch; the script is crisp and cogent; the cinematography is engaging; and the music enhances all of the above. Deservedly, it won the best picture Oscar of 1969, and I would vote it as one of the best films of that cyclonic decade.

I worked the Times Square area for several years, circa 1969, as a NYC Police Officer. I can tell you that the title characters and many others in this fabulous movie were right on the money. There were very few "normal" folks who were regulars to Times Square at that time. Most visitors and tourists looked right through them but they were all there. Sexual perverts aka chickenhawks, Pimps, and of course the young kids coming off the buses from the heartland by the hundreds, ready to be savaged. The music, drug culture, attitudes of too many parents, and excitement of being a young, all combined to make people think they could "make it" in an area like TS. So very many never made it to adulthood because of the lifestyle: drugs, beatings and assaults were so common. Those who survived were damaged psychologically as well as physically. Personally, I never felt so overwhelmed in my life. While handling one case, you just knew there were dozens more happening at the same moment in time. Midnight Cowboy was just one little slice of life on 42nd Street. An excellent movie.

Washing pots inside a diner's not for you, there's so much talent, you have bursting to come through, a new outfit is acquired, naive cowboy's now attired, with a ticket to New York, where dreams come true. Alas you're business acumen is undeveloped, cash not moving in directions, that you had hoped, as a male prostitute, you have no clients, you're destitute, there are memories of the past, that you evoke.

As good as it was all those years ago, and perhaps even better as it's aged, with two great central performances, although Dustin Hoffman is outstanding as the luckless 'Ratso' befriended, by the equally unfortunate Joe Buck, who's also rather gullible.