Midnight Cowboy

Rating

Director

John Schlesinger

Screenplay

Waldo Salt (Novel by James Leo Herlihy)

Length

113 min.

Starring

Dustin Hoffman, Jon Voight, Sylvia Miles, John McGiver, Brenda Vaccaro, Barnard Hughes

MPAA Rating

X (re-classified two years later as R)

Review

A small-town dishwasher decides he can take his faux cowboy appearance and turn a profit as a New York hustler in Midnight Cowboy.

Life in New York isn’t as easy as Joe Buck (Jon Voight) expects. Being from a small town, Buck takes people at their word. His first ‘trick’ turns the tables on him and he ends up giving her money instead of taking it for his ‘services’. He has a number of such encounters, finding it difficult to make the money he needs to keep his apartment paid for.

When he meets Enrico Salvatore ‘Ratso’ Rizzo (Dustin Hoffman), he believes his life will finally turn around. Here’s a guy who, for twenty bucks agrees to take him to a noted pimp who can profitably sell out a stable boy like Joe. However, arriving in the apartment, Mr. O’Daniel (John McGiver) turns out to be a religious nut who begs Joe to join him on his knees and pray for salvation.

Virtually broke, Joe begins sell himself out to men to make a profit, a task he despises but nevertheless endures to try and make money. His nature is a sympathetic one and even his male clientele can manipulate his sensibilities.

When he comes across Ratso again, he tries to pummel the money out of him, but finds it’s already been spent. Ratso then offers Joe a place to stay. They become emotionally more than friends, but never physically. Joe learns to appreciate Ratso’s vices but still can’t find the path he needs to help make the money to get Ratso to Florida where he longs to live.

Midnight Cowboy is one of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences bravest Best Picture selections. No other film compares to the grittiness or risqué nature of the subject matter. Matter of fact, it’s one of the few films that doesn’t end in the typical Hollywood-style happiness.

Voight and Hoffman give two fantastic performances. Voight’s naïveté and charm carry him through many encounters, keeping the audience in his sympathies like the people who exploit him keep him in theirs. Hoffman, despite playing a somewhat reprehensible character, helps the viewer understand and like him. Hoffman’s is the better of the two by a mile but they play so well in tandem that it’s difficult to separate the two.

The other performances tend to be limitedly impacting on the plot. In spite of this fact, McGiver, Sylvia Miles as Buck’s penthouse trick Cass, and Brenda Vaccaro as Buck’s first profitable trick Shirley all give nuanced performances that enhance the film’s exceedingly original script.

Director John Schlesinger took an interesting path in Midnight Cowboy. The typical flashbacks of early childhood serve less as backstory and more as narrative propulsion. The audience discovers as the film progresses what has made Joe Buck the person he is. His unstable home life helped shape his outlook on life and seems to fuel his ability to slough off convention in order to survive.

We learn little from the film about Rizzo’s past and it doesn’t hurt the story at all. If the film has one weakness, it is this. However, we know enough to understand that the film’s ultimate trip to Florida is a fateful one.

Midnight Cowboy was not just a courageous choice for the Academy. It also began a period of gritty pictures to take home the Academy’s top honor. With The Godfather, The Godfather, Part II and The French Connection soon to follow, Midnight Cowboy acts as an unusual and also fitting beginning of a renaissance for the Academy.

Review Written

November 28, 2006