Midnight Cowboy
Forever remembered as the first (and only) X-rated movie to win the Academy Award for Best Picture, this classic from 1969 by director John Schlesinger is relatively tame by today’s standards, but for audiences back then who had never seen nude sex scenes and the like, it was pretty much a revelation, plus the fact that it maintained a gritty, palpable realism, with the production designers not being afraid to showing the dirt under people’s fingernails along with little touches like a sick pervert’s false teeth falling out after he gets put down. It also marked the first major role for the legendary Jon Voight, cast here as Joe Buck, a Texas bumpkin who moves up to New York City with big dreams of making it as a male prostitute. Voight gets his character’s mannerisms and style of speaking down pat, and the viewer can feel his isolation as he wanders the streets of New York looking for business while dressed like one of the refugees from the Village People. The only major flaw with the character (due more to the writing than Voight’s acting) is that the Buck character is so painfully stupid at times that it distances the viewer from his character and makes it harder to relate. This is especially evident during an early scene when, after nailing a rich old hag in a penthouse apartment (the inexplicably Oscar nominated Sylvia Miles), and asking for payment afterwards, this wealthy senior citizen goes on a indignant rant about how gorgeous she is and how he should pay her (which he does) even though he barely has a pot to piss in. Eventually Voight realizes that in order to survive as a hustler in NYC, he’s gonna need to do a lot more than seducing rich women (i.e. go gay) much to the detriment of his pride. It also isn’t long before he is befriended by a sleazy, sickly pickpocket (Dustin Hoffman) who offers to help him find business and let him stay in the condemned building he calls home. White-hot in his career after the success of The Graduate, Hoffman was advised by everyone not to take this unglamorous role, but he did it anyway, giving a moving, touching performance as the crippled, dying Ratso, which led to him (and Voight) both being nominated for the Best Actor Oscar and losing to John Wayne (who ironically is the subject of a conversation when Ratso maintains only gay people like cowboys, to which Joe replies “Are you calling John Wayne a fag?”). Needless to say, this is sheer depressing stuff, and in particular gets bogged down in its melancholy a bit in the middle section of the film, where the pair seem to just sit around and mope instead of getting out there and trying to get some business drummed up. It’s also interesting to note that in the original book this movie was based on, the Ratso and Buck characters were actually portrayed as gay lovers, but in the movie, director Schlesinger (a gay man himself) chose to portray them as a fine example of male bonding, two losers sticking together without the stigma of their relationship being sexual, which probably made the whole thing easier to swallow for audiences of the time. The film does pick up, and gains some life and fun, when the two are invited to a psychedelic drug party attended by real-life members of Andy Warhol’s inner circle, and our heroes actually get to laugh and have a good time, and Ratso manages to set Joe up with a (female) client played by Brenda Vaccaro, who is cute and appealing in the role. This brightens the film up a bit en route to Joe’s fateful confrontation with a sick, twisted old man played by Barnard (Grandpa from Lost Boys) Hughes. Overall, while slightly dated and overrated 40 years later, still one of the landmark films of the era…
8/10