Midnight Cowboy

United States

1969

113 Min

Color, Black and White

1.85:1

English, Italian

Currently 4.1/5 Stars.
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SCR Waldo Salt, James Leo Herlihy

CAST Dustin Hoffman, Jon Voight, Sylvia Miles, John McGiver, Brenda Vaccaro, Barnard Hughes, Ruth White, Jennifer Salt, Gilman Rankin, Gary Owens, T. Tom Marlow, George Eppersen, Bob Balaban, Viva, Ultra Violet, Paul Jabara, International Velvet, Paul Morrissey, Cecelia Lipson, Taylor Mead

MUSIC John Barry, Warren Zevon, Fred Neil

SOUND Abe Seidman, Vincent Connelly, Jack Fitzstephens, Dick Vorisek

Berlinale (Competition): OCIC Award, Berlinale (Retrospective)

Synopsis

Restless and dissatisfied with his life as a dishwasher in a small Texas town, young Joe Buck outfits himself in a flashy cowboy outfit and heads for New York City, confident that his fortune will be made by selling himself to wealthy, sex-starved Manhattan women. While traveling by bus, he recalls some of the events of his childhood–the father who abandoned his wayward mother, the endless stream of men who visited his frisky grandmother Sally, and a series of sexual encounters during adolescence, including a gang rape of both Joe and his girl friend Annie. After checking into a seedy Manhattan hotel, Joe takes to the streets and eventually picks up Cass, a rich, coarse, middle-aged blonde. Although they make love in her East Side apartment, Joe not only fails to collect a fee but ends up giving her $20 for cab fare. Later, at a cheap Broadway bar, Joe meets Ratso Rizzo, a crippled, tubercular petty thief and con artist who volunteers to work as his pimp and manager. Although the two misfits have a falling out when Ratso sends Joe to the sleazy room of Mr. O’Daniel, a homosexual, religious fanatic, they patch up their differences and agree to share Ratso’s dismally cold room in a condemned building. Almost in spite of themselves, their mutual loneliness leads to genuine friendship as Ratso shares with Joe his fantasy of someday living a life of luxury in Miami Beach. Economically, their partnership meets with little success, as Joe’s typical “conquests” turn out to be as unprofitable as his encounter with a timid student to whom he gives himself in a 42nd Street theater balcony, only to discover that the boy cannot pay. Their situation appears to improve when Joe meets Shirley, a chic swinger at an underground party in Greenwich Village, and earns $20 for spending a wild night with her. By now, however, winter has taken its toll on Ratso, and he can no longer walk. Determined to get the bus fare to take his friend to Florida, Joe brutally beats up an aging homosexual in a hotel room and steals his money. Ratso manages to stumble onto the bus, but dies as they reach Miami. Facing an uncertain future, Joe puts his arm around the dead body of the only true friend he ever had. —AFI

Director

John Schlesinger

Schlesinger was born in London into a middle class Jewish family, the son of Winifred Henrietta (née Regensburg) and Bernard Edward Schlesinger, a physician. After Uppingham School and graduating from Balliol College, Oxford, he worked as an actor.

One of his earliest films, the British Transport Films’ documentary Terminus (1960), gained a Venice Film Festival Gold Lion and a British Academy Award. His first two fiction movies, A Kind of Loving (1962) and Billy Liar (1963) were set in the North of England. A Kind of Loving won the Golden Bear award at the 12th Berlin International Film Festival in 1962.

His third Darling (1965) described tartly the modern urban way of life in London and was one of the first films about ‘swinging London’. Schlesinger’s next movie was Far From the Madding Crowd (1967), an adaptation of Thomas Hardy’s popular novel. Schlesinger’s Midnight Cowboy (1969) was internationally acclaimed… read more

His later films include Sunday Bloody Sunday (1971), The Day of the Locust (1975), Marathon Man (1976), Yanks (1979), Pacific Heights (1990), A Question of Attribution (1991), The Innocent (1993) and The Next Best Thing (2000).

Schlesinger also directed Timon of Athens (1965) for the Royal Shakespeare Company and the musical I and Albert (1972) at London’s Piccadilly Theatre. From 1973 he was an associate director of the Royal National Theatre.

Openly gay, Schlesinger dealt with homosexuality in Midnight Cowboy, Sunday Bloody Sunday and The Next Best Thing, and two main characters in Marathon Man were at least implicitly gay. Speaking about Midnight Cowboy’s unflattering portrayal of homosexuality, he stated that he was against political correctness and the self-censorship it encourages, which would prevent such a film from being made today.

Schlesinger also directed a notable party political broadcast for the Conservative Party in the United Kingdom general election, 1992 which featured Prime Minister John Major returning to Brixton in south London where he had spent his teenage years, which highlighted his humble background, atypical for a Conservative politician. Schlesinger admitted to voting for all three main political parties in the UK at one time or another.

The book and TV series The Glittering Prizes, writer Frederic Raphael, who won the Best Screenwriting Oscar for his work on Schlesinger’s film Darling, feature a character believed to be based on Schlesinger. —Wikipedia

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Judicial Joe

3Jun13

A sad portrait of the madness of the American dream.

mursal

3Jun13

this is my shit right here

soiwaswrong

22May13

That "good looking hillbilly with a dark past decided to go to the big city to reach his dreams but ended up nothing" stuff was too typical, but the friendship thing was ok....