Monday 11 November 2019

Midnight Cowboy (1969)



Midnight Cowboy
The Best Picture 1969 according to the Academy was “Midnight Cowboy”, the first, and probably only, X-rated movie to ever win that coveted award. I think it is safe to say that this movie is a bit outside the usual fare.

“Midnight Cowboy” is a movie by John Schlesinger about a young, and very naïve, Texan man who leaves his job as a dishwasher in Texas to become a hustler in New York. By this is meant male prostitute and Joe Buck (John Voight) is convinced that with his good looks and skills at lovin’, the New York ladies will be queuing up for him. However, with his cowboy attire and hopeless naivety, he is more a joke than anything else and he is soon broke. Helpful in relieving him of his money is a local small-time hustler named Enrico “Ratso” Rizzo (Dustin Hoffman), soon though the two of them strike up a friendship at the bottom of the slums of New York.

It sounds terrible in synopsis, but what makes this story not just bearable but actually interesting and charming is the bittersweet humor pervading it. Joe Buck makes a ridiculous figure in New York, but he is also sweet and gullible and therefore likeable. His attempt at working is so miserable that he ends up paying the lady rather than getting money from her. Ratso is a creep, but he is not without feelings and his desperate need of a friend is gripping. Ratso and Joe are lonely and out of their luck, but they find part of what they are lacking in each other and that is heartwarming and not a little comical given how different an appearance they make.

Hoffman and Voight were both are the very start of their careers here. Hoffman had just come off “The Graduate” and Voight had his breakthrough with “Midnight Cowboy” and there is an energy here belonging to a new generation in Hollywood. It is super interesting to see these actors who later became big stars in these, their early roles. Along same vein, the portrait of New York is a very contemporary 1969 picture with the energy and vitality, but also the trash and slums that was New York of the era. Near the end Buck and Ratso even visit a party that was arranged to appear exactly like Warhol’s Factory. This is no coincidence as Warhol and his group was in fact involved with this scene and many of the characters are Warhol regulars.

Harry Nilsson singing “Everybody’s Talkin’” may be the famous song out of the movie, but John Barry’s theme, discreet as it is, is one of those scores everybody knows even if they cannot put a finger on where it is from. It has been copied a thousand times in small variations, but this one is the real deal. I have been humming it constantly over the weekend and it is not only catchy, but also sets exactly the right tone to this melancholic drama of floundering lives.

This would definitely be one of the better movies of 1969 and I think a bold and surprising but also correct pick of the Academy. It managed to catch a lot of the zeitgeist and seem like the right movie at the right time, yet, surprisingly, it holds up perfectly today.

Oh, about the X-rated thing… an average episode of “Sex and the City” is way more raunchy than this movie ever got.

 

9 comments:

  1. The scene that lingers the most for me is when he wants to get paid for his "services" and she takes money off him! I miss these type of friendship films. Just watched the wonderful Inside Moves (1980) and there's nothing like that nowadays.

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    2. That is one of the great scenes in the movie. I also liked his complete failure at the women's hotel.
      I am afraid I do not know Inside moves, but another 1969 movie, Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid would be a reasonable companion in terms of a buddy movie.

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  2. Your review reminded me why I loved this movie so much. Saw it on original release I believe when I was a teenager and remember it being fairly shocking. Dustin Hoffman so great. I could feel it in my own chest every time he coughed.

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    1. That would have been something special. In the extra material they mention the mood in the cinema at the premiere as something entirely out of the ordinary.

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  3. Agreed this isn't that raunchy. But for the time?

    Of course, back in the day "X" didn't mean porn. It just meant that only adults could see it--it was the equivalent of today's NC-17.

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    1. I suppose it is just me shaking the head on rating systems. It is not always obvious why a movie gets rated in a certain way but the system in place from the mid-sixties is at least better than the Hays Code that effectively prevented movie that did not conform to standards.
      I think Midnight Cowboy dared to be honest and frank about about life at the bottom and that is apparently harsh fare, though the Academy, surprisingly, could see through that and recognize the gem.

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  4. This was really a good harbinger of things to come in the 70's as far as character studies. In retrospect, it seems surprising the staid Academy went out on a limb and gave this Best Picture. The following year they honored the more traditional film "Patton."

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    1. Yes, I seem to recall a lot of movies from the seventies with this vibe, though few that are this good.
      Well, Patton is not the worst film ever to win, though not anywhere as interesting as Midnight Cowboy.

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