Oscars Retrospective: Midnight Cowboy (41st Academy Awards Review)
Everybody's Talkin'~Harry Nilsson - Midnight Cowboy
While the previous Academy Awards winner, Oliver! (1968) is a very good movie, it’s a pretty fluffy and safe one. So much so that its winning the Oscar for Best Picture torpedoed the Oscars’ credibility for a few years. The Academy, now newly populated by young, fresh and arrogant faces from the New Hollywood crowd, apparently took that criticism directly to heart because you couldn’t find a movie more diametrically different from Oliver! than Midnight Cowboy if you tried.
Midnight Cowboy is a notoriously dark and unpleasant classic and is one of the darkest films to have ever won the Academy Award for Best Picture. A small town man in Texas named Joe Buck (Jon Voight) moves to New York City seeking to follow his dreams, thinking he’ll pursue a lucrative career as a male prostitute since having sex is the one thing he thinks he’s good at (rule of thumb in life: if you ever openly declare you’re very good at having sex, odds are you’re actually pretty bad at it). He is quickly given a rude awakening as he realizes that New York City isn’t nearly as inviting as he thinks and, desperate to simply survive in the Big Apple, he slowly develops a friendship with the only friendly face he can find: a filthy con artist named Rico Rizzo (Dustin Hoffman), whom Joe nicknames Ratso (much to Rizzo’s everlasting dismay).
The best way to describe Midnight Cowboy is that it serves as a deconstruction of the typical New York City fairy tale that had become commonplace by this point in movies such as Breakfast at Tiffany’s (1961) and Barefoot in the Park (1967), not to mention the long line of backstage musicals set on Broadway, starting with 42nd Street (1933). New York was one of the epicenters of the Western counterculture during the swinging 60s. For thousands, if not millions, of baby boomers around the country, it was the place to move to so you could be part of the center of everything. Though it wasn’t the place to be just in the 60s. Back in the Gilded Age 100 years ago, today, or even when the city went to Hell during the crack era, there was always an aura of New York City being the place where dreams can come true for anyone who tries hard enough. As Frank Sinatra famously sang, “If I can make it there, I can make it anywhere.”
Of course, the unspoken corollary to that line is that it actually means that it’s easier to make it just about anywhere else other than New York City. New York is pretty notorious for being a place that will grind you down into a crabby jerk should you let it and cinema revolving around New York tends to reflect that, usually with a variety of cheeky jokes about how hard it is to live there. While you might think that this is a post-New Hollywood trend, this does go back a bit further than you think though it was a bit more rare (partly due to movies back then being less cynical, partly because during the 50s-mid-60s, at the height of the post-war American economic boom, it probably wasn’t that hard to find an affordable apartment in the city that wasn’t a complete craphole). Barefoot in the Park is about this exact concept though it’s a lot cuter and cheekier. And if you go way back, there’s the classic silent movie The Crowd (1927).
Midnight Cowboy is the first movie to really bring the brutal, unvarnished truth about New York City to the silver screen. There’s a lot of attitude, a lot of grit, a lot of people who will out-hustle our hustling protagonist. Unlike the aforementioned clip which pokes fun at trying to find a place to rent, Midnight Cowboy’s protagonists end up spending a large chunk of the movie homeless, a situation that grows more dire as the winter draws near. If you’ve ever lived in New York back when we had real winters, you’ll know how brutal they can be as the grid-like street pattern turns most of Manhattan into a frigid wind tunnel. And then there’s the film’s most famous scene, containing the best New York welcome ever put to film.
Midnight Cowboy is a notoriously dark and unpleasant classic and is one of the darkest films to have ever won the Academy Award for Best Picture. A small town man in Texas named Joe Buck (Jon Voight) moves to New York City seeking to follow his dreams, thinking he’ll pursue a lucrative career as a male prostitute since having sex is the one thing he thinks he’s good at (rule of thumb in life: if you ever openly declare you’re very good at having sex, odds are you’re actually pretty bad at it). He is quickly given a rude awakening as he realizes that New York City isn’t nearly as inviting as he thinks and, desperate to simply survive in the Big Apple, he slowly develops a friendship with the only friendly face he can find: a filthy con artist named Rico Rizzo (Dustin Hoffman), whom Joe nicknames Ratso (much to Rizzo’s everlasting dismay).
The best way to describe Midnight Cowboy is that it serves as a deconstruction of the typical New York City fairy tale that had become commonplace by this point in movies such as Breakfast at Tiffany’s (1961) and Barefoot in the Park (1967), not to mention the long line of backstage musicals set on Broadway, starting with 42nd Street (1933). New York was one of the epicenters of the Western counterculture during the swinging 60s. For thousands, if not millions, of baby boomers around the country, it was the place to move to so you could be part of the center of everything. Though it wasn’t the place to be just in the 60s. Back in the Gilded Age 100 years ago, today, or even when the city went to Hell during the crack era, there was always an aura of New York City being the place where dreams can come true for anyone who tries hard enough. As Frank Sinatra famously sang, “If I can make it there, I can make it anywhere.”
Of course, the unspoken corollary to that line is that it actually means that it’s easier to make it just about anywhere else other than New York City. New York is pretty notorious for being a place that will grind you down into a crabby jerk should you let it and cinema revolving around New York tends to reflect that, usually with a variety of cheeky jokes about how hard it is to live there. While you might think that this is a post-New Hollywood trend, this does go back a bit further than you think though it was a bit more rare (partly due to movies back then being less cynical, partly because during the 50s-mid-60s, at the height of the post-war American economic boom, it probably wasn’t that hard to find an affordable apartment in the city that wasn’t a complete craphole). Barefoot in the Park is about this exact concept though it’s a lot cuter and cheekier. And if you go way back, there’s the classic silent movie The Crowd (1927).
Midnight Cowboy is the first movie to really bring the brutal, unvarnished truth about New York City to the silver screen. There’s a lot of attitude, a lot of grit, a lot of people who will out-hustle our hustling protagonist. Unlike the aforementioned clip which pokes fun at trying to find a place to rent, Midnight Cowboy’s protagonists end up spending a large chunk of the movie homeless, a situation that grows more dire as the winter draws near. If you’ve ever lived in New York back when we had real winters, you’ll know how brutal they can be as the grid-like street pattern turns most of Manhattan into a frigid wind tunnel. And then there’s the film’s most famous scene, containing the best New York welcome ever put to film.
Dustin Hoffman liked to claim that this scene was improvised when a car almost hit him and he shouted at it whilst remaining in-character. This is not the case as the car almost running them over and Rizzo smacking the hood was in the original script. The line itself may have been improvised though.
In 1966, the mayor of New York City at the time, John Lindsay, set up the Mayor’s Office and Television and Film, an agency in New York City that gives tax breaks and organization to incentivize films to be produced in the city. Lindsay did this to try to get more movies made in the city to help bring more money into a place that was undergoing a fiscal crisis. The bitter irony of this decision is that most of the filmmakers who took advantage of this incentive did not make New York City seem like a very appealing place to be which in turn likely exacerbated white flight and made that fiscal crisis even worse.
With the death of American liberalism in 1968, many of the filmmakers and artists of the generation were left, in the words of Dr. Hook and the Medicine Show, wondering where the dream went wrong. As a result, most of the pop culture of the 70s reflected a much grittier, more unpleasant America and New York City was one of the biggest casualties of that. Midnight Cowboy was the first instance of gothic New York movies that would come to define much of the 70s. (e.g. The Panic in Needle Park (1971), Taxi Driver (1976), The Warriors (1979) etc.) This is going to sound like a strange comparison but the movie actually reminds me a lot of the production design from the classic Universal and Hammer horror movies. Those movies usually depicted Gothic architecture of castles and old European villages to give the world the monsters inhabit the feeling of having once been great before being perverted by evil. The New York displayed in Midnight Cowboy is a mid-20th Century gothic. Buck and Rizzo end up squatting in a burnt-out building in the Bronx (which was being plagued by fires at the time as mobbed-up landlords found it more lucrative to set the city on fire to collect insurance money rather than rent out) which reflects a similar feeling. The idea of the swinging 60s has been swallowed by the reality of the New York immigrant dream gone awry: a man came to New York to find love and must end up squatting because it does not exist anymore.
The movie also broke ground with its depiction of homosexual relations. Joe Buck, despite clearly preferring women, slowly turns into an equal-opportunity gigolo as he ends up sleeping and being taken advantage of by several men. This is another one of those things that was a big no-no under the Hays Code and, honestly, even in the 60s were almost never mentioned. Midnight Cowboy remains a tentpole in gay cinema representation, both for the aforementioned case and also in the implication of Buck and Rizzo’s eventual relationship.
This latter aspect is frequently debated by fans of the movie on whether or not the two characters fall in love, as, besides sharing an apartment, they eventually start acting like a married couple and even share a bed (granted, it’s mostly a practical concern since they’re living in squalor but still). They never kiss or do anything intimate but there are signs. On the other hand, the director of the film, John Schlesinger, insisted that this was not the case as he just saw it being about connection between two lonely souls. Then again, Schlesinger himself also spent most of his life as a closeted homosexual and was understandably pretty sensitive to the idea of having made a “gay picture.” In addition, the writer of the book the movie was based on, James Leo Herlihy, was also gay. In my opinion, I definitely saw Buck and Rizzo as a couple by the end of the movie and I have a pretty bad gaydar so, if I’m seeing it, there’s something there.
Nowadays, this apartment would go for $1850/month + utilities.
The very blunt and casual acknowledgment of sex is definitely one of the most of-the-time aspects of Midnight Cowboy that can make it a little difficult to wrap your head around and, in fact, I’d probably venture to say is the only real key flaw of the picture. The very idea of having a protagonist in a movie whose main goal in life is becoming a prostitute is something that could only really exist during the Sexual Revolution of the 60s and 70s as, historically speaking, prostitution is a pretty unpleasant, looked-down-upon profession outside of that bubble. In fact, I’m actually skeptical that it wasn’t like that at the time either since the movie largely revolves around Joe Buck coming to grips with the horrible realities of getting both literally and figuratively screwed for a living. I understand that it’s meant to be a cheapening of the American Dream; just on a practical level, what kind of moron would move all the way across the country just to become a prostitute for a living? I get the guy is supposed to be kind of dumb but that is next-level dumb.
In case it sounds like I’m analyzing the movie more than actually critiquing, it’s because analyzing a movie like Midnight Cowboy is the whole reason you would (and should) watch it in the first place. That was the beautiful thing about the Hollywood New Wave and why many film lovers still look nostalgically back at the 70s as the height of the art form. Character studies would become all the rage for the next decade as they would take a character that represents some aspect of America and American culture and just study them for 90 minutes. There’s still a 3-act structure and a climax to Midnight Cowboy but they’re ones that want to make you think and unsure how to feel about it after it’s all said and done.
On the bells and whistles, the movie is excellent. The two leads are a great pair and play very well off of each other. Jon Voight, despite being a native New Yorker, has a spot-on perfect Texan accent and mannerisms and does a great job at selling how lost and uncomfortable he is in the Big Apple. The character can even become a pretty nasty piece of work at times but you can always see where it’s coming from. Coming off of The Graduate (1967), Hoffman’s turn as Rizzo is a pretty bold choice for someone who was such a heartthrob. Rizzo is so visibly unhealthy that he damn near exudes filth and he looks like someone who simply smelling his breath would be enough to give you a venereal disease. The height disparity between the two is also a great touch as the image of the two walking down a New York street, side-by-side, is an image that sticks with you.
The tall out-of-towner sticking out like a sore thumb while the ratty native blends into the crowd.
All of the other actors are great but not especially memorable, helping to keep the focus on the journey of Joe Buck. The same goes for the cinematography. It looks good but the movie very rarely has any of those beautiful shots that defined a lot of the 60s. Instead, it’s very divorced and clinical, making the city feel like a very cold place. The music also contains a lot of 60s hits though, again, they’re not the friendly croons of the Beatles. The title song, Everybody’s Talkin’, just sounds sad.
Midnight Cowboy is often regarded as one of the greatest movies ever made as well as a landmark in both New York cinema and gay cinema. I can’t exactly say that it’s an altogether pleasant watch, and it can be on the slow side at times, but if you want a movie analyzing the emotions of the human animal and properly understand the national mood in 1969, there are few better alternatives. It launched the career of Jon Voight, cemented Dustin Hoffman as one of the greatest actors of his generation and captured the hopelessness of the baby boomer generation. It’s that type of movie that will make you want to sit down and digest it afterwards and will stick with you a long time after.
But could it be called the best movie of the year?
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