Macadam cowboy

I worked the Times Square area for several years, circa 1969, as a NYC Police Officer. I can tell you that the title characters and many others in this fabulous movie were right on the money. There were very few "normal" folks who were regulars to Times Square at that time. Most visitors and tourists looked right through them but they were all there. Sexual perverts aka chickenhawks, Pimps, and of course the young kids coming off the buses from the heartland by the hundreds, ready to be savaged. The music, drug culture, attitudes of too many parents, and excitement of being a young, all combined to make people think they could "make it" in an area like TS. So very many never made it to adulthood because of the lifestyle: drugs, beatings and assaults were so common. Those who survived were damaged psychologically as well as physically. Personally, I never felt so overwhelmed in my life. While handling one case, you just knew there were dozens more happening at the same moment in time. Midnight Cowboy was just one little slice of life on 42nd Street. An excellent movie.

I saw MIDNIGHT COWBOY in easter 1970 when i was 15. It was at a very quiet matinée in a very cold rural mountain holiday resort town in in Australia. I was alone as I had gone for a walk but discovered I was in time for the matinée. It was one of the great cinema experiences of my teenage life and left an impression on me that still resonates. After the screening, it was freezing and foggy outside and almost dark. I walked to a nearby park in the freezing fog, sat on a wet bench and cried and cried until the tears began to freeze too. I wiped them away and went home for dinner. Nobody the wiser except me. Recently I was the film again for the first time in 40 years. I am simply awestruck at the sense of NY 1969 that floods from the screen, the sense of the time anywhere in 1969 and the fact that the film is shattering in it's depiction of poverty and friendship in a bleak city. Recently I also went to NY and found that as fascinating for I felt NY was completely safe and totally unlike the squalor seen in their lives in the film. NY today is very pretty and epic and like a fun park. I have enduring respect and admiration for this extraordinary film. I hope you do too. The performances by Voight and Hoffman are award worthy, and Joe Buck, like Forrest Gump is the sexy flip side of the American Everyman. Directed by a Brit: John Schlesinger whose International eye for NY and the tawdry but fascinating life of USA 1969 has allowed this film to be as great as it is, only made one other great American films and that is the equally tangible and shocking Hollywood pit of 1937 called DAY OF THE LOCUST. Both films have trailers which every young film maker today should study for a perfect lesson in 'preview' creation.

Dreaming of a more glamorous existence, an idealistic Texas greenhorn (Jon Voight) walks out on his mundane dishwasher's life and hops a bus bound for New York City, certain he'll find instant success as a high-priced gigolo. The city, as always, has different lessons in store. Soon, our cowboy's strapped for cash and out on the street, too soft for the harsh realities of his dream job but too proud to accept anything less. In desperation, he hooks up with a similarly out-of-luck grifter (Dustin Hoffman) and the two develop a chemical bond that sees them through some dangerously lean times, while the busiest metropolis on the planet buzzes and bustles, blissfully oblivious, on the other side of the wall.

Notorious as the first X-rated film to see wide release, Midnight Cowboy earned its reputation with a risqué subject matter, explicit nudity, glamorized drug use and frank depictions of homosexuality (with a whole boatload of associated slurs). A lot of it still seems daring and edgy today, so I can only imagine how it looked to the viewers of 1969. Then again, there's a chance the setting itself adds a thing or two to the modern shock value. This is a real time capsule of a picture, a breathing document of a city that no longer exists, with an emphasis on subcultures and undercurrents that were pushed out of all the glossy framed photos. It's sixties New York, all right, but this particular close-up is more interested in the warts on its subject's nose and the dirt under its fingernails than the carefully-primped clothes and hairstyle it wears to mask the unsightly bits.

The unflattering depiction is fascinating, particularly to someone like me, who didn't live through that era, but the story often plods and telegraphs its intentions, with an unconventional series of flashbacks only further complicating matters. Hoffman and Voight are dynamite together, an unlikely duo whose connection resonates through the smoggy haze, and serve as major boons to a film that could have floundered otherwise.

Virile, but naive, big Joe Buck leaves his home in Big Spring, Texas, and hustles off to the Big Apple in search of women and big bucks. In NYC, JB meets up with frustration, and with "Ratso" Rizzo, a scruffy but cordial con artist. Somehow, this mismatched pair manage to survive each other which in turn helps both of them cope with a gritty, sometimes brutal, urban America, en route to a poignant ending.

Both funny and depressing, our "Midnight Cowboy" rides head-on into the vortex of cyclonic cultural change, and thus confirms to 1969 viewers that they, themselves, have been swept away from the 1950's age of innocence, and dropped, Dorothy and Toto like, into the 1960's Age of Aquarius.

The film's direction is masterful; the casting is perfect; the acting is top notch; the script is crisp and cogent; the cinematography is engaging; and the music enhances all of the above. Deservedly, it won the best picture Oscar of 1969, and I would vote it as one of the best films of that cyclonic decade.

This is the sort of movie that would get a minor, unremarkable release in a couple of cities, lots of plaudits, and largely ignored by audiences today. In 1969, though, it went very wide in its rollout release and made $44 million, making it the third biggest movie of the year, just behind The Love Bug and just ahead of Easy Rider. The movie industry was in the middle of a tumultuous change, and both Midnight Cowboy and Easy Rider were two major epicenters of that change. Famous for being the only film to win Best Picture while also rated X (knocked down to an R without cuts two years later), it treated sex explicitly in what was a daring fashion at the time. That shock value is long since gone, though, and what's left is an interesting though not entirely engrossing story of loneliness.

Somewhere between Fritz the Cat's cynical look at 60s counter-culture and Martin Scorsese's and Paul Schrader's look at isolation and madness in the sewer of New York City that was Taxi Driver lies Midnight Cowboy. Joe Buck (Jon Voight) is a self-proclaimed hustler (hustler's don't usually self-proclaim this, Buck) who decides to leave his home in Texas for a life of bedding older, rich women in New York City. His past is told in brief flashbacks and a couple of dream sequences that paint a portrait of a young man attached to his grandmother, Sally (Ruth White), after his mother abandoned him at her house, who found some connection with a young woman Annie (Jennifer Salt) which ends in tragedy when she's taken away by police, and who returned from a stint in the army with no connections left (reading a summary of the novel, it seems like all of this is told in more precise detail in the source material by James Leo Herlihy). Detached from anything, he seeks a better life in an exotic new place where he can live on his own terms: purely through his senses.

It's quickly evident that he's way out of his depth, knowing nothing of the city, how older, richer women want to be treated or approached, or how to hold his own in any confrontation. It's a hard road of education that begins when he picks up a woman, Cass (Sylvia Miles), who ends up getting money from him at the end of their sexual encounter instead of her paying him. Things get worse when he meets up with Rico "Ratso" Rizzo (Dustin Hoffman), a cripple of a conman who quickly bilks Joe out of $20, leaving Joe penniless, quickly homeless, and without a friend in the world. It's through happenstance that Joe meets Rizzo again, attaching himself to the smaller man in an effort to get back his money by forcing Rizzo to be his manager.

So begins the core relationship of the film: two lost men finding each other around 42nd street in New York. John Schlesinger, an Englishman and the film's director, wanted to bring to life what he saw on that strip of rundown New York, and as a time capsule for a dilapidated section of a failing city the film succeeds best. The hunger for success, the closeness to wealth, and the desperation for any kind of connection, manifested in the burgeoning relationship between Rizzo and Joe, is palpable and wonderfully realized on screen. However, the actual two characters I don't find particularly compelling which, I think, is where my resistance the film's, say, charms comes from.

Joe Buck is an idiot, and he's kind of hard to watch. Rizzo is a piece of trash who seems to only attach himself to Buck because he's falling apart physically and knows he can't survive on his own much longer. When Buck finds him again at the diner, confronting him for his $20, Rizzo looks like he's given up on life, staring blankly out the window, and his initial reaction to seeing Buck is actually a happy one like he's thinking that he's glad to meet someone who knows him, no matter who. I'll say that the pair are well-drawn, but I just don't find them the most compelling to pull on this narrative. They're tragic figures that are both so pathetic in their own way as to minimize the tragedy. There's no strength or intelligence in either of them. There's desperate stupidity in Joe and weak cunning in Rizzo.

Still, the journey is fascinating with the showstopper being an Andy Warhol-esque party that Joe gets invited to because of his unique look. It's the high-end bohemian side of the life that flaunts its own wealth in the faces of the lesser people, and it's obvious that Rizzo feels like he's being made fun of every time he gets interviewed, even though he shoving salami down his pants in order to find some food to last for a few weeks. Joe ends up getting his first successful score with the socialite Shirley (Brenda Vaccaro), getting paid $20 after a night of lovemaking that gets started slow when Joe can't perform (probably because he's concerned with Rizzo's health after Rizzo fell down a flight of stairs). Desperation kicks in mixed with Joe's sense of loyalty to his only friend, and he gives up the second step of his new life as a hustler to rob an older man and get the money to take Rizzo down to Miami.

That the film begins and ends with bus rides, both towards supposed points of freedom and wealth, is interesting, and that both end up being empty in their own way is obviously intentional. There's no greatness in the future for someone like Joe Buck. Just misery and death, although, it's kind of his own choice.

The prevalence of religious iconography is mostly subtly placed (there's Joe's early meeting with a zealot on his room that's obviously different), but there are pictures of Jesus in the flashbacks in Texas as well as sitting above Rizzo's bed as he lay dying. These are obviously intentional, and I kept thinking of how Joe had completely rejected all attachment he had before, and how those attachments were all material, centered around specific people (his grandmother and Annie). I seriously doubt that Schlesinger was trying to say anything positive around religion, so I'm guessing that they're meant to be empty symbols ("Where is your God now?" sort of stuff), but I also find it interesting that Rizzo, the one closest to death, is the only one who actually talks about religion ever. It's only once, and he talks about how his sins are between him and his confessor who he obviously doesn't go to. These are people without religion, who are lost in the modern world, who have no support otherwise, and end up just being miserable materialists. I don't think Schlesinger was intentionally calling materialism empty, but that does seem to be the implication.

So, there's a lot to chew on. The film was obviously made from a well-written novel, and the adaptation by Waldo Salt does a good job of distilling down a large work into a smaller film. I really appreciate the use of montage in flashbacks and, in particular, the dream sequence showing Annie taken away. It doesn't provide the literal details of what happens, but it's enough emotional truth to get the sense of what drove Joe away from Texas. I just cannot get invested in either main character. They are alternately too dumb and too pathetic to want to see succeed, especially since their whole vision for a life of plenty is to become a gigolo and a pimp.