Midnight Cowboy (1969)

John Schlesinger's opus about the underbelly of New York City at the end of the 1960s is a curious beast. Now it is a relatively obscure film, though it won Best Picture at the Academy Awards and boasts the famous quote "I'm walking here!" It is a seedy, graphic, violent film, but I imagine that most people are more familiar with "A Clockwork Orange" which premiered just two years later. Why this film has fallen into a pit of obscurity when, in my opinion, it is still as shocking as anything modern is a mystery to me.

Jon Voight caught his break starring as Joe Buck, a would-be cowboy who travels to the Big Apple to work as a hustler. He is tall, goofy, handsome in a boyish way, those looks giving him an air of naivety. It is false. Although he is unlearned in the art of prostitution, there are secrets in his past which are not to be underestimated. 

The hustler is hustled, first by a lonely old woman (Sylvia Miles, in a brief but startlingly good performance) and then by a sickly man named Ratso Rizzo, a cripple, a down-and-out, an urchin of the underworld. Ratso is an extraordinary character of which countless others have ripped off. He is resilient like a parasite, but a good soul, eeking out an existence in a city which would like to squish him and be done with it. Dustin Hoffman gives my favorite of his performances as Ratso. This role came right off the heels of his work in "The Graduate" and showed him for the versatile and thoughtful actor that he is. It is amazing work.

Joe and Ratso form an unlikely bond as the film, which meandered for a considerable amount of time, finally becomes an exploration of loneliness and friendship. I wonder if there are not some homosexual undertones to their relationship. "Midnight Cowboy" is so much about the taboo that I was rather surprised that there was not an overt love interest. If it was there Schlesinger did a good job at keeping things platonic.

I imagine that this film was rather shocking when it first came out. It was during the Summer of Love and all bets were off. Cinema was still largely not exploratory in its subject matter, however, and I see this as a large departure for film-making. The content itself is dark, but more than that it is simply an erratic and aggressive piece in general. Frenetic editing and anchored by a disjointed match-up of characters, the movie seems to channel and harness the angry and vocal nature of drug-fueled youths of the time. 

Its story is let down by a clunky, corny opening and a rather unfulfilling conclusion. The hefty middle portion of the story is so subversive and filled with gritty energy, culminating in a hallucinatory party scene which I'm sure challenged everything that mainstream media wanted to talk about, that it seems a shame that the mood wasn't maintained throughout. Its excellence is hindered by the lack of complete dedication to the idea. The idea is terrific, but I didn't get the sense of a full release.

3.5/4