Dustin Hoffman, Jon Voight, Sylvia Miles, Brenda Vaccaro. Dir. John Schlesinger, UA, 1969
Jon Voight, Dustin Hoffman, Brenda Vaccaro. Dir. John Schlesinger, United Artists, 1969
7 lbs of Movies, #4
Like Towering Inferno, Midnight Cowboy holds a special place in my life as a legendary, paradigm-shattering film released in my lifetime but before I could appreciate it. As a film fan, I certainly grew up hearing and reading about it. The only X-rated feature to win Best Picture at the Academy Awards. The movie that made Jon Voight a star, and kept Hoffman, hot from The Graduate, on the map. The theme music outlived the movie, a staple of easy-listening playlists almost from the film's release.
Unlike Towering Inferno, Midnight Cowboy's not an Old Hollywood-style blockbuster, swathed in glamor and big stars. It's a more personal film, a character piece looking at an unlikely street friendship between a naive male prostitute and a sick con man. It's a famous film, yes, but not one with a Mad Magazine parody I ever saw, not the kind of movie grade school boys discussed on the playground. Not, at least, without saying "EW!" at least once. (In the '70s, anyway. Kids today might be less weirded out by the male-hustler thing. Had it come up at Clifton School in the mid-1970s, things would have been said.)
Point being, Midnight Cowboy, while qualifying as a legendary film of my lifetime that I missed, its status and legend come to me only as an adult and a movie buff. I finally saw it in 2005, and I think my own life circumstances made it hard to fully appreciate, but I knew I wanted to look at it again. I had no idea it would take 16 years for "again" to occur.
When I first watched Midnight Cowboy, in 2005, I had just moved out of a subsidized apartment in suburban Cincinnati, from which I was being evicted, into an SRO hotel called The Dana, part of a larger housing agency for the mentally ill. I had a long, narrow sleeping room with a bed, a table for my TV, a folding chair, and a set of drawers and vanity built out of one wall. My window overlooked the parking lot. I had to open it once a while when the room hazed up with my cugarette smoke. I had to stay at the Dana for two weeks while the larger agency decided which building would take me as a resident. A precarious time, in which I basically sat in my room, got high, and watched feature films I checked out from the Msin Branch public library, two blocks away.
Allow me to suggest that was not an optimal time to fully appreciate the nuances of a story about failing street-hustlers squatting in a condemned building, scrounging for food, barely keeping each other from even worse. The life of Ratso Rizzo and Joe Buck existed outside my window, on W. 12th Street, at the Drop Inn Center, two blocks away, in Carl's, the neighborhood tavern at the end of my block, at Washington Park, a half-block and one walk-light from the Dana's door. Those relationships, that level of subsistence-scamming, could be watched all day and night from the Dana's fenced patio, where I'd go to get some summer air with my cigarette. It was a life I temporarily left when I moved to the 'burbs. I felt stranded and isolated there, but that didn't mean I wanted to be back watching guys try to peddle shampoo they got free from a charity to score a pebble or a shorty of wine.
I understand why Midnight Cowboy made enough of an impression that I wanted to see it again. I also understand why it wasn't really my ideal movie at that point. I'm also glad it took 16 years to return to it, as it's virtually a new film to me. A film which I'm comfortable saying is one of the best movies I've ever seen, as satisfying as The Godfather, though a totally different picture. When I feel complete at a film's end, as if I've had a perfect dinner while reading a great story, I know I've seen something special. I felt that as Midnight Cowboy's final credits rolled.
Jon Voight's Joe Buck, a smalltown dishwasher and wannabe cowboy-ladies' man fled to NYC to be a gigolo, and Dustin Hoffman's Enrico "Ratso" Rizzo, a consumptive street-grifter at the end of his string, need each other. That's the essence of everything that happens. They're two damaged, lonely men who need what the other has, materially, economically, and emotionally. Their relationship reminded me of similar friendships I experienced in those years, relationships by turns parasitic, symbiotic, and tender. Your partner might sucker you out of five bucks one day, then make sure you eat all the next. In truth, the relationship between these two men reminds me of my former fiancee, whom I moved to Mississippi to live with. Our relationship wasn't especially pretty, but it fed necessity. We needed each other, sometimes for money or food or a ride, but sometimes because the struggle seems a little less daunting with someone to curl up with at night. Lacking the sexual part, mostly, that's the core of Buck's & Rizzo's partnership. When I saw Midnight Cowboy in '05 I was about 90 days away from the start of that relationship. Today I'm 13 years past its last gasp. Midnight Cowboy's a very different movie to me now.
I swear, 1969 is the year of the anti-movie. The Wild Bunch and Butch Cassidy & the Sundance Kid were anti-westerns. As, in its way, was Easy Rider, also an anti-road-movie. Even On Her Majesty's Secret Service stood as the anti-Bond movie. Midnight Cowboy is an anti-buddy-picture that in some senses qualifies as an anti-everything film. The Best Picture of 1969, it doesn't look like Best Picture movies look. It isn't beautiful, except in the way urban blight and grit can be oddly beautiful. It isn't uplifting, it's not a biopic or ripped from any headline, there's no traditional love interest, and not only is there no happy ending, there's no real ending, nor a traditional beginning, either. Midnight Cowboy looks as different, feels as different, and is as different as any other Best Picture winner. It's dank. Dour. The lighting's poor. People look as unhealthy as they are.
The same lack of Hollywood glitz applies to the story. Two broken guys keep each other whole until one breaks too much. That's the whole thing. It's a platonic love story. It's a movie about what two people take from and give to one another, and how it affects them. There's no antagonist. The protagonists are or are not likable - it's your call. There's no leading lady. No heroic quest. No set pieces. No chases. No gunplay. There's just Voight and Hoffman, drowning each other as they try to stay above water. They come together without much backstory, they part and we have no idea what lies in Joe Buck's future, healing or more damage or something else. It's not important. All that matters is the time they spend together, learning to love each other. There's an almost zen simplicity to the story.
My questions are answered. We would never have talked about Midnight Cowboy on the playground at Clifton School. It would not have even interested us, or made any sense. Nothing exploded and no one said "shit." It's a movie for adults, adults who can understand a movie without a bad guy, a gun, or a sex scene. Sometimes, I'm not even that adult, but tonight I was, and thank god, because Midnight Cowboy is the kind of movie that elevates even an already-good week of movie-watching.
As good as movies get.
Like Towering Inferno, Midnight Cowboy holds a special place in my life as a legendary, paradigm-shattering film released in my lifetime but before I could appreciate it. As a film fan, I certainly grew up hearing and reading about it. The only X-rated feature to win Best Picture at the Academy Awards. The movie that made Jon Voight a star, and kept Hoffman, hot from The Graduate, on the map. The theme music outlived the movie, a staple of easy-listening playlists almost from the film's release.
Unlike Towering Inferno, Midnight Cowboy's not an Old Hollywood-style blockbuster, swathed in glamor and big stars. It's a more personal film, a character piece looking at an unlikely street friendship between a naive male prostitute and a sick con man. It's a famous film, yes, but not one with a Mad Magazine parody I ever saw, not the kind of movie grade school boys discussed on the playground. Not, at least, without saying "EW!" at least once. (In the '70s, anyway. Kids today might be less weirded out by the male-hustler thing. Had it come up at Clifton School in the mid-1970s, things would have been said.)
Point being, Midnight Cowboy, while qualifying as a legendary film of my lifetime that I missed, its status and legend come to me only as an adult and a movie buff. I finally saw it in 2005, and I think my own life circumstances made it hard to fully appreciate, but I knew I wanted to look at it again. I had no idea it would take 16 years for "again" to occur.
When I first watched Midnight Cowboy, in 2005, I had just moved out of a subsidized apartment in suburban Cincinnati, from which I was being evicted, into an SRO hotel called The Dana, part of a larger housing agency for the mentally ill. I had a long, narrow sleeping room with a bed, a table for my TV, a folding chair, and a set of drawers and vanity built out of one wall. My window overlooked the parking lot. I had to open it once a while when the room hazed up with my cugarette smoke. I had to stay at the Dana for two weeks while the larger agency decided which building would take me as a resident. A precarious time, in which I basically sat in my room, got high, and watched feature films I checked out from the Msin Branch public library, two blocks away.
Allow me to suggest that was not an optimal time to fully appreciate the nuances of a story about failing street-hustlers squatting in a condemned building, scrounging for food, barely keeping each other from even worse. The life of Ratso Rizzo and Joe Buck existed outside my window, on W. 12th Street, at the Drop Inn Center, two blocks away, in Carl's, the neighborhood tavern at the end of my block, at Washington Park, a half-block and one walk-light from the Dana's door. Those relationships, that level of subsistence-scamming, could be watched all day and night from the Dana's fenced patio, where I'd go to get some summer air with my cigarette. It was a life I temporarily left when I moved to the 'burbs. I felt stranded and isolated there, but that didn't mean I wanted to be back watching guys try to peddle shampoo they got free from a charity to score a pebble or a shorty of wine.
I understand why Midnight Cowboy made enough of an impression that I wanted to see it again. I also understand why it wasn't really my ideal movie at that point. I'm also glad it took 16 years to return to it, as it's virtually a new film to me. A film which I'm comfortable saying is one of the best movies I've ever seen, as satisfying as The Godfather, though a totally different picture. When I feel complete at a film's end, as if I've had a perfect dinner while reading a great story, I know I've seen something special. I felt that as Midnight Cowboy's final credits rolled.
Jon Voight's Joe Buck, a smalltown dishwasher and wannabe cowboy-ladies' man fled to NYC to be a gigolo, and Dustin Hoffman's Enrico "Ratso" Rizzo, a consumptive street-grifter at the end of his string, need each other. That's the essence of everything that happens. They're two damaged, lonely men who need what the other has, materially, economically, and emotionally. Their relationship reminded me of similar friendships I experienced in those years, relationships by turns parasitic, symbiotic, and tender. Your partner might sucker you out of five bucks one day, then make sure you eat all the next. In truth, the relationship between these two men reminds me of my former fiancee, whom I moved to Mississippi to live with. Our relationship wasn't especially pretty, but it fed necessity. We needed each other, sometimes for money or food or a ride, but sometimes because the struggle seems a little less daunting with someone to curl up with at night. Lacking the sexual part, mostly, that's the core of Buck's & Rizzo's partnership. When I saw Midnight Cowboy in '05 I was about 90 days away from the start of that relationship. Today I'm 13 years past its last gasp. Midnight Cowboy's a very different movie to me now.
I swear, 1969 is the year of the anti-movie. The Wild Bunch and Butch Cassidy & the Sundance Kid were anti-westerns. As, in its way, was Easy Rider, also an anti-road-movie. Even On Her Majesty's Secret Service stood as the anti-Bond movie. Midnight Cowboy is an anti-buddy-picture that in some senses qualifies as an anti-everything film. The Best Picture of 1969, it doesn't look like Best Picture movies look. It isn't beautiful, except in the way urban blight and grit can be oddly beautiful. It isn't uplifting, it's not a biopic or ripped from any headline, there's no traditional love interest, and not only is there no happy ending, there's no real ending, nor a traditional beginning, either. Midnight Cowboy looks as different, feels as different, and is as different as any other Best Picture winner. It's dank. Dour. The lighting's poor. People look as unhealthy as they are.
The same lack of Hollywood glitz applies to the story. Two broken guys keep each other whole until one breaks too much. That's the whole thing. It's a platonic love story. It's a movie about what two people take from and give to one another, and how it affects them. There's no antagonist. The protagonists are or are not likable - it's your call. There's no leading lady. No heroic quest. No set pieces. No chases. No gunplay. There's just Voight and Hoffman, drowning each other as they try to stay above water. They come together without much backstory, they part and we have no idea what lies in Joe Buck's future, healing or more damage or something else. It's not important. All that matters is the time they spend together, learning to love each other. There's an almost zen simplicity to the story.
My questions are answered. We would never have talked about Midnight Cowboy on the playground at Clifton School. It would not have even interested us, or made any sense. Nothing exploded and no one said "shit." It's a movie for adults, adults who can understand a movie without a bad guy, a gun, or a sex scene. Sometimes, I'm not even that adult, but tonight I was, and thank god, because Midnight Cowboy is the kind of movie that elevates even an already-good week of movie-watching.
As good as movies get.
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