Midnight Cowboy (1969) Review
9/10
A dishwasher from Texas buys a fringed jacket and a bus ticket to New York, convinced that the city is full of wealthy women who will pay him. He’s wrong about everything except the bus. The 9 is for a film with total confidence in its own bleakness and a great deal of tenderness underneath it. It’s a story about two men with delusions that won’t survive contact with the winter, and what happens when the delusions collapse and there’s nothing left but each other. The point I withhold is for the psychedelic party sequence. That’s the most 1969 thing in the picture and the only stretch that feels like a director reaching for contemporary relevance instead of following his characters.
I find this film hard to watch and harder to shake. Voight and Hoffman make two losers so specific that I stop judging them early on and just want them to get to Florida, knowing full well they won’t.
The X Rating Was a Mistake by the Studio
The rating board initially gave the film an R. United Artists were nervous about it, and by the account in Glenn Frankel’s book on the production, studio head Arthur Krim consulted a psychiatrist and applied the X himself.
The stated concern was what the MPAA called a homosexual frame of reference, which in 1969 meant the film acknowledges that Joe Buck sells himself to men when the women don’t materialize.
The rating worked to the film’s advantage, which nobody intended. Curiosity drove attendance, the picture finished third at the year’s box office, and it took the Academy Award for Best Picture, along with director for Schlesinger and adapted screenplay for Waldo Salt. It was re-rated R in 1971. That sequence of events is a small piece of industry history worth keeping. A studio panicked, imposed the most restrictive rating available on its own release, and produced the only X-rated Best Picture winner in the Academy’s history.
Restriction advertises. Anything marked as too much for a general audience acquires a value it didn’t earn, and people who aren’t thinking about your work’s interests apply the mark.
That’s not an argument for courting it. The film did nothing to invite the rating, and it suffered from the accompanying assumption that it’s lurid, which it’s not.
The durable lesson is about who controls the framing. Rating, cover, category, shelf placement: other people apply all of it, and all of it changes what the audience expects before they encounter a single line.
Two Delusions Holding Each Other Up
Joe Buck believes he’s a stud and that New York is waiting. Ratso Rizzo believes he’s going to Florida and that his leg is a temporary condition. Both are wrong and both need the other’s belief to sustain their own.
That’s the structure of the whole film. They meet as a con, Ratso taking twenty dollars for an introduction that goes nowhere, and the relationship converts by degrees into the only thing either man has.
Nothing in that conversion is stated. There’s no scene where they discuss the friendship. There’s a scene where Ratso, freezing and coughing, is given a jacket, and a scene where Joe carries him upstairs, and by the bus to Florida the audience knows exactly what has happened without a word about it. The scene where Joe carries Ratso upstairs wrecks me. There’s no music telling me how to feel and no speech, just a big dumb kid hauling a sick friend, and it does more for me than any declaration of friendship could.
Voight is playing a man whose entire personality is a costume he bought. Hoffman is playing a man whose entire personality is a scheme. When both are stripped away in the last twenty minutes what’s left is two frightened people, and the film has spent two hours making that ending unbearable.
Hoffman had come off The Graduate two years earlier as a clean-cut college graduate, and the switch to a limping, unwashed grifter with a ruined voice was a deliberate demolition of what he’d just become famous for. It’s one of the great second moves in an American acting career.
Schlesinger Shot New York As It Was
Schlesinger was British and this was his first American film, and the outsider’s eye is all over it. Adam Holender photographed 42nd Street, the diners, the bus stations, the condemned building, mostly on real streets with real people in shot.
The famous cab moment came out of that method. They couldn’t afford to close a street, so the camera sat in a van and the actors walked through live traffic. That’s why a real taxi comes close enough to Hoffman for the reaction to be genuine.
Voight and Hoffman have both described it as improvised. Schlesinger, asked directly, was less certain and thought an extra had been placed in the cab. Both accounts are on record and the answer probably sits between them. That’s usually how these stories work.
What matters is the atmosphere the approach produced. This New York is filthy, indifferent and cold, and the film never comments on it, because Joe Buck has no structure for judging it. He simply keeps walking into it and getting less.
John Barry’s harmonica theme does the rest. It’s a Western instrument attached to a man in a cowboy hat who has never been near a horse, and it plays over Manhattan sidewalks. That states the film’s whole joke in about eight bars without anybody saying a word. That harmonica theme is my favorite thing in the picture. I can hear it just thinking about the film, and whenever it comes in over those filthy sidewalks I laugh and feel sorry for Joe in the same breath.
Shooting or writing from an outsider’s perspective gives you access to detail a native wouldn’t tone. Schlesinger noticed things about America that American directors had stopped seeing. Attach the observation to a character who’s also new. Joe Buck arriving means every piece of the city can be presented without explanation, because he doesn’t understand it either and the audience learns at his pace.
The risk is condescension. The film avoids it by never letting the camera know more than Joe does about how ridiculous he looks. That keeps the picture inside his experience instead of above it.
Waldo Salt and the Flashback Structure
Salt’s screenplay cuts constantly to fragments of Joe’s past in Texas, out of order, without context, in flashes of a few seconds.
That was unusual in 1969 and it does something specific. The fragments are memory as it works under stress: a grandmother, a girlfriend, a violent night that’s never fully explained, all arriving unbidden and never resolving into a narrative.
The technique also protects the film from a common problem. A conventional backstory scene would explain Joe and shrink him. These fragments give the audience the weight of a history without the reassurance of understanding it. I’d trade the whole psychedelic party for another minute of these Texas fragments. They’re the film at its bravest, and the party is the film at its most dated. Salt had been blacklisted through the 1950s and this was the film that restored him. His cinematographer’s account describes an unusually deep collaboration with Schlesinger, with the writer present throughout production as a sounding board. That wasn’t the norm then and isn’t now.
Why It Holds Up
Three point two million dollars against about forty-five million, third at the box office for 1969, three Academy Awards from seven nominations, with Hoffman and Voight both nominated for Best Actor and splitting the vote.
It sits on a list of films that couldn’t be made today and the reason isn’t the content. Studios release far more explicit material now. What has gone is the willingness to spend a mainstream release on two failures who don’t succeed, don’t learn, and don’t get to Florida.
The film also refuses to sentimentalize the friendship. Joe is capable of real violence and does something terrible for bus fare. Ratso is a thief who conned him in the first scene. The tenderness at the end isn’t a redemption, it’s two damaged people arriving too late.
That refusal is why it doesn’t date. Films that flatter their characters age badly because the flattery goes out of fashion. This one takes both men entirely seriously as fools, and foolishness is permanent.
It also arrived at exactly the right moment and helped push the door open. Between this, Bonnie and Clyde and Easy Rider, the studios spent a few years funding work about people who lose, and the period that followed is the one American cinema is still living off.
A friendship written without a scene declaring it’s stronger than one that announces itself. Show the exchange of small practical kindnesses and let the reader draw the conclusion. Keep the flaws live. If your characters become good people at the end, the earlier material is retroactively a phase. If they stay who they are and are simply seen clearly, the ending costs something.
Sentimentality is the enemy of endurance. It’s the fastest-aging component in any work, because it’s entirely a product of what a particular decade found touching.
Should you watch Midnight Cowboy?
Yes, and watch how little gets said out loud. It’s a 9 from me because the whole achievement is two men who never once discuss what they are to each other, in a city with no interest in either of them, and an ending that arrives without a line explaining it. That party sequence is the only thing standing between it and a 10, and a film this disciplined had no business detouring into it at all.
