Midnight Cowboy ***** (1969, Dustin Hoffman, Jon Voight, Sylvia Miles, Brenda Vaccaro, John McGiver, Jennifer Salt, Bob Balaban, Barnard Hughes) – Classic Movie Review 204

John Schlesinger’s controversial 1969 masterpiece Midnight Cowboy is a key film of the troubled late-Sixties and precious icon of its time, and the movie’s power and allure endure. Its impossibly young-looking stars Jon Voight and Dustin Hoffman scintillate in performances that remain among the best they have ever done in their extremely long careers.

Midnight Cowboy won three Oscars, including Best Picture (producer Jerome Hellman), Best Director (John Schlesinger) and Best Writing, Screenplay Based on Material from Another Medium (Waldo Salt). There were four other nominations, for actors Dustin Hoffman, Jon Voight and Sylvia Miles and film editor Hugh A Robertson. There was only won Golden Globe win for Most Promising Newcomer – Male (Jon Voight) but six BAFTA Film Awards for Best Actor (Dustin Hoffman), Best Direction, Best Film, Best Film Editing, Most Promising Newcomer to Leading Film Roles (Jon Voight) and Best Screenplay.

On-fire English director John Schlesinger serves up a classic slice of underclass Americana, showing the tawdry flipside of the love-and-peace Sixties counter-culture, in an electrifying, bracing study of a straight, young, naive Texan hustler (Voight) trying to survive in the seedy side of New York. He has come there to get rich as a gigolo to rich society women. Instead, he gets mixed up with one of Times Square’s seediest losers (Hoffman).

Visually the film is perhaps a shade too eye-catching in its effort to dazzle. And it also slightly shows its age in the over-earnest tone and in some displays of heart-on-sleeve sentiment. Technically, it is marred a little by some sloppy editing work, despite winning the BAFTA Film Awards for Best Film Editing.

But there is absolute brilliance in the thrilling star-making turns of Voight and Hoffman as Joe Buck and Ratso Rizzo, the mis-matched drifters trapped in the urban hell of midtown Manhattan, struggling just to survive and eventually plotting to make their escape to sunny Florida. Brenda Vaccaro, John McGiver, Jennifer Salt, Bob Balaban, Barnard Hughes and especially Warhol star Sylvia Miles as Cass are memorable in the cast.

Their performances, plus Waldo Salt’s great penetrating writing in his Oscar-winning screenplay that runs the whole gamut from funny to scary to tragic, keep this brilliant film always exciting and challenging. Salt based his script on an extremely fine 1965 novel by James Leo Herlihy, the author of the novel All Fall Down (filmed as All Fall Down in 1962). ‘Always be yourself,’ he said. ‘No one can tell you you’re doing it wrong.’ After this, he went on to teach play-writing at New York’s City College.

At the time of his death in July 2003, it was hailed as Schlesinger’s best movie, the only X-rated film ever to win best picture Oscar. So, it was his first and finest American film that won him the best director Oscar.

Musically it is a glorious time capsule. John Barry’s famous score is superb and Harry Nilsson’s song Everybody’s Talking at Me (by Fred Neil) is still a much-played knockout. Oddly, there were no awards or nominations for the music.

It is astonishing that the story of a male prostitute hit the jackpot at the box office, but it wasn’t universally popular. And, unsurprisingly, American conservative and religious groups fervently attacked it and especially its sympathetic treatment of a male prostitute and graphic depiction of his life.

On 25 May 2019 we celebrated the 50th anniversary of Midnight Cowboy’s New York premiere.

Sylvia Miles (1924–2019).

RIP iconic New York actress Sylvia Miles, Oscar nominee for Midnight Cowboy and the 1975 Farewell, My Lovely, who died at 94 on 12 June 2019.

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© Derek Winnert 2013 Classic Movie Review 204

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