#700) Midnight Cowboy (1969)

When I started this blog in January 2017, the National Film Registry totaled 700 movies, and even as that number grew over the last seven years, my goal from the start was to hit that 700 milestone. It has been quite the journey getting to this moment, and it is with immense pride that I present…

The Plot: Joe Buck (Jon Voight) is a young, naïve Texan who moves to New York City with a dream of becoming a sex worker (“hustler” in his parlance) catering to rich older women. After an unsuccessful start with a bored Park Avenue socialite (Sylvia Miles), Joe meets Enrico “Ratso” Rizzo (Dustin Hoffman), an impaired Brooklynite con man who takes him in and agrees to manage his hustling. As the months wear on and the weather gets colder, Joe’s business continues to be hit or miss, while Rizzo’s health worsens. Despite their bleak existence, Joe perseveres in the hopes of helping Rizzo achieve his dream of moving to Miami. It’s a story of survival in the Big Apple’s rotten core, set to the same Harry Nilsson song playing on a seemingly endless loop.

Why It Matters: The NFR calls the film “gritty” and “frequently disturbing”, praising the “electric performances” of Voight and Hoffman.

But Does It Really?: Roger Ebert once said that no great movie can be truly depressing because a great film’s artistry can uplift even the most downer subjects, and that’s how I feel about “Midnight Cowboy”. While not the cultural touchstone it once was, “Midnight Cowboy” still has a compassionate quality that ultimately supersedes its gloomy subject matter to be a captivating experience. I attribute most of that compassion to Schlesinger’s realistic but never melancholy direction, as well as the compelling performances from Hoffman and especially Voight. “Midnight Cowboy” successfully tows the line of being timeless while simultaneously of its time, and the film is a no-brainer for NFR induction.

Shout Out: Among Joe’s possessions is a poster of Paul Newman from “Hud”.

Everybody Gets One: John Schlesinger was part of the British New Wave of filmmaking in the early 1960s, and one of the few openly gay film directors of the era. Following the international success of his 1965 film “Darling”, Schlesinger successfully pitched an adaptation of “Midnight Cowboy” to United Artists, who gave him total creative control and a budget of $1 million (which would ultimately balloon to $3 million). Screenwriter Waldo Salt got his start in the 1940s, but, like so many of his peers, was blacklisted in the 1950s after refusing to testify before HUAC. “Midnight Cowboy” was one of Salt’s first big projects following the dissolution of the blacklist. His daughter Jennifer appears in the movie as Joe’s hometown sweetheart Crazy Annie.

Wow, That’s Dated: Part of the sexual interplay between Joe and Shirley involves a game of Scribbage: the forgotten bastard child of Scrabble and Yahtzee.

Seriously, Oscars?: Although “Midnight Cowboy” didn’t enter the Oscar race with the most nominations of the year (“Anne of the Thousand Days” – 10) or win the most trophies that night (“Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid” – 4), it received seven nominations and scored three very important wins: Best Adapted Screenplay, Best Director, and Best Picture, the only X rated film ever to win the top prize (more on that rating later). The film lost its Editing nod to “Z”, Sylvia Miles lost Supporting Actress to Goldie Hawn in “Cactus Flower”, and Dustin Hoffman and Jon Voight lost Lead Actor to a very different cowboy: John Wayne in “True Grit”.

• Oh, and apparently one of the bus passengers on Joe’s trip is M. Emmet Walsh in his film debut? Definitely missed that.
• The film is a straightforward adaptation of the second half of the novel. The book’s first half is Joe’s life in Texas before he goes to New York, and while most of that is excised from the movie, the main points are featured throughout in flashbacks and dream sequences. The one thing I wish they had kept was Joe’s reasons for wanting to be a hustler. In the final film I get that his history with sex is complicated to say the least, but other than wanting to make money, they never clarify his choice. Still, I can’t begrudge a movie that doesn’t spell out everything.
• Shoutout to two of this movie’s behind-the-scenes talents. Editor Hugh A. Robertson’s Oscar nod for his work here was the first for an African American in that category. And as of this writing, the film’s costume designer Ann Roth is still with us, having recently won an Oscar for her work on “Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom” and even more recently played the older woman on the bench in “Barbie”.
• This film’s depiction of New York City is the epitome of its seedy reputation from the late ’60s onwards. As seen in “Midnight Cowboy”, this is the dingy, cacophonous Manhattan where you will get pickpocketed immediately upon arrival; a city that turns everyone into a hustler of some kind. The film plays it all so realistically you accept that this is what New York must have really been like.
• A staple of Off-Broadway theater, Sylvia Miles makes quite the impression as Joe’s first “client”. As surprised as I am by her Oscar nomination (she’s in the film for about five minutes), I’m always in favor of anyone pulling a Beatrice Straight and getting a nod for a one scene performance. Unrelated, Sylvia Miles once dumped a plate of food on misogynist/critic John Simon’s head at a restaurant, which makes her my personal hero.

• As Rizzo, Dustin Hoffman is clearly trying to distance himself from Benjamin Braddock and establish himself as an actor with range rather than a clean-cut leading man. To keep Rizzo’s limp consistent, Hoffman allegedly kept stones in one of his shoes. To paraphrase Laurence Olivier, “Have you tried acting, dear boy?”
• Side note: Rizzo is in that co-lead/supporting gray area that confuses the Oscars, and I suspect putting Hoffman in the lead category hurt both his and Voight’s chances of winning.
• If you know two things about this movie, the second thing is Rizzo shouting “I’m walkin’ here! I’m walkin’ here!” as he and Joe are almost hit by a cab while crossing a busy street. Both Hoffman and Voight attest that the cab was not supposed to be there and the whole thing was improvised, while producer Jerome Hellman insisted that the cab was always part of the scene, with Hoffman only improvising that specific line (there is a similar scene without the line in the original screenplay). Whatever the truth is, the actors’ version makes the better story, and as they say in another NFR movie “When the fact becomes legend, print the legend.”

• That’s Bob Balaban as the student who picks up Joe at a movie theater. Not so much a “Before They Were Famous” role as it is “Before They Were That One Guy”.

• The one element that seems to be absent in the novel is the film’s homosexual aura. There’s a lot of talk about Joe’s male clientele (always shown as desperation on Joe’s part), and unfortunately plenty of homophobic slurs. One interesting coincidence is that when Joe and Rizzo start arguing about masculinity they mention John Wayne!

• Also very dated: The Warhol-inspired “happening” that Joe and Rizzo attend. It’s a bit excessive (even Schlesinger admitted later he should have trimmed it down), but you don’t mind it as you get lost in this unfamiliar territory alongside Joe and Rizzo. Speaking of Andy Warhol, party host Gretel is played by Viva, who in real life was one of Warhol’s superstars. According to Schlesinger, when he offered Viva the role, she immediately called Warhol with the news and while they were talking, Warhol was shot by radical feminist Valerie Solanis.

• Although I haven’t seen a lot of her filmography, I always enjoy when Brenda Vaccaro pops up in things, and her performance here as Shirley, the playful partygoer who hires Joe, is a lot of fun. This is also your reminder that Johnny Bravo’s mom is on the NFR.

• Joe’s rate is $20, which in today’s money is about $170. I know nothing about sex worker rates, but I feel like Joe’s lowballing himself. Also, Rizzo’s cut is $1 for cab fare, which is only about $9 today. Wow, that’s dated.
• The ending was spoiled for me years ago, but I still found it devastating after seeing it in the right context. And yet, in keeping with this film’s MO, I also found it surprisingly beautiful, ending my viewing experience on a positive note. And for those of you keeping score, that’s two NFR movies that end with Dustin Hoffman and another actor sitting in the back of a bus contemplating everything that’s happened.

• Both Dustin Hoffman and Jon Voight spent the next few decades being movie stars, and coincidentally won consecutive Best Actor Oscars: Voight in 1978 for “Coming Home” (with the same producer and screenwriter as “Midnight Cowboy”), and Hoffman in 1979 for “Kramer vs. Kramer”. Oh, and they’re both in that new Coppola “Megalopolis” movie, the first time they’ve been in a narrative film together since 1969 (though I don’t know if they have any scenes together).

• Both “Everybody’s Talking” and “I’m walkin’ here!” have entered the pop culture lexicon thanks to this movie, to the point where I imagine most people don’t know what they’re referencing.

• The film has had a few parodies over the years, and I’m partial to this tribute from a “Seinfeld” episode with an appearance by Jon Voight!

• And finally, the Muppet character Rizzo the Rat gets its name from this movie’s “Ratso” Rizzo. So thanks to an X rated drama, you have a rat puppet co-narrating your favorite Christmas movie.