Review of Midnight Cowboy (1969) by Simeon D — 15 Mar 2010

This, along with "A Clockwork Orange", are the only two X rated films to ever be nominated/win the Best Picture Oscar. The only X rated movie I had ever seen before this was "A Clockwork Orange", so I was expecting violent rape scenes and penis sculptures, but to my surprise, other than a few sex scenes and some drug use, this movie is pretty clean. It may have gotten an X rating because of the overall concept of the movie, which I can understand is a little racy. Midnight Cowboy is about Joe Buck (Jon Voight), an aspiring "stud" who makes his way from Texas to New York, with a dream of sleeping with elderly rich women and getting their money. I didn't realize this until halfway through the movie, but a "stud" is actually a male prostitute, which surprised me, seeing how innocent and ignorant Joe Buck is. Well, Joe Buck's plan doesn't go so well, and he loses all of his money, but then he meets up with cripple street-scum Enrico Rizzo (Dustin Hoffman), who helps show him the ropes of how city life works, and they begin to develop a close relationship. Midnight Cowboy is full of memorable moments, colorful characters, and scenes that show you just how desperate someone can get for money.

John Schlesinger does an excellent job at making a movie that just looks like someone carrying a camera around New York City, and you can really feel the griminess and grittiness of every pothole or every back alley or every taxi cab that make up this film. You can even smell the pungent odor of Enrico Rizzo every time the camera zooms in front of his dirty, sweat covered face as he lights a cigarette in one motion of his hand, lighting it with the match at a horizontal angle. It's vivid, bleak, and at times disturbing images like that which really leave the biggest impressions on you. One theme that follows through the whole film is dreams. What I found odd about this, is that Joe Buck doesn't seem like the kind of person to have that complex of a mind, and yet all of his dreams are incredibly intricate and unexplainable, where as street-smart Enrico Rizzo's dreams are simple and have one main idea in mind. Three scenes, all of them somewhat dreamlike, really stood out in this film for me. The first, is the moment right after Joe Buck realizes that Enrico Rizzo just cheated him out of twenty dollars, and Buck gets consumed with revenge, and begins to imagine Rizzo around every corner or behind every door. The second, is an artsy party that Buck and Rizzo get invited to, which has some very memorable lines, images, and some comic relief from Buck. The third, and probably most memorable of them all, is Rizzo's fantasy of what life would be like if he wasn't crippled, and we watch as he runs across a beach and earns a lot of money, but then he comes back to reality and his smile fades away slowly.

The acting in this is stellar, and is probably the best reason to watch the movie. Jon Voight plays Joe Buck, who is an ignorant, dim witted, and yet a compassionate character who we can all sympathize for, even if he is a male prostitute. Jon Voight does a great job with a Texan accent at times is fun to watch because of his "Forrest Gump"-like attitude. Dustin Hoffman does an amazing job as Enrico Rizzo, who is an incompassionate, shady character that goes out of his way to make other people's life miserable. Hoffman, if anything, makes this film so powerful, because of the exuberant amount of emotion that he invokes from the screen, as well some entertaining humor ("Hey I'm walking here!"). This film can be related to Of Mice and Men, which both center around two lowlife men who aspire for more, one of them smart, one of them dim witted, and both end with a powerful yet tragic finale.

I'm not sure whose idea it was to make this film, but despite it's incredibly odd plot and concept, it's great. And there's some catchy tunes to top it all off. So, what is my final verdict? Midnight Cowboy is an oddity, but is put afloat by Hoffman's and Voight's performances, as well as some memorable images of 60s culture. 98/100.