The only X-rated movie ever to nab the Academy Award for best picture, Midnight Cowboy plays like a druggy, grind-house remake of 1942's The Big Street, a Damon Runyon vehicle in which endearing simpleton Henry Fonda pushes wheelchair-bound witch Lucille Ball from the cold streets of Manhattan through the Holland Tunnel and all the way to balmy Florida, where she dies.
The Fonda character is taken by Jon Voight as Joe Buck, a six-foot slab of blond beefcake out of Texas (where a dimly referenced past seems to include a history of sexual abuse by a grandmother plus a homosexual gang rape). He rides the Big Dog to New York, where he hopes to cut a wide swath as a swain to wealthy women. Instead, he crosses paths with a "crippled" street-smart street person, played by Dustin Hoffmann as Rico ("Ratzo") Rizzo the Ball part. And the only emotional thrust in the movie lies in their sexless, antagonistic romance (and the heat kindled by its two stars offscreen, two New York actors on the make as single-mindedly as the characters they portray).
Other than that, the movie's off-puttingly chilly, almost repellently misanthropic. Director John Schlesinger turns an avid eye on the grotesques and misfits and just plain wretched of the earth who seem to reach critical mass in a metropolis, but shows scant pity for them they're just dress extras for his soulless carnival. He enlists a whole ladies' auxiliary of over-made-up old Janes gawking at the goings-on, as though it weren't the director himself doing all the gawking.
In scene after scene, shot after shot, he opts for the cheapest gimmick, squelching any hint of complexity in his vast cast of supporting players. John McGiver, for example, may well be a pitiful old queen who got religion once he could no longer score tricks, but the pulsating plastic Jesus behind the bathroom door of his seedy, SRO hotel lingers as a spiteful, unwarranted detail. Just as unconvincingly unworthily staged are Buck's encounters with over-the-hill rich roundheels Sylvia Miles (where she out-hustles the hustler out of 20 bucks), scared-stiff schoolboy Bob Balaban (in the balcony and bathroom of a 42nd Street sex-and-cinema palace), and mama's-boy oldster Barnard Hughes (who gets a telephone receiver crammed into his dentureless mouth instead of what he hoped and paid for).
Schlesinger was good with actors, and was in the vanguard in pushing for edgy material particularly about homosexuality long before it became reasonably mainstream (he was gay himself and open about it in a Hollywood which preferred circumspection, i.e. the closet). Though it may be unchivalrous to speak ill of the recently departed, he was an uneven, almost mediocre director. His work suffered either from suffocatingly stately and prim taste (Far From The Madding Crowd) or catastrophic lapses of it (Day of The Locust). If he made one movie that approaches a masterwork, it's not Midnight Cowboy, it's Sunday, Bloody Sunday. And even there he can't take a lion's share of the credit, which belongs to actors Peter Finch and Glenda Jackson, and most luminously to the writer of its unforgettable script, Penelope Gilliatt.
The Fonda character is taken by Jon Voight as Joe Buck, a six-foot slab of blond beefcake out of Texas (where a dimly referenced past seems to include a history of sexual abuse by a grandmother plus a homosexual gang rape). He rides the Big Dog to New York, where he hopes to cut a wide swath as a swain to wealthy women. Instead, he crosses paths with a "crippled" street-smart street person, played by Dustin Hoffmann as Rico ("Ratzo") Rizzo the Ball part. And the only emotional thrust in the movie lies in their sexless, antagonistic romance (and the heat kindled by its two stars offscreen, two New York actors on the make as single-mindedly as the characters they portray).
Other than that, the movie's off-puttingly chilly, almost repellently misanthropic. Director John Schlesinger turns an avid eye on the grotesques and misfits and just plain wretched of the earth who seem to reach critical mass in a metropolis, but shows scant pity for them they're just dress extras for his soulless carnival. He enlists a whole ladies' auxiliary of over-made-up old Janes gawking at the goings-on, as though it weren't the director himself doing all the gawking.
In scene after scene, shot after shot, he opts for the cheapest gimmick, squelching any hint of complexity in his vast cast of supporting players. John McGiver, for example, may well be a pitiful old queen who got religion once he could no longer score tricks, but the pulsating plastic Jesus behind the bathroom door of his seedy, SRO hotel lingers as a spiteful, unwarranted detail. Just as unconvincingly unworthily staged are Buck's encounters with over-the-hill rich roundheels Sylvia Miles (where she out-hustles the hustler out of 20 bucks), scared-stiff schoolboy Bob Balaban (in the balcony and bathroom of a 42nd Street sex-and-cinema palace), and mama's-boy oldster Barnard Hughes (who gets a telephone receiver crammed into his dentureless mouth instead of what he hoped and paid for).
Schlesinger was good with actors, and was in the vanguard in pushing for edgy material particularly about homosexuality long before it became reasonably mainstream (he was gay himself and open about it in a Hollywood which preferred circumspection, i.e. the closet). Though it may be unchivalrous to speak ill of the recently departed, he was an uneven, almost mediocre director. His work suffered either from suffocatingly stately and prim taste (Far From The Madding Crowd) or catastrophic lapses of it (Day of The Locust). If he made one movie that approaches a masterwork, it's not Midnight Cowboy, it's Sunday, Bloody Sunday. And even there he can't take a lion's share of the credit, which belongs to actors Peter Finch and Glenda Jackson, and most luminously to the writer of its unforgettable script, Penelope Gilliatt.