In 1994, Midnight Cowboy was deemed "culturally, historically or aesthetically significant" by the Library of Congress, and selected for preservation in the United States National Film Registry.[5]
Plot
Young Texan Joe Buck quits his dishwashing job, and heads by bus to New York City in cowboy attire to become a male prostitute. Initially unsuccessful, he finally beds a middle-aged woman, Cass, in her Park Avenue apartment. She is insulted when he requests payment, and Joe ultimately gives money to her.
Joe meets Rico "Ratso" Rizzo, an indigent con man with a limp who takes $20 for introducing him to a pimp. After discovering that the alleged pimp is actually an unhinged religious fanatic, Joe flees and unsuccessfully searches for Rico. Joe spends his days wandering the city, listening to his Zenithportable radio and sitting in his hotel room. When his money runs out, management locks Joe out and impounds his belongings.
In an attempt to make money, Joe receives oral sex from a meek young man in a movie theater, but the man cannot pay. Joe threatens him, but releases him unharmed. The next day, Joe spots Rico at a diner, and angrily confronts him. Rico manages to calm Joe, and invites him to share his squalid, condemned apartment squat. Joe reluctantly accepts, and the two begin a "business relationship" as hustlers. Rico asks Joe to call him "Rico" instead of "Ratso", but Joe does not oblige. They struggle with severe poverty, stealing food and failing to get work for Joe. Joe pawns his radio and sells his blood, while Rico's persistent cough worsens during a winter without heat.
In intermittent flashbacks, Joe's grandmother raises him after his mother abandons him. He has a tragic relationship with Annie, disclosed through hazy flashbacks in which they are attacked and raped by a cowboy gang. Annie shows signs of mental trauma and is taken into an ambulance.
Rico tells Joe his father was an illiterate Italian immigrant shoeshiner whose job yielded a bad back and lung damage from inhaling shoe polish. Rico learned shoeshining from his father, but considers it degrading and generally refuses to do it. When he breaks into a stand and shines Joe's cowboy boots to attract clients, two police officers arrive and sit with their dirty boots next to Joe's. Rico dreams of escaping to Miami, shown in fantasies in which he and Joe frolic on a beach and are pampered at a resort, including a boy polishing Rico's boots.
A Warhol-like filmmaker and an extrovert female artist approach Joe in a diner, taking his photograph and inviting him to a Warhol-esque art event.[a] Joe and Rico attend, but Rico's poor health and hygiene attract unwanted attention. After mistaking a joint for a cigarette and receiving uppers, Joe hallucinates. He leaves with Shirley, a socialite who pays him $20 for spending the night, but Joe cannot perform sexually. They play Scribbage, and the resulting wordplay leads Shirley to suggest that Joe may be gay; suddenly, he is able to perform. The next morning, she sets up her female friend as Joe's client, and his career appears to be progressing.
When Joe returns to the apartment, Rico is severely feverish. He refuses medical help, and begs Joe to put him on a bus to Florida. Desperate, Joe picks up an effeminate middle-aged man in an arcade. The two return to the man's hotel room, but when the man refuses to give Joe more than $10, Joe brutally beats, robs, and apparently smothers him. Joe buys two bus tickets to Florida with the stolen cash. Rico again tells Joe that he wants to be called "Rico", not "Ratso", and Joe finally begins to oblige. During the bus trip, Rico's health worsens, and he suffers from urinary incontinence.
Joe buys new clothing for Rico and himself at a rest stop, discarding his cowboy outfit. Back on the bus, Joe muses that there must be an easier way to make money than hustling, and tells Rico he will get a regular job in Florida. When he does not respond, Joe realizes that Rico has died. The driver asks Joe to close Rico's eyelids, saying they must continue to Miami. The other passengers stare. Teary-eyed, Joe sits with his arm around his dead friend as the bus drives on past rows of Floridian palm trees.
Cast
Dustin Hoffman as "Ratso" or Enrico Salvatore "Rico" Rizzo
Paul Rossilli (aka Gastone Rossilli) as Hansel McAlbertson, The Factory party/happening filmmaker
Craig Carrington as Charlie Dealer
Production
The opening scenes were filmed in Big Spring, Texas, in 1968. A roadside billboard, stating, "If you don't have an oil well...get one!", was shown as the New York-bound bus carrying Joe Buck rolled through Texas.[7] Such advertisements, common in the Southwestern United States in the late 1960s and through the 1970s, promoted Eddie Chiles's Western Company of North America.[8]
In the film, Joe stays at the Hotel Claridge, at the southeast corner of Broadway and West 44th Street in Midtown Manhattan. His room overlooked the northern half of Times Square.[9] The building, designed by D. H. Burnham & Company and opened in 1911, was demolished in 1972.[10] A motif featured three times throughout the New York scenes was the sign atop of the facade of the Mutual of New York (MONY) Building at 1740 Broadway.[7] It was extended into the Scribbage scene with Shirley the socialite, when Joe's incorrect spelling of the word "money" matched that of the sign.[11]
Dustin Hoffman, who played a grizzled veteran of New York's streets, is from Los Angeles.[12][13] Despite his portrayal of Joe Buck, a character hopelessly out of his element in New York, Jon Voight is a native New Yorker, hailing from Yonkers.[14] Voight was paid "scale" (the Screen Actors Guild minimum wage) for his portrayal of Joe Buck, a concession he willingly made to obtain the part.[15]Harrison Ford auditioned for the role of Joe Buck.[16]Michael Sarrazin, who was Schlesinger's first choice, was cast as Joe Buck, only to be fired when unable to gain release from his contract with Universal.[17][18][19]
The line, "I'm walkin' here!", which reached number 27 on AFI's 100 Years...100 Movie Quotes, is often said[by whom?] to have been improvised, but producer Jerome Hellman disputes this account on the two-disc DVD set of Midnight Cowboy. The scene, which originally had Ratso pretend to be hit by a taxi to feign an injury, is written into the first draft of the original script.[20] Hoffman explained it differently on an installment of Bravo's Inside the Actors Studio. He stated that there were many takes to hit the traffic light just right so they would not have to pause while walking. In that take, the timing was perfect, but a cab nearly hit them. Hoffman wanted to say, "We're filming a movie here!", but stayed in character, allowing the take to be used.[21]
On initial review by the Motion Picture Association of America, Midnight Cowboy received an "R" ("Restricted") rating. However, after consulting with a psychologist, executives at United Artists were told to accept an "X" rating, due to the "homosexual frame of reference" and its "possible influence on youngsters". The film was released with an X rating.[1] The MPAA later broadened the requirements for the "R" rating to allow more content, and raised the age restriction from 14 to 17. The film was later rated "R" for a reissue in 1971.[1][22]
It took several hours to shoot the rape scene, and Jennifer Salt recalls the evening as a traumatic ordeal for her. The wardrobe crew had given Jennifer a nude-colored body suit to wear, but the night was so hot and sticky that she quickly stripped it off. "I felt that the most horrible thing in the world was that people were seeing my bare ass, and that was so humiliating I could not even discuss it. And this kid was just on top of me and all over me and it hurt and no one gave a fuck and it was supposed to look like I was being raped. And I was screaming, screaming, and it was traumatic in some way that couldn't be acknowledged."[23]
Reception
Critical response to the film has been largely positive. Vincent Canby's lengthy 1969 review in The New York Times was blunt: "a slick, brutal (but not brutalizing) movie version of... Herlihy's 1965 novel. It is tough and good in important ways, although its style is oddly romantic and at variance with the laconic material.... As long as the focus is on this world of cafeterias and abandoned tenements, of desperate conjunctions in movie balconies and doorways, of catchup and beans and canned heat, Midnight Cowboy is so rough and vivid that it's almost unbearable.... Midnight Cowboy often seems to be exploiting its material for sensational or comic effect, but it is ultimately a moving experience that captures the quality of a time and a place. It's not a movie for the ages, but, having seen it, you won't ever again feel detached as you walk down West 42nd Street, avoiding the eyes of the drifters, stepping around the little islands of hustlers and closing your nostrils to the smell of rancid griddles."[24]
Gene Siskel of the Chicago Tribune said of the film: "I cannot recall a more marvelous pair of acting performances in any one film."[25]
In a 25th-anniversary retrospective in 1994, Owen Gleiberman of Entertainment Weekly wrote: "Midnight Cowboy's peep-show vision of Manhattan lowlife may no longer be shocking, but what is shocking, in 1994, is to see a major studio film linger this lovingly on characters who have nothing to offer the audience but their own lost souls."[26]
As of 2022, Midnight Cowboy holds an 89% approval rating on online review aggregator Rotten Tomatoes, with an average rating of 8.50/10, based on 116 reviews. The website's critical consensus states: "John Schlesinger's gritty, unrelentingly bleak look at the seedy underbelly of urban American life is undeniably disturbing, but Dustin Hoffman and Jon Voight's performances make it difficult to turn away."[27]
The Japanese filmmaker Akira Kurosawa cited this movie as one of his 100 favorite films.[28]
Box office
The film opened at the Coronet Theatre in New York City, and grossed a house record $61,503 in its first week.[29] In its tenth week of release, the film became number one in the United States, with a weekly gross of $550,237,[30] and was the highest-grossing movie in September 1969.[31] The film earned $11 million in rentals in the United States and Canada in 1969,[32] and added a further $5.3 million the following year when it won the Academy Award for Best Picture.[33] It eventually earned rentals of $20.5 million.[34]
Television premiere
More than five years after its theatrical release, Midnight Cowboy premiered on television November 3, 1974. Twenty-five minutes were edited from the film due to censorship regulations and a desire for broader appeal.[citation needed] Although the cuts were approved by director John Schlesinger, critic Kay Gardella of the New York Daily News said the film was "hacked up pretty badly".[35]
John Barry's version, used on the soundtrack, charted at #116 in 1969. It also charted at #47 in the U.K. in 1980.[52]
Johnny Mathis' rendition, one of only two known recordings containing lyrics (the other being the Ray Conniff Singers), reached #20 on the U.S. Adult Contemporary chart in the fall of 1969.
Ferrante & Teicher's version, the most successful, reached #10 on the U.S. Billboard Hot 100, and #2 on the Easy Listening chart.[53] It went to #11 in Canada[54] and #91 in Australia[55]: 110 in 1970.
^Blake Gopnik, Warhol: A Life as Art London: Allen Lane. March 5, 2020. ISBN978-0-241-00338-1 p. 629
^ abChris (October 5, 2006). "Midnight Cowboy locations". Exquisitely Bored in Nacogdoches. Archived from the original on January 6, 2015. Retrieved February 14, 2015.
^Frankel, Glenn (2020). SHOOTING MIDNIGHT COWBOY: Art, Sex, Loneliness, Liberation, and the Making of a Dark Classic. New York, NY: Farrar, Straus and Giroux. pp. 175–176. ISBN9780374209018.
