Macadam cowboy

Two desperate characters meet. It's not a meet cute in the classic sense of the word but it's not far away from it either. It's also a melodrama, operatic but hidden in a reality that can't possibly be real. Dustin Hoffman is as bold as Bette Davis in a Warner Brothers melodrama. Amazing. And Jon Voight? - He wasn't the first choice, Michael Sarrazin was. Jon Voight plays his whore with a heart of gold with the decency of a Mary Astor in another melodrama from the the 40's. I've seen Midnight Cowboy 5 times, the first time in a theater, three other times in VHS or DVD - Last night I saw it in a huge screen in the house of a friend. HD I believe and, Oh my God. I wept. I was taken over completely by this two devastating, truly devastating characters. John Schlesiger the director, a genius. British by birth but he showed us an America that most people didn't know existed, not even Americans. This is a film for the ages.

I worked the Times Square area for several years, circa 1969, as a NYC Police Officer. I can tell you that the title characters and many others in this fabulous movie were right on the money. There were very few "normal" folks who were regulars to Times Square at that time. Most visitors and tourists looked right through them but they were all there. Sexual perverts aka chickenhawks, Pimps, and of course the young kids coming off the buses from the heartland by the hundreds, ready to be savaged. The music, drug culture, attitudes of too many parents, and excitement of being a young, all combined to make people think they could "make it" in an area like TS. So very many never made it to adulthood because of the lifestyle: drugs, beatings and assaults were so common. Those who survived were damaged psychologically as well as physically. Personally, I never felt so overwhelmed in my life. While handling one case, you just knew there were dozens more happening at the same moment in time. Midnight Cowboy was just one little slice of life on 42nd Street. An excellent movie.

Virile, but naive, big Joe Buck leaves his home in Big Spring, Texas, and hustles off to the Big Apple in search of women and big bucks. In NYC, JB meets up with frustration, and with "Ratso" Rizzo, a scruffy but cordial con artist. Somehow, this mismatched pair manage to survive each other which in turn helps both of them cope with a gritty, sometimes brutal, urban America, en route to a poignant ending.

Both funny and depressing, our "Midnight Cowboy" rides head-on into the vortex of cyclonic cultural change, and thus confirms to 1969 viewers that they, themselves, have been swept away from the 1950's age of innocence, and dropped, Dorothy and Toto like, into the 1960's Age of Aquarius.

The film's direction is masterful; the casting is perfect; the acting is top notch; the script is crisp and cogent; the cinematography is engaging; and the music enhances all of the above. Deservedly, it won the best picture Oscar of 1969, and I would vote it as one of the best films of that cyclonic decade.

Washing pots inside a diner's not for you, there's so much talent, you have bursting to come through, a new outfit is acquired, naive cowboy's now attired, with a ticket to New York, where dreams come true. Alas you're business acumen is undeveloped, cash not moving in directions that you'd hoped, as a male prostitute, you have no clients, you're destitute, there are memories of the past, that you evoke.

As good as it was all those years ago, and perhaps even better as it's aged, with two great central performances, although Dustin Hoffman is outstanding as the luckless 'Ratso' befriended, by the equally unfortunate Joe Buck, who's also rather gullible.

In my opinion, this is one of the greatest movies ever made in America and it deserved every single award it won and it's place on the AFI Top 100 list (though it's shamefully too low on the IMDB Top 250 list, at only #183 as of this writing). If you enjoy acting of the highest calibre (Voight and Hoffman are a superb match), well-drawn characterizations and inventive direction, editing and cinematography, you'll love this just as much as I did. Schlesinger paints a vivid, always credible picture of the late 60s New York City scene and it's many victims struggling to overcome personal demons and survive amidst the amorality, poverty and hopelessness of 42nd Street, New York City.

The filmmaking techniques employed here brilliantly capture the feel of the underground New York film movement (and of the city) and are nothing less than dazzling. I've seen many ideas (including the rapid-fire editing, the handling of the voice-over flashbacks, the drug/trip sequences and the cartoonish face slipped in during a murder scene to convey angst and terror) stolen by other filmmakers.

The relationship between Joe and Ratso is handled in such a way as to be viewed as an unusually strong friendship OR having its homosexual underpinnings. I think the director handled this in a subtle way not to cop out to the censorship of the times, but rather to concentrate his energies on the importance of a strong human connection in life, whether it be sexual or not.

MIDNIGHT COWBOY is a brave, moving film of magnitude, influence and importance that has lost absolutely none of it's impact over the years, so if you haven't seen it, you're really missing out on a true American classic. I recommend this film to everyone.

Score: 10 out of 10.