12 Movies Challenge: 'Midnight Cowboy' (1969)

by Julian Spivey

Photo: United Artists

I knew two things about director John Schlesinger’s “Midnight Cowboy” before I saw it on Friday night.

I knew it was the only X-rated film to ever win the Oscar for Best Picture, which has way more to do with the MPAA’s X rating being short-lived due to people misidentifying it with pornography.

And I knew Dustin Hoffman’s classic “I’m walkin’ here!” line, which, depending on what story you hear, was either improvised by Hoffman on the spot or actually in Waldo Salt’s Oscar-winning screenplay all along.  

I didn’t expect “Midnight Cowboy” to be quite as weird as it was. I knew the film was about a male prostitute, which was quite risqué for its time, as the film came out right about the time American films were developing more mature-themed films. But that’s not what I mean by it being weird.

“Midnight Cowboy” is definitely of its era, the late ‘60s, and this is no better seen than in its Andy Warhol-esque party scene that, while it only runs about seven minutes long, even Schlesinger reportedly wished he’d cut it down. The film is also strange in that there aren’t any real transitions. It does its own thing, going from scene to scene willy-nilly, while also throwing in dark flashbacks of lead Joe Buck’s childhood and more tragically a rape of both him and his girlfriend, which is never really explained, but used to put us in Buck’s head.

When I say “Midnight Cowboy” is weird, it doesn’t mean I don’t think it’s good. There’s genuinely a masterclass acting performance in the film from Hoffman as the dirty, greasy, sickly Italian conman Enrico “Rico” Rizzo, whom Jon Voight’s Buck affectionately refers to – at least it becomes affectionate – as “Ratso.”

Voight does a fine job as Buck, playing him appropriately as an aw-shucks hayseed who believes he only has one thing to offer the world, but Hoffman steals the picture in what’s supposed to be a supporting role – though he was billed first as the bigger star at the time and was nominated for Best Actor at the Oscars, alongside Voight. They both lost to John Wayne’s Rooster Cogburn in the Western “True Grit.” Wayne reportedly hated “Midnight Cowboy,” and one of the film's most memorable lines is Buck’s “John Wayne! You wanna tell me he’s a fag?”

Hoffman’s performance is much better than Wayne’s in “True Grit,” by the way. I wonder if Buck pulled some votes, but more than likely, the older voters couldn’t vote for characters they viewed as depraved and chose the mythic American Hero instead.

But I can’t say “Midnight Cowboy,” ranked No. 43 on the American Film Institute’s list of the 100 Greatest American Movies, was the best film of 1969. I would’ve given my vote to a different kind of cowboy flick – no, not one starring John Wayne – but “Butch Cassidy & the Sundance Kid,” a buddy-flick of a different kind.