Everybody's Talking About Midnight Cowboy, Though I Can't Hear A Word They Say

The end of the 1960's saw American cinema getting to really strut its stuff as the Hayes Code, which put restrictions on what kind of material American films could cover, collapsed and the floodgates opened in terms of major American films suddenly being able to deal with aspects of reality that had previously been off-limits. One movie that certainly would never have been allowed to exist in the days of the Hayes Code existing was Midnight Cowboy, a John Schlesinger directorial effort whose content was so explicit that it was given an X-rating (the equivalent in that day and age for the modern-day NC-17 rating) from the MPAA.


Though scandalous enough in its initial 1969 release to warrant the harshest MPAA rating that existed, the complete lack (to the best of my recollection) of any characters dropping F-bombs and only minimal amounts of nudity and on-screen drug use means Midnight Cowboy might actually have a chance of scoring a PG-13 rating (which allows for Autobots to gruesomely murder Decepticons so long as the latter creatures shed green blood) if it were to be released today. While its MPAA rating may be altered if it were released today, what hasn't changed since it came out in May 1969 is just how good Midnight Cowboy is, it's a grim take on the classic story of a young country boy moving to the city with big hopes and dreams that haunts you even when its runtime is over.

The young country boy in question is Joe Buck (Jon Voight, slumming it here before he moved on to real pieces of cinematic gold like Baby Genius sequels and Bratz: The Movie), who moves from Texas to New York City in hopes of striking it rich by engaging in sex work. With a polite to fault disposition and a cowboy outfit covering his body, Buck struggles to make ends meet as he strives to achieve his ambitions in this city and he ends up moving in with the shady Enrico Rizzo (Dustin Hoffman), who has his own dreams of earning enough money to move to Florida, just to keep a roof over his hood. 

Midnight Cowboy is an oppressively grim movie about two guys that, like the then-forthcoming Raging Bull, gets a lot of mileage out of using run-down parts of New York City as a grimy backdrop for its story. Joe enters this city seeing it as a wonderland that can provide all kinds of solutions for his troubled life but the constantly derelict New York surroundings he's occupying make it clear just how tragically naive such short-sighted hopes are. The viewer gets some insight into what's informing those hopes that Joe clings to so dearly by way of flashbacks brought to life through recurring uses of disorienting editing that simulate how horrifying it is for Joe to recall traumatic experiences of his past.

Though he's usually got a buttoned-up personality accompanied by a "Ma'am" and "Sir" at the end of each sentence, Buck is tormented by memories by his home life and a prior romantic relationship that carry their intended terrifying power thanks to how editor Hugh A. Robertson filters these memories through discombobulating editing. Robertson uses a similar style of editing to great effect in a separate scene showing Rizzo imagining him and Buck in an idyllic parade in Florida only for flashes of disappointing reality involving Joe Buck losing a major job opportunity to abrasively cut into his fantasy. Both Joe Buck and Rizzo are people whose present-day affairs are motivated by hopes of the future and the horrors of the past and the editing of Midnight Cowboy frequently smashes those various points of time together to exceptional results.

The editing by Hugh A. Robertson does a great deal for making the two lead characters and their tormented lives so engaging, ditto for the work done by screenwriter Waldo Salt and director John Schlesinger, the former deserving particular credit for ensuring that queer subtext is present to a notable degree in an American film released in 1969 (interestingly, the same year that the Stonewall Riots raised the visibility of LGBTQIA+ people to new levels). As for the two lead performers, they do strong work, particularly Voight who does a remarkable job capturing how John Buck tends to have an "Aw shucks!" good o'l Southern boy exterior with a more complex internal personality. Maybe one day Voight will go back to doing thoughtful dramas like this instead of PureFlix Drama #34, but even if he doesn't, at least we'll always have Midnight Cowboy.