Midnight Cowboy - Film Review by Izzy Sieveking

Midnight Cowboy Friday 20th March 7.30pm - Head to our Events page to book tickets

John Schlesinger's Midnight Cowboy (1969) has a range of influences and themes that have spoken to audiences for over 55 years. A time capsule of a bygone America, the tale of two drifters might be commonplace now, but Schlesinger's personal and stylistic film made a considerable impression on American film, earning its place as our 'Classic Cinema' pick this March.

To understand why it is so revered, it's useful to situate the film in the period known as New Hollywood. Studio-driven, commercial cinema struggled into the 1960s, dented by the competition of TV and the disillusionment of cinemagoers with the 'escapist' narratives of before. It became necessary to "produce counterculture flavoured films aimed at young people" (film theorists David Bordwell and Kirsten Thompson). Already, the popularity of Nicholas Ray's teenage angst-filled Rebel Without a Cause (1955) showed that challenging authority in mainstream American film could work, whilst the French New Wave were changing convention with Francois Truffaut's The 400 Blows (1959) and Jean Luc-Godard's Breathless (1955). Without the hinderance of the Hays Code either, taboo subjects of sex, violence and crime were more ambiguous, eradicating clear 'good' or 'bad' characters or heterosexual romances to hold the film together. Stories veered into more adult territory. One such example is this, the original 1969 buddy film.

This was a breakthrough for actor Jon Voight, playing optimistic Texan dishwasher Joe Buck. Busing it from his small-town life for the freedom of New York, he turns to male prostitution to make ends meet- but in Vietnam-era America, the American Dream is disappointing. Customers aren't as easy to come by, amused rather than attracted to Joe's bravado and cowboy hat (we quickly see through the 'cowboy' guise for the costume it really is). A surprising friend comes in Dustin Hoffman's conman Rico, a rising star from his role in Mike Nichols' The Graduate (1967). Limping from childhood polio, teeth blackened by cigarettes and short in stature, he's the visual opposite to our protagonist. After the one trick, Rico convinces Joe to enter a business arrangement as manager and client. Before Barbara Lowden's one-woman road trip in Wanda (1970), here was a film that dealt in similar melancholy. Rico is poverty-stricken and ill, stealing out of necessity and hard to read- in one scene,he condemns Joe for stealing a jacket from another homeless person, but in another lifts coconuts from street vendors. Just as Joe is naïve about 'making it' in New York, Rico harbors dreams of getting to Florida.

Production designer John Robert Lloyd helps set up false expectations for their new lives; the billboards coming out of Texas and commercial Time Square signage at odds with the grimy, litter-strewn streets and dank of Rico's apartment. Characteristic of New Hollywood was also the interesting, unusual methods of filming that paid homage to other auteurs. A zoom-in shot to an apartment window, or how the camera tilts upwards at the buildings, is reminiscent of Alfred Hitchcock. The avant-garde party and seemingly authentic footage evoke the underground cool of John Cassavetes. Not only this, but cinematographer Adam Holender draws attention to the suggestive power of the medium itself. Using soft lighting, Joe visualizes going home with respectable women who just turned him down, whilst Rico lapses into fantasies of being adored and respected by Floridians as Joe is simultaneously thrown out of a member's club. Most jarring is a subway chase scene that alternates between colour and black and white film, merging with traumatic flashbacks of an incident with Joe and a past girlfriend that explains some of his macho persona and womanizer image. The New Hollywood technique of disrupting the narrative flow and ambiguity (key to the French New Wave) fills in the gaps of Joe's life in poignant and striking ways.

Why this film is striking is because Joe and Rico's friendship sustains them through hardship. As a cultural monument, the notes of possible homosexuality- the demeaning encounters with other men, the derogatory put downs- might have accounted for the X rating as much as the film's nudity and coarse language at the time. Or perhaps it was the overt criticism of capitalism and poverty that leads people into sex work in the first place. Watching it now doesn't seem shocking, but at the time Midnight Cowboy was a bold deviation in America's film industry. With plenty of readings to be taken and truly authentic lead performances, this is a fantastic introduction to what New Hollywood was about.
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Image courtesy of MUBI.
​Article by Izzy - our in-house Film Critic Volunteer