Midnight Cowboy (review)

At its heart, though, Midnight Cowboy is a buddy movie of rather unlikely characters falling into a rather forced friendship. Joe Buck (Jon Voight) heads east from Texas to New York City looking to meet rich, lonely women. Joe is hopelessly naive and a bit dumb ("I ain't a fer-real cowboy, but I am one hell of a stud!" he says), and instead of hustling he gets hustled himself, first by women and then by oily Ratso Rizzo (Dustin Hoffman). But Joe falls further and further down on his luck and ends up bunking down in Ratso's squat in an abandoned tenement. And so we get to watch the increasing desperation and downfall of these unsympathetic characters, right through to the incredibly contrived ending.

We're offered some clues to the roots of Joe's loneliness and despair through his memories of growing up an ignored child raised by a trampy grandmother, but it's never enough to make us really understand Joe -- he always just seems like a big, dumb dolt getting his fantasies about the big city crushed. And we're never privy to what makes Ratso tick -- Hoffman's performance as the grown-up street urchin with a limp and a constant hacking cough has become iconic, and yet the actor really has nothing here to work with. Ratso is always a mystery, as is Joe's unexplained attachment to him.

In 1969, the suggestion of oral sex in a movie theater -- as one of Joe's Times Square pickups has him perform -- must have been scandalous. Today, it's the subject of a hit pop song. Without that kind of outrageousness to distract from the actual story, Midnight Cowboy is a bland disappointment.

Best Picture 1969
AFI 100: #36
unforgettable movie moment:
Joe wanders late-night Times Square, his illusions shattered by the presence of all the male prostitutes dressed as cowboys -- just like him.

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previous Best Picture:
1968: Oliver!
next Best Picture:
1970: Patton

previous AFI 100 film:
35: It Happened One Night
next AFI 100 film:
37: The Best Years of Our Lives