MIDNIGHT COWBOY
US, 1969, 110 minutes, Colour.
Jon Voight, Dustin Hoffman, Brenda Vaccaro, Sylvia Miles, Ruth White, John McGiver?.
Directed by John Schlesinger.
Midnight Cowboy has become one of the most celebrated films of our time, winning numerous awards, including Oscars for best film, Director and screenplay for 1969, and British Academy Awards for the two stars. English director John Schlesinger has been actor, television director and stage director for the Royal Shakespeare Company (Including a Timon of Athens with Paul Scofield in 1965 and Marguerite Duras’ A Day in the Trees with Dame Peggy Ashcroft in 1966). His films have been varied and have been praised - A Kind of Loving, Billy Liar, Darling, Far From the Madding Crowd and Sunday, Bloody Sunday.
In Midnight Cowboy an outside observer looked at the United States, its ugliness, both physical and moral, and the loneliness and aloneness of individuals in the twentieth century metropolis. Though squalor and hopelessness are portrayed, there is much compassion and awareness of the dignity of the human person even where we least look for it. The film is sad, disturbing, pessimistic, but not hopeless.
Jon Voight incarnates Joe Buck, the buck-cowboy dreaming the old American dream which most discover is a nightmare. He has since shown his acting skill in Out of It, Catch 22 and The Revolutionary. Dustin Hoffman seemed perfect as The Graduate; he seemed perfect as Ratso Rizzo, the con-man cripple who dreams and who falls short close to achievement. Hoffman also excelled in Little Big Man. The words of 'Everybody's Talkin" with which the film opens are a plaintive poetic text for the film, which is raw but rewarding.
1. The images in this film move us emotionally and intellectually, but the arrangement of them serves as a necessary distancing of the viewer from the film so that we do not fully identify with it, but are able to identify and yet judge objectively, e.g. the effect of the opening of the film: sense of motion, travel, character of Joe Buck, his work and friends, flashbacks (family, grandmother, love, sex, girl, gang) his talking to the mother, old man, nun, his transistor (his Linus' blanket) his reactions to the women interviewed on the ideal male, the song, style, words, feeling, the goal: New York, its panorama as a vision for Joe Buck, the insight into his ideals, morals (and lack of them). All this is given in moving images which engage the audience as well as giving them the opportunity to gauge the film's standards for all that follows. Also the impact of Rizzo's dream of Florida, his outrunning Joe, the gambling, the women, his cooking and Rizzo's imagining all this while Joe's failure to get into the hotel is interspersed.
2. The strong theme of friendship and interdependence against a background of ugliness, an opportunity for an audience to feel the human plight of those who are caught up, voluntarily or not, in kind of world.
3. The theme of poverty - hunger, the condemned building, the cold, illness.
4. Joe and Rizzo as persons. They do depraved things, but the film shows us that we have to be cautious in judging. The old distinction between the sin and the sinner is brought home to the audience, Joe end his early failures in his goals, the religious maniac, O'Daniel, and the prostitute, Cass, as necessary to show Joe's ideals and his vanity and naivety. Note his reaction to the man lying neglected on the footpath.
Then compare Joe's decision to help Rizzo in the scene where he talks, conscience-like in the mirror (contrasting with his looking in the mirror admiring his physique). The trip to Florida and Rizzo's death. The effective use of the flashbacks suggesting events and the tone of the events briefly as some explanation for Joe's situation. The use of fantasy and nightmares:
Joe's vengeance as he chases Rizzo,
Joe's dream and fears as he relives the past and Rizzo enters into it as a villain,
Rizzo's dream of happiness.
5. The theme of American society and New York is presented in background images which make their impression:
the New York crowds and the man on the footpath,
the billboards, the advertising, MONY,
the television programmes, especially the caustic comment on the U.S. when the starving Joe watches the programme where the poodle is dressed in wig, panties and bra to the accompaniment of canned laughter (one of the film's important comments on sexual morality),
the squalid world of 42nd Street and Times Square,
the addict and child in the cafe
the fashionable drug party,
the amorality of society wives,
loneliness and alone-ness in the city jungle.
7. Consider the interaction of the two main characters. Joe - did he have a choice?
- his family background, his grandmother, the gang, the rape,
- his ambitions, money, vanity,
- his simplicity, naivety, the way he was taken in,
- his moral and intellectual standards, his comics reading,
- yet his revulsion for the homosexual, for Rizzo's dishonesty. He received his chance for a choice with Rizzo's illness. Rizzo - as the dregs of society, smart yet physically disabled, a rodent who can talk of the spiritual, afraid and dreaming. Two sick men, one physically, one morally.
8. The theme of the American Dream, e.g. Steinbeck's 'Of Mice and Men' and a similar treatment of:
- dreams
- companionship
- protection
- interdependence
- death as the destroyer of dreams (yet for Lennie and Rizzo, death probably means the closest approach to their dreams.)
