Midnight Cowboy is a 1969 American drama film directed by John Schlesinger, adapted by Waldo Salt from the 1965 novel by James Leo Herlihy. The film stars Dustin Hoffman and Jon Voight, with supporting roles played by Sylvia Miles, John McGiver, Brenda Vaccaro, Bob Balaban, Jennifer Salt and Barnard Hughes. Set in New York City, Midnight Cowboy depicts the unlikely friendship between two lost and lonely hustlers: naïve prostitute Joe Buck (Voight) and ailing con man Rico Rizzo (Hoffman), referred to as "Ratso".
At the 42nd Academy Awards, the film won three awards: Best Picture, Best Director, and Best Adapted Screenplay. Midnight Cowboy is the only X-rated film (equivalent of the current NC-17 rating) to win Best Picture and the only X-rated film ever to win an Academy Award. It placed 36th on the American Film Institute's 1998 list of the 100 greatest American films of all time, and 43rd on its 2007 updated version.
In 1994, Midnight Cowboy was deemed "culturally, historically or aesthetically significant" by the Library of Congress, and selected for preservation in the United States National Film Registry.
Contents
Plot
Young Texan Joe Buck quits his dishwashing job, and heads by bus to New York City in cowboy attire to become a male prostitute. Initially unsuccessful, he finally beds a middle-aged woman, Cass, in her Park Avenue apartment. She is insulted when he requests payment, and Joe ultimately gives money to her.
Joe meets Rico "Ratso" Rizzo, an indigent con man with a limp who takes $20 for introducing him to a pimp. After discovering that the alleged pimp is actually an unhinged religious fanatic, Joe flees and unsuccessfully searches for Rico. Joe spends his days wandering the city, listening to his Zenith portable radio and sitting in his hotel room. When his money runs out, management locks Joe out and impounds his belongings.
In an attempt to make money, Joe receives oral sex from a meek young man in a movie theater, but the man cannot pay. Joe threatens him, but releases him unharmed. The next day, Joe spots Rico at a diner, and angrily confronts him. Rico manages to calm Joe, and invites him to share his squalid, condemned apartment squat. Joe reluctantly accepts, and the two begin a "business relationship" as hustlers. Rico asks Joe to call him "Rico" instead of "Ratso", but Joe does not oblige. They struggle with severe poverty, stealing food and failing to get work for Joe. Joe pawns his radio and sells his blood, while Rico's persistent cough worsens during a winter without heat in the freezing apartment.
In intermittent flashbacks, Joe's grandmother raises him after his mother abandons him. He has a tragic relationship with Annie, his first girlfriend and sexual partner, disclosed through hazy flashbacks in which they are attacked and raped by a cowboy gang. Annie shows signs of mental trauma and is taken into an ambulance.
Rico tells Joe his father was an illiterate Italian immigrant shoeshiner whose job yielded a bad back and lung damage from inhaling shoe polish. Rico learned shoeshining from his father, but considers it degrading and generally refuses to do it. When he breaks into a stand and shines Joe's cowboy boots to attract clients, two police officers arrive and sit with their dirty boots next to Joe's. Rico dreams of escaping to Miami, shown in fantasies in which he and Joe frolic on a beach and are pampered at a resort, including a boy polishing Rico's boots.
Production
The opening scenes were filmed in Big Spring, Texas, in 1968. A roadside billboard, stating, "If you don't have an oil well...get one!", was shown as the New York-bound bus carrying Joe Buck rolled through Texas. Such advertisements, common in the Southwestern United States in the late 1960s and through the 1970s, promoted Eddie Chiles' Western Company of North America.
In the film, Joe stays at the Hotel Claridge, at the southeast corner of Broadway and West 44th Street in Midtown Manhattan. His room overlooked the northern half of Times Square. The building, designed by D. H. Burnham & Company and opened in 1911, was demolished in 1972. A motif featured three times throughout the New York scenes was the sign atop of the facade of the Mutual of New York (MONY) Building at 1740 Broadway. It was extended into the Scribbage scene with Shirley the socialite, when Joe's incorrect spelling of the word "money" matched that of the sign.
Dustin Hoffman, who played a grizzled veteran of New York's streets, is from Los Angeles. Despite his portrayal of Joe Buck, a character hopelessly out of his element in New York, Jon Voight is a native New Yorker, hailing from Yonkers. Voight was paid "scale" (the Screen Actors Guild minimum wage) for his portrayal of Joe Buck, a concession he willingly made to obtain the part. Harrison Ford auditioned for the role of Joe Buck. Michael Sarrazin, who was Schlesinger's first choice, was cast as Joe Buck, only to be let go when Universal, who had him under contract, asked for too much money.
Director John Schlesinger and producer Jerome Hellman had approached Andy Warhol to play the role of an underground filmmaker, but he passed it on to his superstar Viva instead. Her principal scene involved hosting a wild Factory-esque party for which various Warhol superstars were recruited as extras while Warhol lay in the hospital recovering from an assassination attempt. The film set, decorated with original Warhol works rented from the Museum of Modern Art, was filmed at Filmways Studios in East Harlem.
It took several hours to shoot the rape scene, and Jennifer Salt recalls the evening as a traumatic ordeal for her. The wardrobe crew had given Jennifer a nude-colored body suit to wear, but the night was so hot and sticky that she quickly stripped it off. "I felt that the most horrible thing in the world was that people were seeing my bare ass, and that was so humiliating I could not even discuss it. And this kid was just on top of me and all over me and it hurt and no one gave a fuck and it was supposed to look like I was being raped. And I was screaming, screaming, and it was traumatic in some way that couldn't be acknowledged."
"I'm walkin' here!"
One of the most famous lines in Midnight Cowboy is Hoffman's exclamation "I'm walkin' here!" as a taxi cab approaches him and Voight at a traffic intersection. The line reached number 27 on AFI's 100 Years...100 Movie Quotes, but its origin is subject to differing accounts.
Hoffman stated, in an installment of Bravo's Inside the Actors Studio, there were many takes of this scene, with the actors hoping to arrive at the crosswalk and continue their dialogue while walking across the street without interruption. In that take, they were able to cross the road without waiting, but a cab unexpectedly ran the red light and nearly hit them. Hoffman wanted to say, "We're doing a movie here!" and can be heard beginning to say as such in the final film, but he ultimately changed his sentence halfway and stayed in character as he berated the driver with "I'm walkin' here!". As such, the cab driver's angry response is also unscripted.
However, Jerome Hellman disputes the notion that it was an ad-lib on the two-disc DVD set of Midnight Cowboy. The scene, which originally had Ratso pretend to be hit by a taxi to feign an injury, is written into the first draft of the original script.
Reception
Critical response to the film has been largely positive. Vincent Canby's lengthy 1969 review in The New York Times was blunt: "a slick, brutal (but not brutalizing) movie version of ... Herlihy's 1965 novel. It is tough and good in important ways, although its style is oddly romantic and at variance with the laconic material. ... As long as the focus is on this world of cafeterias and abandoned tenements, of desperate conjunctions in movie balconies and doorways, of ketchup and beans and canned heat, Midnight Cowboy is so rough and vivid that it's almost unbearable. ... Midnight Cowboy often seems to be exploiting its material for sensational or comic effect, but it is ultimately a moving experience that captures the quality of a time and a place. It's not a movie for the ages, but, having seen it, you won't ever again feel detached as you walk down West 42nd Street, avoiding the eyes of the drifters, stepping around the little islands of hustlers and closing your nostrils to the smell of rancid griddles."
Gene Siskel of the Chicago Tribune said of the film: "I cannot recall a more marvelous pair of acting performances in any one film." Pauline Kael wrote: "The point of the movie must be to offer us some insight into the two derelicts ... But Schlesinger keeps pounding away at America, determined to expose how horrible the people are ... If he could extend the same sympathy to the other Americans he makes to them, the picture might make better sense ... yet the two actors and the simple Of Mice and Men kind of relationship at the heart of the story save the picture."
In his original 1969 review, Roger Ebert of The Chicago Sun-Times gave the film three stars out of four, praising the "magnificent performances" of Voight and Hoffman and saying the film "should have been about their mutual self-discovery" but was bogged down by clumsy flashbacks and "a string of melodramatic scenes that will not do".
In a 25th-anniversary retrospective in 1994, Owen Gleiberman of Entertainment Weekly wrote: "Midnight Cowboy's peep-show vision of Manhattan lowlife may no longer be shocking, but what is shocking, in 1994, is to see a major studio film linger this lovingly on characters who have nothing to offer the audience but their own lost souls." Ebert also revisited the film for its 25th Anniversary, and largely reiterated his earlier assessment. He said viewers had "done our own editing job on [their memories of the film]. We’ve forgotten the excesses and the detours, and remembered the purity of the central characters and the Voight and Hoffman performances."
Box office
The film opened at the Coronet Theatre in New York City, and grossed a house record $61,503 in its first week. In its tenth week of release, the film became number one in the United States, with a weekly gross of $550,237, and was the highest-grossing movie in September 1969. The film earned $11 million in rentals in the United States and Canada in 1969, and added a further $5.3 million the following year when it won the Academy Award for Best Picture. It eventually earned rentals of $20.5 million in the United States and Canada. By 1975, it had earned rentals of over $30 million worldwide.
Television premiere
More than five years after its theatrical release, Midnight Cowboy premiered on television November 3, 1974. Twenty-five minutes were edited from the film due to censorship regulations and a desire for broader appeal. Although the cuts were approved by director John Schlesinger, critic Kay Gardella of the New York Daily News said the film was "hacked up pretty badly".
Soundtrack
John Barry composed the score, winning a Grammy Award for Best Instrumental Theme, although he did not receive an on-screen credit. Fred Neil's song, "Everybody's Talkin'", won a Grammy Award for Best Contemporary Vocal Performance, Male for Harry Nilsson. Schlesinger chose the song as its theme, and the song underscores the first act. Other songs considered for the theme included Nilsson's own "I Guess the Lord Must Be in New York City" and Randy Newman's "Cowboy". Bob Dylan wrote "Lay Lady Lay" to serve as the theme song, but did not finish it in time. The movie's main theme, "Midnight Cowboy", features harmonica by Toots Thielemans, but the album version is played by Tommy Reilly. The soundtrack album was released by United Artists Records in 1969.
Theme song
John Barry's version, used on the soundtrack, charted at No. 116 in 1969. It also charted at No. 47 in the U.K. in 1980.
Johnny Mathis' vocal rendition, (the first recording with lyrics by songwriter Jack Gold), reached No. 20 on the U.S. adult contemporary chart in the fall of 1969.
Ferrante & Teicher's version, the most successful, reached No. 10 on the U.S. Billboard Hot 100, and No. 2 on the easy listening chart. It went to No. 11 in Canada and No. 91 in Australia in 1970.
Faith No More released a version as the final track on their 1992 album Angel Dust.
Legacy
The song Crazy Annie from the album Any Way That You Want Me by Evie Sands and co-written by Chip Taylor was inspired by the film.
The Muppet character Rizzo the Rat was named after Ratso Rizzo by creator Steve Whitmire.
The final scene on the bus was parodied in the Seinfeld episode "The Mom & Pop Store". Jon Voight guest stars in the episode as himself.
Australian singer-songwriter Vance Joy references the film in his song Riptide.
The making of the film, as well as the time it was made, is subject of the 2022 documentary feature Desperate Souls, Dark City and the Legend of Midnight Cowboy by Nancy Buirski.
The season two episode of the animated series Futurama entitled "Brannigan, Begin Again" would parody the famous scene where Zapp Brannigan has to live his life as a gigolo, and would even include the film's theme, "Everybody's Talkin'" by Harry Nilsson.
While developing the Marvel Cinematic Universe television series Wonder Man, co-creator Destin Daniel Cretton pitched the series to Marvel Studios as inspired by Midnight Cowboy, specifically in the depiction of an unlikely, budding friendship between struggling actors Simon Williams and Trevor Slattery in the same vein as the dynamic between Joe and Rico.
