midnight cowboy (d john schlesinger, w. waldo salt)

This is one of those iconic films of my youth, another one I will have seen on late night TV back in the eighties, lodged there as a reference point, the details all but forgotten. I revisited it as part of a new project which might be set in NY of that era. That Velvet NY, a rat infested Factory farm with a winsome charm that has supposedly been long since lost, is at the forefront of Midnight Cowboy. All the semiotic placeholders are present. The underpasses where the zombie world lives. The Italian families, speaking Italian. The outrageous sub-Velvet art party which is a haven for freaks, petty criminals and anyone who wants to get out of the cold. 

Schlesinger’s film cleverly frames its vision of NY through the dreams of the would-be cowboy gigolo, Joe Buck, played with a disarming naivety by Jon Voight. He comes from Texas to use his body and make something of himself, Candy Darling style. The film plays on the myth of NY as a city paved with gold which turns out to be strewn with rubbish and conmen. One of whom is Hoffman’s Rizzo, a presumably gay down-an-out who at first cons him and then befriends him. The fame of Midnight Cowboy was down to two things: one is Hoffman’s bravura performance, and  the other is its portrayal of love between men, even if it’s clear this love-hate relationship is never anything other than platonic. Hoffman, who had once been a struggling actor who knew this world like the back of his hand, succeeds in portraying Rizzo as a bona fide creature of the streets, someone who might have literally crawled out of the gutter. His off-key smile and unexpected gentleness lend Rizzo a pathos which that type of character is rarely offered on the big screen. He seems like a survivor, until it becomes obvious that the thing which bonds him to Joe Buck is that they are both inveterate losers. 

The film is also distinguished by its willingness to go off-piste. The neo-Roeg editing style was in danger of becoming slightly cliched, but in Midnight Cowboy it permitted Schlesinger to go beyond naturalism and seek out a more percussive register to convey its vision of a city which never sleeps, but also one that never gives a sucker an even break.