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. 

darling (d john schlesinger, w frederick raphael)

Darling is a curious movie, almost interesting for those movies that it isn’t than the one that it is. The movies that it isn’t include two vertiginous London portrayals: Repulsion (1965) and Blow Up (1966), as well as Accident (1967). Also Agnes Varda’s Cleo from 5 to 7 (1962), not to mention Godard’s Vivre Sa Vie (1962). Indeed, with its Paris and Capri sequences, this is a film that seems to aspire towards a European sensibility, something the occasional freeze frame and ambitious tracking shot reinforces. 

However, there’s an uneasiness to the whole melange, as though the director and screenwriter’s thematic and stylistic ambitions don’t quite marry. In part, one suspects, this is because there’s a timidity surrounding the protagonist, Julie Christie’s Diana. Diana, her erstwhile boyfriend, Robert, (played by Dirk Bogarde with his usual judicious flair), says, is a whore, someone who has slept her way to the top. But Christie is far too homely to really convince in this role. Christie is as luminous as ever, and any moral doubts we might have regarding her behaviour are never given room to flower. She doesn’t have the vulnerability of Deneuve in Repulsion either, we never really worry she’s about to go off the rails.

However, given that this is a flawed film, it’s still fascinating to observe the scope of the movie’s ambition. It’s not hard to see how a script like this would nowadays be shepherded straight off to the TV execs, to turn into a series. Which on one level makes sense: this is a film trying to package a raft of narrative which it doesn’t quite  pull off; but on the other hand it reminds us of cinema’s capacity to investigate not just a sector of society, but the whole raging caboodle. In which sense, one suspects that Schlesinger’s greatest influence might have been Fellini, a filmmaker who successfully used the medium to offer panoramic views of his psycho-sexual-social environment. These kind of films just don’t get made any more in the UK (I can’t think of any). Which seems a pity: we have the stars; we have the technical resources; we have the screenwriters… maybe we don’t have the audiences? Or maybe that kind of overarching remit is no longer relevant to the localised issues that British cinema seeks to address.