Midnight Cowboy

Midnight Cowboy

John Schlesinger (Sunday, Bloody Sunday) won an Oscar for this story of a naive would-be hustler and his relationship with a consumptive petty crook.

Swaggering Texan Joe (the ever-brilliant Jon Voight) rides the Greyhound bus to New York in order to seek his fortune as a professional stud, only to discover the hard way that everyone else in the city is hustling too. His services are first accepted by a middle-aged woman - they copulate on the TV's remote control (shots of vigorously bouncing buttocks intercut with flashing TV programmes), she takes him for $20: smooth-talking Fatso (Dustin Hoffman) offers to be his manager but turns out to be a con-man: an acned youth gives him a Hugh Grant in a Times Square cinema but reveals afterwards that he has no money.... Joe moves in with Ratso and an uneasy friendship develops into mutual concern.

Shooting in the Big Apple in 1969 the British director captured the city's contrasts in a style that, while dated, still seems totally appropriate. Personally I find its density and snappy editing a breath of fresh air after the relentless formalism of so much recent "art" cinema.

Dealing more optimistically with themes of urban alienation than Scorsese, Schlesinger makes these two outcasts dependent on each other for survival. The delirious dream sequences (accompanied by the theme from "Wild Track") capture perfectly their reason for continuing from day to day. Meanwhile they steal enough to live on, until finally Ratso falls ill at a psychedelic party (featuring Warhol's film-maker Paul Morrissey) where, ironically, the food is unlimited and free.

Voight and Hoffman work wonderfully together, each giving his character's struggle to retain dignity a tragic edge that is borne out by the film's ending.

Andrew Abbott/Stephen Cox
EUFS Programme 1993-94