In my humble opinion, Midnight Cowboy is a good film, though not a great one. It has superb acting from both Jon Voight and Dustin Hoffman, but the storyline isn’t terribly strong, and the premise is fairly ridiculous, although that is admittedly looking at it through a modern perspective. Personally I feel what resonates with this film and why it won Best Picture, and why it’s considered a classic is that it is very strong thematically. The year was 1969 and America was in a state of upheaval between the Vietnam War, recent assassinations of Bobby Kennedy and Martin Luther King, Jr, as well as the social and racial strife that were rampant throughout the country. This is a film about transition, and Joe Buck (Voight) is the personification of that transition that the United States of America was also going through.

Midnight Cowboy is about Joe Buck, a simple man from a small town in Texas who wants to leave behind his life as a dish washer and live the American Dream by moving to New York and becoming a hustler. He’s a good looking guy, and confident that the women of New York will be lining up for his services since he’s more of a man than any of those New York sissies. However, it’s harder going than he thought it would be when he gets there, and he as the misfortune to meet Ratso Rizzo (Hoffman), a con artist who tells him that he can find some management for him for a small price. Rizzo takes Joe to a man who wants to help him, but not in the way that Joe expects. This man doesn’t want to introduce Joe to women that will pay for sex. Quite the contrary, he wants to introduce Joe to God. Not wanting any of that, Joe bolts from the apartment and tries to find Ratso to get his money back and maybe get a little something else for his trouble.

Needing money, Joe considers applying for a dishwasher job at a coffee shop, but finds better money in prostitution, but with male clients rather than female clients. He finally happens upon Ratso again, and Ratso agrees to help him find some real management. From there, these two odd balls strike up an unlikely alliance as they try to hustle their way through life. Some hustles work out better than others, but for the most part, hustling turns out to be a losing proposition for Joe. He has some unresolved issues from his past relating to the deaths of his parents and perhaps some sexual abuse from his grandmother. We learn this through quick flashbacks throughout the film, and they show Joe is a man who is trying to repress some inner demons.

Ratso, on the other hand, is a man with no scruples, few morals, and little sense of the real world. He becomes a mentor, of sorts, to Joe and helps him navigate the streets of New York City (“I’m walkin’ here!”), and he helps Joe finally start to break seriously into the sex business. The main problem with Ratso is his health. He’s in very poor health, as a matter of fact, and refers to himself as a cripple. But underneath his poor health and his loose morals is a heart of gold and a vulnerable and scared man who is facing his mortality with varying degrees of success depending on the day. Bu helping Joe, Ratso is ultimately able to redeem himself and reach his own goal in a very bittersweet way.

From a storytelling and filmmaking perspective the strongest aspects of this film reside in the characters and their growth and development. Joe goes from being a naïve, small-town hick to a mature care-giver who realizes that life is different from what he set out to discover. He realizes that a simple life isn’t necessarily a bad life, and at the end of the picture he tells Ratso that he’s going to get a real job and try and start a family. The old Joe has died and a new Joe has been resurrected as an adult and someone who understands that life isn’t just a big party.

Ratso, on the other hand, seems to have more of a tragic ending to his story, but there is a silver lining. Throughout the film, he keeps making references to Florida, and how he’s going to make enough money to move down there. His health will improve and he’ll live the food life. It becomes readily apparent to Joe that Ratso is never going to make it to Florida. This comes at a very important point of the story at the end of Act II. Joe has finally made money as a hustler. He met a girl at a party that he and Ratso went to, and she actually paid him to have sex with her. And what’s more, she’s calling her friends to recommend that they hire him as well. After struggling the entire film to reach this point, Joe has hit the jackpot. But then he gets back to the condemned building that he and Ratso are living in, and Ratso can’t even walk. He’s coughing terribly and has a fever. Joe takes the money that he made the previous night and uses it to buy two bus passes to Miami. As soon as they cross the Florida line, Joe buys them new clothes, and they discard the color-less rags that they’d been wearing in New York for brightly colored tropical outfits. Joe nurtures Ratso as well as he can until they finally get to the outskirts of Miami, and that’s (WARNING! SPOILER ALERT!) wear Ratso dies, his illness finally overcoming him. One of the things that makes hits ending so effective, and helps make this a very good film, is that it isn’t everything that it appears to be on the surface. Yes, Ratso is dead, and it’s a sad moment, but he made it to Florida. That’s something that never would have happened without the help of Joe. He also has a new appearance, with his old ratty clothes gone, and he died with some amount of dignity that he never would have had if he had died in the rat hole in which he was living in New York.

Just like these two characters are not what they appear to be on the surface, what appears to be a sad ending actually comes off as quite uplifting upon reflection. And it’s true that these characters are not what they appear to be on the surface. On the surface, they’re each saddled with long lists of character flaws, and yet they’re likable characters. The reason for that is that they each have depth. If you’re an aspiring screenwriter and you want to learn how to make a reprobate of a character appealing to an audience, you should screen Midnight Cowboy. Screenwriter Waldo Salt, who incidentally won the Oscar for Best Screenplay for his work on Midnight Cowboy and director John Schlesinger, who also took home the Best Director statue for this film, created characters with depth. It sounds like an easy thing to do, but they had a huge challenge for themselves in having to convince the audience to go along on a two-hour ride with these people who for all intents and purposes are not likable people. We have one guy who wants to be a male prostitute and thinks that he’ll have no problem because he assumes that all of the men in New York are “fruity”, and we have another guy who would con his own mother out of her last pair of shoes if he thought he could get 50 cents for them. These guys are low lifes.

So why do we care about them? Because Joe Buck could charm a dictator. Joe Buck can relate to people and he is as charming as they come. With his folksy Texas accent, his cowboy hat and his simple way of looking at life, Joe is the kind of guy that you would want to have a beer with, flaws and all. They had a totally different issue with Ratso, but they were no less effective in making us care about him because ultimately, he had a good heart and was a good cook. For whatever reason, he sees Joe as a guy who he can help and who can help him. He’s never had love in his life, and though (we think) the love between Joe and Ratso is platonic, it’s love all the same and it brings out the best in Ratso, even though that’s a very low bar. However in that way, as we see palm trees in the reflection of his window, Ratso also gains his redemption.

There is one point that I would like to make about this film that I think is overlooked. The Art Direction of Midnight Cowboy is great. When Joe is in Texas, everything has a yellow hue. When he’s in New York, everything is gray, and it’s practically a black and white movie from that point on until they get to Florida. The scenes in Florida are alive with color. The gray misery of New York is replaced with the endless possibilities of an endless color palette. That’s film language-101 right there, as those choices did just as much as anything that was in the script to help tell the story and set the various moods of the film.

I mentioned earlier that this is a film about transition. Everyone knows that the late 1960’s were a tumultuous time in America. The years between 1967 and 1974 really did mark a loss of innocence for this country. We can argue whether or not that innocence ever really existed in the first place, but attitudes were changing, and artists’ expressions of those attitudes were changing as well. Filmmaking was changing, as the old studio system was out and a freer, more equitable system had taken its place. A new group of filmmakers were making their respective marks with films that were more experimental. The films now had more signature styles that allowed some of them to be considered as auteurs. A new rating system had been implemented as well, and directors like Schlesinger and Stanley Kubrick were taking advantage of the new freedom to take the content of film to places never dreamed of by filmmakers of the previous generation. Midnight Cowboy actually was rated X upon its initial release. It’s the only X-rated movie to ever win Best Picture, although the rating has since been changed to R. Likewise, Kubrick’s A Clockwork Orange would be released two years later with an X-rating and would be nominated for Best Picture. It also has since been re-rated with an R.

One other aspect to this more auteur-like filmmaking was that linear storytelling wasn’t as much of a concern. Indeed, the story line of Midnight Cowboy to my way of thinking is pretty weak. There are too many times where Joe just happens upon someone that he’s looking for or something that he needs. I know it was 1969, but it was still New York City. You’re not going to just bump into someone there, especially if you have no idea where to look. The story also has some sloppy moments where the party scene where Joe meets Shirley. It’s a Warhol-esque party, and the whole scene is rather self-indulgent. It’s a good scene for the most part, but it goes on too long, and we start to lose interest. The main reason to watch Midnight Cowboy is for the excellent character work and the layered thematic elements that make you really think about what was going on in America at that time.

Did the Academy get it right?

I am inclined to say no. Hello Dolly is a musical and it might have won had it come out three or four years earlier. I have not seen Anne of a Thousand Faces or Z, so I cannot speak to them. The film that would have had my vote in 1969 would have been Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid. Paul Newman and Robert Redford were at their respective peaks in this film, and it is by any measure a classic. Ranked #50 on the AFI list of the top 100 movies of all time (Midnight Cowboy is not on the list), Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid is an action film with a great story and two great actors at the top of their craft. Alas, it was a Western, and Westerns only get slightly more love than courtroom dramas with the Academy. With that said, however, I don’t find it an atrocity that Midnight Cowboy won. In fact, from a contemporary standpoint, it makes a lot of sense that it did. Unlike any of the other films nominated in 1969, Midnight Cowboy spoke to what people were feeling at that time. Even though very few people could empathize with these characters, they could relate to the transitions they were going through because that was what was happening to the country. If they weren’t living it in their own lives, they were seeing it all around them. For that reason, while I wouldn’t have voted for it, I can understand why Midnight Cowboy won Best Picture of 1969.