Year of Release: 1969Country of Origin: USA
Director: John Schlesinger
Cast: Dustin Hoffman, Jon Voight
Plot outline: A naive male prostitute and his sickly friend struggle to survive on the streets of New York City (IMDb).
Midnight Cowboy is the bridge between the softer, more formulaic movies that preceded it, and the gritty, intense cinema that would define the 1970s, and as such is half-brilliant, half hamstrung. Director John Schlesinger does a great job painting New York as a cold, harsh, unforgiving metropolis. Indeed, the city is almost a supporting character in the story, as leads Dustin Hoffman and Jon Voight’s characters simply struggle to survive in New York’s bleak underbelly. And as for Hoffman and Voight, they both give amazing performances, generating a believable chemistry and completely disappearing into their respective characters. Unfortunately, despite being risqué enough to garner an X rating upon its release for it’s frank references to homosexuality and prostitution, Midnight Cowboy isn’t quite honest enough. It resorts to dreamy ballads and an incredulous Andy Warhol party to advance the plot, all of which feel out of place in what is otherwise an uncompromising story of two of society’s cast-off’s finding each other and struggling to survive. As a groundbreaking piece of cinema, Midnight Cowboy deserves the accolades showered upon it, but it would be later movies that would actually realize the potential glimpsed here. (FML)
My judgement: **** out of 4 stars
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