Midnight cowboy what is it about

The film's direction is masterful; the casting is perfect; the acting is top notch; the script is crisp and cogent; the cinematography is engaging; and the music enhances all of the above. Deservedly, it won the best picture Oscar of , and I would vote it as one of the best films of that cyclonic decade.

Lechuguilla Jun 15, FAQ 7. What is 'Midnight Cowboy' about? Is 'Midnight Cowboy' based on a book? What was wrong with Ratso? Details Edit. Release date May 25, United States. United States. English Italian. Jerome Hellman Productions Florin Productions.

Box office Edit. Technical specs Edit. Runtime 1 hour 53 minutes. Color Black and White. Related news. Oct 21 The Film Stage. Contribute to this page Suggest an edit or add missing content. Top Gap. What is the Hindi language plot outline for Midnight Cowboy ? See more gaps Learn more about contributing. Edit page. This party has been done and overdone in dozens of films. It provides an excuse for the cameraman to exercise his skill and for the editor to give up a few easy glimpses of skin.

Insofar as it is not a ciche, it is a handy way to sneak in one more rock song for the sound-track album. In the real world, let's face it, there is almost no chance of Joe and Ratso being invited to such a party even assuming they were still being given anywhere outside of movies. More likely the rich girl so finely played by Brenda Vaccaro would pick up Joe or someone like him on 42nd St.

The other two offensive episodes involved the religious fanatic with his electric Christ, and the shy, middled-aged homosexual from Chicago. The first scene might just barely have been pulled off, if only that Christ hadn't started blinking like a carlot Santa Claus. The second scene went wrong when Joe jammed the telephone in the guy's mouth and the false teeth went flying. We already knew Joe well enough to know he simply wouldn't do that; why didn't Schlesinger know him as well?

One scene that did work -- that painful encounter in the dark movie theater with the kid with hornrims -- was seriously damaged by Schlesinger's flashbacks. The flashbacks, indeed, are a serious weakness in the movie. We are never quite sure what went on with the girl in Texas, or what Joe's grandmother was up to, but that doesn't matter.

We get the general idea. But the trouble is, experiences like those in Joe's background should in the convention of Freudian shorthand have produced a masochistic, impotent figure.

They don't fit into Joe Buck as we see him. So on top of this sloppy psychology, we get the gimmicky photography, the obigatory Warhol party, and of course the pop songs. How long will it be before we recover from " The Graduate " and can make a movie without half a dozen soul-searching pseudo-significant ballads?

When we dump the songs, we'll also be able to get rid of all those scenes of riding on buses, walking the rainy streets, hanging around, etc. All of these criticisms exist entirely apart from the performances of Dustin Hoffman and Jon Voight. It is a tribute to them, and to the core of honesty in the screenplay, that Ratso and Joe Buck emerge so unforgettably drawn. But the movie itself doesn't hold up.

Roger Ebert was the film critic of the Chicago Sun-Times from until his death in In , he won the Pulitzer Prize for distinguished criticism. Rated R Later re-rated R. Brenda Vaccaro as Shirley. Bob Balaban as Young Student.

Barnard Hughes as Towny. And yet, and yet … a viewing of the film confirms my original opinion, expressed in , that the movie as a whole doesn't live up to its parts. And that Joe and Ratso rise above the material, taking on a reality of their own while the screenplay detours into the fashionable New York demimonde. The best thing in the movie is the acting, by Jon Voight and Dustin Hoffman as a simple-minded Texas drifter and a cynical Broadway street operator.

This was the movie that established Voight's career, and proved that Hoffman, after the triumph of " The Graduate ," had many more notes inside of him -- and was destined to become one of the great character actors of his time. Voight and Hoffman both won Oscar nominations as best actor.

Over their shoulders, we could see a real world, the world of Times Square in the s, which at the time seemed bleak and dangerous -- but in the less innocent s seems positioned half-way between our current despair and lingering myths of Damon Runyon.

The characters and their immediate world are absolutely right, then. But the director, John Schlesinger , was not willing to tell their story with the simplicity I think it required.

He took those two magnificent performances and dropped them into a trendy, gimmick-ridden exercise in fashionable cinema. The ghost of the Swinging Sixties haunts "Midnight Cowboy," and robs it of the timelessness it should possess. They live their own lives, become two of the permanent inhabitants of our imagination, like Bonnie and Clyde.

They exist apart from the movie, outside of it. Their lives have nothing to do with Andy Warhol parties, or escort services, or hard Park Avenue dames. And who can really believe they would ever find themselves on that bus to Florida? It is cruel to take the reality of Times Square -- the existence of the real people like Ratso and Joe -- and tell their story as if it were a soap opera. The form that has been imposed on this story simply will not fit. I still feel that is the case.

What has happened to "Midnight Cowboy" is that we've done our own editing job on it. We've forgotten the excesses and the detours, and remembered the purity of the central characters and the Voight and Hoffman performances. Seeing the movie again was a reminder of what else, unfortunately, it contains.

The heart of the movie is that Joe Buck, who thinks he will become the lover of a rich woman and be supported by her in a life of luxury, finds his small-town dreams destroyed. Although he briefly makes some money as a hustler, he finds he is expendable, disposable -- and lacking the skills to survive in the city.

Then he meets Ratso Rizzo, a person entirely outside his experience. Ratso is well-named. He makes his own way in the city, hated, asking no favors. When Joe finds himself used and discarded, Ratso shows him how to survive. Instead, it reaches outside the relationship for a string of melodramatic scenes that will not do.