Shooting Midnight Cowboy. (original) (raw)

The gritty, bleak, and poignant 1969 classic, MIDNIGHT COWBOY, helmed by director John Schlesinger and starring Jon Voight and Dustin Hoffman, has the distinction of being the sole X-rated motion picture to win the Oscar for Best Picture. Film scholar Glenn Frankel, who previously authored excellent histories of two other iconic films, THE SEARCHERS and HIGH NOON, traces the development of MIDNIGHT COWBOY from its beginning as a 1965 novel by James Leo Herlihy to its appearance on the big screen four years later. Frankel brilliantly contextualizes the movie, which was chiefly set on the grimy, unforgiving streets of late Sixties New York and examined the improbable friendship between male prostitute Joe Buck (Voight), a na�ve "country boy" recently arrived from west Texas, and sickly Manhattan con man Ratso Rizzo (Hoffman). In addition to Herlihy, Schlesinger, Voight, and Hoffman, other significant players in this story include producer Jerome Hellman, screenwriter Waldo Salt, cinematographer Adam Holender, actresses Brenda Vaccaro and Sylvia Miles, casting director Marion Dougherty, and musicians John Barry and Harry Nilsson. The film won two other awards besides Best Picture; it also earned Oscars for Best Director and Best Adapted Screenplay, and in 1994, MIDNIGHT COWBOY was added to the National Film Registry as a "culturally, historically or aesthetically significant" motion picture.

Lone Star history enthusiasts may be interested to know that in addition to being filmed in New York City and Florida, MIDNIGHT COWBOY has a number of scenes shot in and around Big Spring, "a traditional" west Texas town "dominated by frontier culture, cars, alcohol, and church life." While in Big Spring, Frankel asserts, "Voight had observed the politeness that young people in Texas displayed not just to their elders but to everyone they met. He incorporated that sense of deference and respect to the strangers Joe Buck meets on his initial bus ride to New York and to those he encounters once he gets to the city." According to Frankel, the citizens of Big Spring were intrigued and excited that a motion picture was being filmed in their community. He adds, however, that "few if any of the residents knew what MIDNIGHT COWBOY was really about�They had no idea that Joe Buck was dreaming of becoming a male prostitute and that [the film] was replete with sexual content, straight and gay." When the movie was released, many Big Spring denizens, some of whom had appeared in the film, were appalled by the frankness of MIDNIGHT COWBOY.

Although not every reviewer embraced the movie, "MIDNIGHT COWBOY received a relatively warm reception." For example, Stanley Kauffmann, writing for THE NEW YORK TIMES, contended that "with intelligence, flourish, and extraordinary skill, [Schlesinger] has made an unusually moving film." NEW YORKER critic Pauline Kael declared that while the movie's "spray of venom is just about overpowering," the performances of Voight and Hoffman "save the picture."

MIDNIGHT COWBOY blazed "a trail during the brief golden era of the New Hollywood. With its frank, adult treatment of sexuality," Frankel maintains, "the movie crashed through the gates that THE GRADUATE and BONNIE AND CLYDE had tried to storm two years before." In short, it stands as a groundbreaking cinematic masterpiece. Pop culture fans, especially cinephiles, will relish this commendable book.

"Everybody's talkin' at me/I don't hear a word they're sayin'/Only the echoes of my mind/People stoppin', starin'/I can't see their faces/Only the shadows of their eyes."

Review by

Dr. Kirk Bane, Central Texas Historical Association