Midnight Cowboy

Midnight Cowboy, American dramatic film, released in 1969, that depicted the squalid lives and desperate friendship of two broken drifters and became the only X-rated (meaning that only adults could see it) movie to win an Academy Award for best picture (the movie’s rating was later changed to R).

(Read Martin Scorsese’s Britannica essay on film preservation.)

The film begins in a small town in Texas, where a young man, Joe Buck (played by Jon Voight), is dressing himself as a cowboy with a fringed jacket. He quits his job as a dishwasher and boards a bus, heading for New York City, where he imagines that he will be able to make a living selling his sexual services to rich sex-starved women. A series of flashbacks on the bus trip reveal that he was often cared for by his grandmother, Sally Buck (Ruth White), and that his mother and grandmother may have been prostitutes and also that he once had a girlfriend, Annie (Jennifer Salt). In New York, he takes a room in a fleabag hotel and heads out to cruise the streets, seeking customers. He meets Cass (Sylvia Miles), who takes him to her penthouse apartment for sex, but she is herself a call girl, and Joe ends up giving her money. Joe goes to a bar, where he meets the seedy and tubercular Ratso Rizzo (Dustin Hoffman). Ratso offers to introduce him to a known pimp, Mr. O’Daniel (John McGiver) for $20; O’Daniel proves to be a religious fanatic seeking homosexual sex, and Joe flees. He soon runs out of money and is locked out of his hotel room. In desperation, he agrees to permit a young man (Bob Balaban) to fellate him in a movie theatre, but the man has no money with which to pay him. When Joe again encounters Ratso, he invites Joe to live with him in his apartment in a condemned tenement building. They commit petty crimes together, and Ratso becomes Joe’s manager.

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One day when Ratso and Joe are sitting in a diner, a strange-looking couple invites them to a “happening.” At the psychedelic party, Joe smokes marijuana for the first time and meets the socialite Shirley (Brenda Vaccaro), who is willing to pay Joe $20 for his services. Shirley later sets him up for the following day with a friend. When Joe returns triumphantly to the apartment, however, he finds that Ratso’s health has deteriorated drastically. Ratso insists that he must go to Miami to recover his health and live his dream life. In order to get cash to pay for bus tickets, Joe sells his services to a homosexual man (Barnard Hughes), but when the man tries to shortchange him, Joe brutally attacks him and steals all his money. He takes Ratso to the bus station and buys two bus tickets to Miami. Ratso’s condition continues to worsen as they travel. At a rest stop, they change into new clothes appropriate for Florida weather, but later, as Joe is telling Ratso that he will get a job in Miami, he realizes that Ratso has died.

The movie, based on a 1965 novel of the same name by James Leo Herlihy, was British director John Schlesinger’s first Hollywood film. Midnight Cowboy’s seamy depiction of sexuality was shocking at the time and drew an X rating, but it received generally favourable reviews and won five BAFTA Awards (including that for best picture) as well as three Academy Awards, and it was selected for preservation in the National Film Registry in 1994.

Production notes and credits

• Studio: Jerome Hellman Productions
• Director: John Schlesinger
• Writer: Waldo Salt (screenplay)
• Music: John Barry (uncredited)

Cast

• Jon Voight (Joe Buck)
• Dustin Hoffman (Ratso Rizzo)
• Sylvia Miles (Cass)
• Brenda Vaccaro (Shirley)

Academy Award nominations (* denotes win)

• Picture*
• Lead actor (Jon Voight)
• Lead actor (Dustin Hoffman)
• Supporting actress (Sylvia Miles)
• Direction*
• Editing
• Writing*