In advance of the 94th Academy Awards, I saw a theatrical screening of one of the more infamous past Best Picture winners, that being John Schlesinger's darkly comic 1969 drama Midnight Cowboy.
Joe Buck (Jon Voight) is a naive young Texan, who walks away from his dishwashing job and travels to New York City with aspirations of being a male prostitute. However, Joe finds hustling women while dressed in his cowboy garb harder than he thought it would be and he ends up meeting Enrico Salvatore “Ratso” Rizzo (Dustin Hoffman), who ends up conning Joe out of $20. However, when Joe is evicted from hotel, he accepts an offer to join Ratso at the condemned apartment he is squatting in and together they begin a business relationship as hustlers.
There are probably two things that Midnight Cowboy is best known for. One is the Dustin Hoffman's improvised line of “I'm Walking Here” after he is nearly run over by a taxi cab during a scene. However, probably the more notable thing Midnight Cowboy is known for is that the film is the first and only X-rated film to win the Oscar for Best Picture. This fact comes with an asterisk, since Midnight Cowboy was re-rated to R upon a 1971 rerelease.
The X-rating for Midnight Cowboy was predominantly the result of the feelings at the time towards the few scenes of homosexual content in the film, including Joe Buck resorting on a few occasions to solicitating males. The film also features a violent rape scene at one point, which might have also contributed to the X-rating.
When viewed with modern eyes, Midnight Cowboy is actually a relatively tame film by today's standards. Despite the film's sexual content, Midnight Cowboy is actually more about the growing friendship between Joe Buck and Enrico Salvatore “Ratso” Rizzo, the latter of which is suffering from an ambiguous medical condition that gives him a limp and progressively declining health.
In addition to winning Academy Awards for Best Picture, Best Director and Adapted Screenplay, Midnight Cowboy received Best Actor nominations for both Jon Voight and Dustin Hoffman and a Best Supporting Actress nomination for Sylvia Miles, who has a relatively brief role as one of Joe Buck's first clients.
Admittedly, in what can be considered an example of differing tastes between generations, while I thought that Midnight Cowboy was an OK film, it was not a film that I was particularly blown away by. However, the film still undeniably has a place in film history.
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