Midnight Cowboy

Please note the purpose of this blog is to discuss established classics that I've never seen. As such, the following is laden with spoilers.

Why So Long?
This one is indefensible isn't it? Along with the like of Easy Rider, this was one of the films that heralded the end of the factory-line studio system of old Hollywood and ushered in a renaissance in American cinema. Midnight Cowboy is canon in that movement and yet somehow it had never graced my presence. Stuck this one on at the start of the Covid lockdown, odd how it takes a pandemic to get me to watch a verified classic.


And? 
So, just here at the top, I want to get one observation off my chest about this film. I finally made it to New York as a visitor about three years ago. Finally getting the chance to walk the streets I'd seen depicted countless times on the big screen. One can crudely group New York films (or at the very least, those made after 1968) into two categories; generally speaking you either get the New York of Scorsese's Mean Streets or you get the New York of Allen's Manhattan. Having been there, I can confirm that the place itself seems a lot closer to the former and Midnight Cowboy falls firmly into that category. The first thing that struck me about New York was the smell, and somehow the director, John Schlesinger seems to have blended that smell into the celluloid of this film. The New York of Midnight Cowboy looks how New York actually smells.

As for the rest of the film, well as Mark Kermode is so want to remind us of Jaws, "it's not a film about a shark". Well, Midnight Cowboy is not a film about male prostitution. It is instead a study on the American class system, a showing of how America fails its mentally ill and finally, and its crucial to remember this last bit, a truly touching love story. It beggars belief that this managed to get past the censors of the day, even if it was with an X rating. I knew that Schlesinger was gay and knew that the friendship at the core of this film flirted with something beyond the platonic but I'd always imagined it was more like the Oysters and Snails scene between Tony Curtis and Laurence Olivier in Spartacus. In that scene the two characters famously flirt but it ultimately comes to nothing. By the end of Midnight Cowboy there can be no doubt that these two men have to come to love each other. One could argue its a love they don't understand and probably wouldn't know how to physically express, even if they were inclined to give it a whirl, but there is no doubt that its there. To see such an affecting and respectful depiction of homosexuality in an American film from 1969 is incredible.

"John Wayne! Are you gonna tell me he's a fag?"

That said, the power of Midnight Cowboy lies in its handling of the American class system - or as popular American culture would prefer you call it, "the American Dream". Arriving in 1969, Midnight Cowboy comes as the dreams and delusions of the swinging sixties imploded. Here was a foreshadowing of what the 70s would begin to herald, as rampant capitalism would remove any sense, real or imagined, of decency and community. On the one hand, Jon Voight's Joe Buck is a typical American character, leaving his rural life to make it in the big city. The crucial difference though is that Buck is not naive. He's doesn't arrive dreaming of Broadway, he arrives with the intention of selling himself to rich housewives. His mistake was believing that people would be willing to pay for services rendered; finding out instead that "an honest day's work for an honest day's pay" is very much the mantra of the poor.


Will You be Watching it Again?
Unquestionably!





Has Any Light Been Shone on Some Heretofore Unknown Bit of Pop Culture?
As with a few other films on this blog, this one has become a bit too integrated into the modern culture psyche for it to really throw up any "ah!" moments. The montage cut to Harry Nilsson' Everybody Talkin' is a bit of cliche now for one thing. That said, it is another one of countless examples of an odd recurring theme in American cinema. The characters who dream of getting away from it all but somehow lack the imagination or knowledge to think of jetting off to somewhere that isn't just elsewhere in the USA.