Schlesinger’s New York is as sour as it was in 1969, and Jon Voight and Dustin Hoffman make a friendship out of two men the city has no use for. The flashbacks that looked modern then have aged worst.
Joe Buck gets off the bus from Texas in a fringed jacket and a new hat and decides New York is going to work out. John Schlesinger spends 113 minutes taking the hat off him. Midnight Cowboy, adapted by Waldo Salt from James Leo Herlihy’s novel, is about a man with the wrong idea and a city that never bothers to correct it, and it is nearly as good as its reputation. The two lead performances are as fine as anyone says. Some of what surrounds them has dated.
Jon Voight plays Joe as a man whose confidence has never met anything real. He talks to himself in the mirror, hums along to his radio and tips people he cannot afford to tip. The plan is to be paid by wealthy women for sex, and the first he approaches, Cass (Sylvia Miles), takes him to bed and then, in a single scene that holds a whole life, takes his money. Miles is on screen for a few minutes and we thought about her for the rest of the film.
Dustin Hoffman’s Ratso arrives in a bar, limping, coughing, talking fast, and offers to manage Joe. He introduces him to Mr. O’Daniel (John McGiver), who turns out not to be a pimp, and disappears with the fee. When Joe finds him again he has nowhere else to go, and Hoffman does the hard thing: he makes a con man pitiable without once asking us to forgive him. The voice is a wheeze, the walk is a lurch, and the moment in traffic where he slaps a taxi bonnet and shouts that he is walking here has been quoted so often it is a surprise to find it still funny in context.
Adam Holender shoots Times Square at night as a smear of neon on wet glass, the camera down among real crowds who look at Joe’s hat and then away. His Texas is flat, bleached and empty. John Robert Lloyd’s production design gives Ratso a room in a condemned tenement, an X painted across the window, one mattress, a hotplate and a radiator that does not work, and Ann Roth keeps Joe’s buckskin clean for exactly as long as his money lasts. The music is credited to John Barry and Toots Thielemans, and its harmonica line is the loneliest sound in the film; Schlesinger rations it.
The scene that got us is the one where Ratso first shows Joe the flat. He walks him round it like an estate agent, pointing out the view, defending the cold, insisting it is fine, and Joe, who has been robbed by everyone else, stands there and decides to believe him. We were moved more than we expected, and it was Voight’s face that did it: he knows he is being lied to and has decided it does not matter. Everything the film has to say about the pair is in that flat.
What has aged is the editing. Hugh A. Robertson cuts away from the street to Joe’s childhood with Sally Buck (Ruth White) and a girl called Annie (Jennifer Salt), in bleached and tinted stock, and to black-and-white nightmares that tell us Joe is damaged without telling us anything we could not have read off Voight. It looked modern in 1969. Now it looks like a director nervous that two men in a flat would not hold us, when the two men in the flat are why the film has lasted. A long party sequence in the second half has the same restlessness, and the film’s disgust at the gay men Joe deals with is doing work the writing should have done itself.
None of that sinks it. The friendship holds, the city holds, and the final stretch, which we will not describe, is as plain and as sad as the rest has earned. It carries an 18 certificate and deserves one; there is a scene in a cinema that is hard to sit through, and it is meant to be.
Watch it with the sound up. The harmonica gets in.
