Sylvia Miles made a career out of a few minutes at a time. Hand her one scene as a New York woman who has seen it all and she plays the whole life behind it; her Cass in Midnight Cowboy is the proof.
Fi1m perspective
The first woman Joe Buck approaches in Midnight Cowboy (1969) is Cass, a kept woman on Park Avenue. He has come to be paid for sex. She takes him to bed and then, in one scene, takes his money. Miles is on screen for about six minutes, and she does not play the moment as a trick pulled on a fool. She plays a woman who has known for years what everything costs, and who is not going to pretend otherwise for a boy in a cowboy hat. We thought about her for the rest of the film, and the reason is that she never asks for our sympathy; she simply lets us see how long she has been doing this.
That was her trade, and it was a narrow one by choice as much as by casting. She had been on stage since 1947 and in television and film from the 1950s, with Off-Broadway work that included The Iceman Cometh, before Midnight Cowboy got her noticed. Six years later she did it again in Farewell, My Lovely (1975), eight minutes as Jessie Halstead Florian opposite Robert Mitchum. Between them came a rare lead, Sally Todd in Paul Morrissey's Heat (1972), a faded star in a film from the Andy Warhol stable. Later there was Dolores the realtor in Oliver Stone's Wall Street (1987), a part she picked up again for the 2010 sequel, and the matchmaker Hannah Mandelbaum in Crossing Delancey (1988).
The pattern is plain. Brassy New York women: prostitutes, estate agents, matchmakers, people who talk fast and have a price for everything. Up to 1975 the prostitutes came round too often, and she knew it. She had a defence of the short part that we believe: "I become the character at the time I’m doing it, so it doesn’t matter if it’s two minutes or 200 hours." It is also the limit of the method. A body of work made of six-minute appearances is hard to judge as a body, and the parts she was given rarely asked her to be anything but vivid. Her life as a fixture of the New York social round did not help; for a while people wrote about the parties more than the acting.
Start with Midnight Cowboy, which is the only one of her films we have reviewed and the one where the scene is built to hold her. Watch for Cass. She is gone almost as soon as she arrives, and you will find yourself waiting for her to come back.
