Midnight Cowboy (1969)
There are movies you appreciate for the way they are made or acted, yet would never want to see again. I’m going to add Midnight Cowboy to my list of such movies. The performances are fantastic. I usually loathe Jon Voight but he’s fantastic as Joe Buck. I find it a little hard to believe he can keep his innocence and happy-go-lucky attitude as long as he does, but Voight pulls it off. Dustin Hoffman acts with something other than a bemused smile on his face, and does it well (and who have thought Hoffman could be so sleazy?).
The feel of the movie is vintage 1970s — gritty, real, with lots of pop songs and shots of people walking around the big city at night. Throw in some neat camera tricks at a drugged-out party and you’ve hit most of the popular visuals of the era. These tricks get a little old after a while, though they avoid to irritating repetition that was most of Tom Jones.
I did have two big problems with the movie, primarily the odd flashbacks which seem to be hinting at some nasty past for Joe Buck. The problem is that the Joe Buck we see in no way bares the scars one would expect to find if he and his girlfriend were both gang raped. My other big problem was the scene where Joe (apparently) kills a man from Chicago who has invited Joe up to his hotel room (for sex presumably). I can understand the robbery, but Joe proceeds to attack the man with a telephone in a manner completely inconsistent with everything we’ve learned about him.
In the end the tale of Joe and Ratso is a pretty depressing one, though mostly well told, but I’m not a big enough fan of 1970s film making to want to sit through the whole thing again.
Roger Ebert’s Review from 1969, which seems to say most of what I just said with much better writing.