Midnight Cowboy (1969): The Love Story Hollywood Didn't Know It Was Making

The Story

Joe Buck (Jon Voight) arrives in New York from Texas in a fringed jacket, convinced he can make money as a gigolo for lonely rich women. He cannot. He is robbed, he is exploited, he is found, finally, by Enrico "Ratso" Rizzo (Dustin Hoffman) — a consumptive, limping street con man who is as desperate as Joe and considerably less naive.

They become, improbably, a household. They share a condemned building in the West Side, they look after each other, they make plans. Ratso is dying, though he won't admit it. His dream is to get to Florida before the winter kills him. Joe, who has failed at everything he came to New York to do, has one remaining ambition: to get Ratso there.

The film ends on a bus to Miami. It ends the only way it can. It is still, fifty-five years later, almost unbearable.

The Chemistry

Voight and Hoffman are so good together, and so clearly in love with each other in the way that actors sometimes fall into when the material demands total openness, that the relationship they create on screen exceeds what the script explicitly describes. They are not written as a couple. They are filmed as one.

Schlesinger understood this. His camera returns, again and again, to the specific quality of attention the men pay each other — the way Ratso watches Joe with a pride he can't quite suppress, the way Joe's tenderness toward Ratso becomes the most real thing about him. The film's most erotic scenes are not the sex scenes (which are awkward, perfunctory, commercial transactions that leave everyone diminished). They are the scenes of the two men simply being together in the cold, keeping each other warm.

The New York

The New York of Midnight Cowboy is not a city that exists any more, though it existed then: the West 42nd Street of sex cinemas and street hustlers, the loft parties of the Warhol circle (Warhol regulars appear in the Warholian party sequence), the condemned buildings of a city that was twenty years away from its own reinvention.

Schlesinger and cinematographer Adam Holender shot on location throughout, and the result is one of the most vivid documents of that city at that moment in cinema history. The cold comes through the screen. The light — flat, grey, particular — gives the film its texture.

The Queer Coding

The film is explicit, in ways that seem surprising for 1969, about what Joe does to survive. There is a scene in a cinema that leaves nothing to the imagination. There is the question, never quite answered, of what exactly the relationship between Joe and Ratso is and has been.

What Schlesinger does is refuse to resolve the question. The film doesn't identify Joe as gay — it presents him as a man whose desires are more complicated than the cowboy identity he arrived in New York wearing, a man who finds his deepest connection in a place he wasn't looking. That ambiguity is the film's honesty. It understands that desire doesn't always know what it is before it arrives.

The Music

John Barry's score and Harry Nilsson's "Everybody's Talkin'" have become inseparable from the film's emotional meaning — the song's quality of reaching toward somewhere warmer, somewhere easier, is so precisely right for Ratso's dream of Florida that it feels written for the film rather than borrowed for it.

The soundtrack is the film's second emotional layer. When you hear it without the images, you feel the images anyway.

Why It Matters for BoysDo

BoysDo is built on the premise that the most beautiful things are made when someone cares deeply about what they're looking at. Schlesinger cared deeply. He made a film about two men who love each other in a world that has no language for what they are to each other, and he made it with enough craft and enough honesty that the love comes through anyway.

Sixty years later, the film still makes people cry on buses. That is what serious cinema does. That is what serious attention to desire — gay desire, any desire — produces when it is given the resources it deserves.