Midnight Cowboy

“Whatever you hear about Midnight Cowboy is true.” With that provocative tagline, United Artists advertised what promised to be one of the most controversial movies to ever come out of the Hollywood studio system. And the tagline more than lived up to the hype.

Released in 1969, Midnight Cowboy is about Joe Buck, a naïve, handsome young man who leaves a troubled past in West Texas and goes to New York with dreams of selling himself to rich, sex-starved women. But in no time, his dream collides with harsh reality. He ends up broke, selling himself on the street to other men instead, and he’s forced to live in a condemned building with a sickly, small-time crook named Ratso Rizzo.

The story of Joe and Ratso’s unlikely friendship resonates with profound compassion and heartbreak.

In a year of celebrity-driven mainstream movies like Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid and Hello Dolly, Midnight Cowboy shook audiences with its astonishing and frank look at the dark, fringe night world of New York filled with street hustlers, trippy drug parties, and a landscape of decaying buildings. Yet at the center of it all was an even greater astonishment: the unexpected and deeply touching love story that develops between Joe and Ratso. Thanks to the brilliant performances of Jon Voight as Joe and Dustin Hoffman as Ratso, the story of their unlikely friendship resonates with profound compassion and heartbreak.

Directed by John Schlesinger, with a screenplay by Waldo Salt from a novel by James Leo Herlihy, Midnight Cowboy is a landmark movie in the history of American film. From its gritty, semi-documentary camerawork…to the fragmented editing style that boldly mixes present and past, reality and illusion…the film represents a unique mash-up of classic Hollywood film grammar and the avant-garde cinematic techniques found in European art house films at the time.

It was also one of the first commercial American movies to openly deal with gay characters and gay themes. While some activists criticized the movie for what they saw as a negative depiction of homosexuality, others found the film to, at least, be a step forward in how it authentically depicted anti-gay attitudes at the time.

The movie also boasted a theme song that perfectly captured the story’s melancholy spirit. That song—the massively popular “Everybody’s Talkin’”—was written by folk-rocker Fred Neil and sung by Harry Nilsson.

Given the controversy over its daring subject matter, it was no surprise that Midnight Cowboy was given an X-rating by the Motion Picture Association, which usually meant death at the box office. Despite that, the movie was still one of the biggest moneymakers of the year and went on to become the only X-rated film to ever win the Best Picture Academy Award.

As the ads proclaimed, “Whatever you hear about Midnight Cowboy is true.” For me, what is most true is that it’s a completely unconventional, four out of four-star artistic triumph.