John Schlesinger (1969)

‘There’s no Beatitude for the lonesome.  The Book don’t say they are blessed.’

In James Leo Herlihy’s 1965 novel Midnight Cowboy, these words are spoken by a minor character, the religious maniac Mr O’Daniel.  They also provide the book’s epigraph and hint at what Nelson Algren called its ‘edge of iron … real indignation at humiliation of the human spirit’.  John Schlesinger’s film of Herlihy’s novel sets the story of Joe Buck (Jon Voight) within a flashy, acrid denunciation of contemporary America.  Although Joe and the other main character, Enrico Salvatore ‘Ratso’ Rizzo (Dustin Hoffman), are far from the only unfortunates in evidence, Schlesinger extends little sympathy to most of the others.  It’s a relief and a boon that the relationship that develops between Joe and Ratso comes to dominate the film.  Their story and the lead performances combine – with the variously melancholy musical contributions of John Barry, Fred Neil and Harry Nilsson – to make Midnight Cowboy moving and memorable.

Joe Buck quits his job as a dishwasher, at the Sunshine Cafeteria in Houston, and travels to New York City, to make his living there as a stud.  He’s brimful of confidence in his body and the Texan cowboy outfit he clothes it in.  He’ll be a success in the Big Apple, he tells another worker at the cafeteria, because ‘Lotta rich women back there, Ralph, begging for it, paying for it, too – and the men – they’re mostly tutti fruttis. So I’m gonna cash in on some of that, right?’  From the moment the affable, naive ‘cowboy’ boards a Greyhound bus bound for New York and we see his fellow passengers, John Schlesinger emphasises the unlovely aspects of the people Joe encounters – their physical grotesqueness or mean-mindedness, their readiness to take advantage and lack of compassion.  This definitely reflects the director’s view rather than the protagonist’s:  Joe continues to give others the benefit of the doubt and pays the price for doing so.  (Shortly after he arrives in New York, Joe is shocked to see a man lying motionless on the pavement – he’s less angry than baffled that other pedestrians continue on their way, ignoring the body.)  The American people of Midnight Cowboy deserve the culture – a mixture of vicious and inane – which surrounds them.  Crummy, tinny music blares from Joe’s transistor radio.  In one of his first sexual encounters, he’s in bed with a woman and a TV remote control:  the couple’s writhing bodies generate inadvertent channel-hopping and Schlesinger shows the range of garbage on the unwatched television screen.  The accumulation of striking images and the fast cutting between them (the cinematographer was Adam Holender and the editor Hugh A Robertson) have undoubted impact.  Yet the pyrotechnics – a form of misanthropic showing off – build up antipathy towards the man behind the camera as much as to the people in front of it.

The screenplay, by Waldo Salt, retains from the novel most of the key moments of Joe’s luckless childhood and early manhood, as flashbacks – some of them economically effective, others overly insistent.  Schlesinger’s storytelling is consistently confident and clear.  The first half of the film describes the uninterrupted series of setbacks and humiliations Joe suffers in New York.  By the time he meets Ratso, a petty thief and small-time conman, Joe is low on hope as well as funds.  The ailing Ratso promptly fleeces him for $20 – the introduction fee to a man Ratso claims is a well-connected pimp  but who turns out to be O’Daniel (John McGiver).  By way of apology, Ratso invites Joe, locked out of the hotel room he can no longer afford, to share his squat in a condemned building.  At this point, the tone of Midnight Cowboy shifts.  The nightmare faces and behaviour don’t disappear entirely but the two desperate young men take centre stage.  The move into Of Mice and Men territory makes for apprehension:  you wonder if the movie is going to turn as emphatically mawkish as it’s been harshly satirical up to now.  In most of what follows, however, John Schlesinger also shows a very different side.  His humour becomes more generous (the fantasy sequence in which Ratso imagines a future life for him and Joe in Florida is well placed, sad and amusing).  Schlesinger’s handling of the scratchy, needy friendship between Joe and Ratso is supple and sensitive.

The acting styles of the two leads are powerfully complementary.   The emotional openness of Jon Voight’s wholesome, boyish face is continually poignant, as Joe is repeatedly thwarted and rebuffed.  Ratso derides Joe’s superstud outfit – ‘dumb cowboy crap … [that] don’t appeal to nobody except every jockey on 42nd Street. That’s faggot stuff!’;  Voight wears the clothes with such empathetic innocence that he makes you understand what they mean to Joe.  It’s distressing when he spills tomato ketchup on his light-coloured jeans and makes futile attempts to clean them up:  Joe Buck, in spite of his professional ambitions, has a virginal quality.  There’s not a hint of condescension in the way Voight expresses the cowboy’s slow-wittedness.  The moments when Joe means to be humorous – feigning enthusiasm as he eats some grim-looking food that Ratso’s prepared, responding to Ratso’s lecture on reincarnation with ‘I hope I don’t come back as you!’ – aren’t just funny but delightful.  Thanks to Voight, the final sequence is indelible.  Ratso dies on the coach taking him and Joe to Florida.  Joe alerts the driver, who comes to investigate and says there’s no option but to continue the journey into Miami.   Other passengers crane their necks to see what’s going on.  Joe, his face stricken, puts his arm protectively around Ratso.

Dustin Hoffman, with an elaborate limp and hacking cough, is much more theatrical.  There are moments when you sense he’s pricked by surprise that his co-star’s acting is quite as good as it is, and into competitiveness, but this is one of Hoffman’s most compelling and effective performances.   He not only realises his character’s rodent nickname; he burrows inside Ratso’s broken-down exterior and finds something truthful.  You’re prepared for the unfailing wit of Hoffman’s playing, less prepared for how affectingly he captures Ratso’s increasing, and increasingly desperate, possessiveness and fear that Joe might leave him behind.  Brenda Vaccaro is excellent – and relatively sympathetic – as a socialite who picks Joe up, an assignment that turns out to be one of his few successes.   In an earlier Park Avenue liaison that begins in misunderstanding and ends in tears, Sylvia Miles delivers a sharply-etched portrait of an anxiously aging kept woman.   The other actors, notably John McGiver, Barnard Hughes and Bob Balaban, do all that’s expected of them, but what’s expected – stressing and repeating one or two characteristics only – is what’s wrong with Schlesinger’s approach.

Joe’s bizarre garb gets him an invitation, from a studiedly eccentric duo called Hansel and Gretel McAlbertson, to the party at which he catches the socialite’s eye.  Gretel is played by Viva; other Warhol alumni – Ultra Violet, International Velvet, Paul Morrissey – are among the guests at the McAlbertsons’ happening.  The  party sequence has some strong moments – mostly supplied by the discomfort of Ratso, who’s tagged along – but it’s over-extended:  the director seems almost starstruck by the guest list, which makes it all the more grating how comparatively hard he is on lowbrow culture.  Midnight Cowboy was John Schlesinger’s first American film.  It contains much of lasting value but Schlesinger was fortunate in his timing.  In 1969, the country, mired in high-profile assassinations, Vietnam and their combined political and psychological repercussions, had a self-image that chimed with his choleric outsider’s perspective.

30 June 2017