Evan D. As a project this year we are taking a trip through time to revisit all of the Best Picture winners in history, Wings to Anora. Midnight Cowboy is the forty-second film in that series, to see all the other Best Picture reviews, click here. **The Sound of Music will be reviewed out of order so we can see it in theaters In few places was the transition from the 60s to the 70s starker than at the Academy Awards. After the former decade saw more than half of its biggest awards going to musicals and comedies, the 1970 ceremony went a decidedly different, grungier direction. Marking the turn of the decade, John Schlesinger’s X-rated Midnight Cowboy ushered in a new era for Hollywood. Joe Buck (Jon Voight) is a Texan dishwasher with a troubled past full of misfortune and abuse. Fed up with his menial work he sets out to New York City in hopes of seducing the socialites of the big city. Joe discovers quickly that hustling in Big Apple is neither as glamorous nor lucrative as the faux cowboy imagined. Desperate for a break Joe befriends a beleaguered con man named Rico “Ratso” Rizzo (a possessed Dustin Hoffman.) The pair grow closer as their fortunes worsen, ultimately hoping to build a new life in Miami. Midnight Cowboy is quite remarkable in the context of its Best Picture win for a few reasons. It remains to this day the only X-rated (now NC-17) to win the top Oscar, although it would be pretty unremarkably R-rated if released now. For that time though the content and style are genuinely transgressive. It may not seem like the case now — our most recent Best Picture winner is about a foul mouthed sex worker — but for the 60’s a movie about a male prostitute and his sexuality was incredibly uncommon in mainstream cinema. Stylistically, Schlesinger brings a whole new look and feel to his film that feels like a real transition into some of the hallmarks of the 70s. Lo-fi textured cinematography makes the New York streets feel grittier and grime covered. Flashbacks and cutaways to thematically linked imagery abstractly adds an internal depth to the characters and their struggles. Choices like these are not always completely coherent within the text but they are never boring either. At the core of what makes Midnight Cowboy such an engaging movie is a pair of outstanding performances. Both Joe and Ratso are severely broken in different ways and how they are portrayed by Voight and Hoffman, respectively, heightens those cracks. Voight has soured his public image in recent years but here he plays Joe with a real tender meekness that no amount of false bravado can paper over. Over the course of the film we get the rough outlines of a haunted past and the its almost as if you can see the mental fissures of trauma in Voight’s bright blue eyes. By contrast, Hoffman gives Ratso a certain bombast that is very nearly chaotic and confident enough to hide just how hollow he is beneath it. A pair of remarkable performances that compliment one another as much as Joe and Ratso do each other. Midnight Cowboy is quite unlike anything that achieved the same accolades in years prior. Its imprint on films that would follow is undeniable. To see Hollywood embrace a seedy story about the margins of society is not so far fetched now but there is something of a template in this film that others have built on over the years. Beyond its legacy, the film is a tremendously stylish, well performed and entertaining endeavor. 8/10
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