Convinced of his irresistible appeal to women, Texas dishwasher Joe Buck quits his job and heads for New York City, thinking he'll latch on to some rich dowager. New York, however, is not as hospitable as he imagined, and Joe soon finds himself living in an abandoned building with a Dickensian layabout named Enrico Ratso Rizzo.
EN
“A band of shaggy anti-war demonstrators are parading in the little park that is kitty-corner from the Plaza Hotel, just north of the fountain where Zelda and Scott Fitzgerald used to splash. They carry the usual assortment of signs in the midday heat, including (girls) ‘We Say YES To Boys Who say NO’ and ‘Bring the Universal Soldier Home.’ All of a sudden Dustin Hoffman pushes his way through the crowd, brushing aside the peace pamphlets proffered him. He looks like hell. (It has nothing to do with his nose.) His long, greasy hair is slicked straight back from his forehead, giving him the appearance of a drowned rat, and he sports a stubby, three-day beard. His teeth are brown and rotting, like those of a Georgia teen-ager who grows up swigging cola morning, noon and night. His shoes are falling apart at the seams - Bowery style - and, underneath, his toes are on the verge of bursting through his sox.”
Judy Klemesrud1
“Joe Buck is 6 feet tall and has the kind of innocence that preserves dumb good looks. Joe Buck fancies himself a cowboy, but his spurs were earned while riding a gas range in a Houston hamburger joint. Ratso Rizzo, his buddy and part-time pimp from the Bronx, is short, gimpy and verminous. Although they are a comparatively bizarre couple, they go unnoticed when they arrive at one of those hallucinogenic ‘Village’ parties where the only thing straight is the booze that no one drinks. Everybody is too busy smoking pot, popping pills and being chic. Joe Buck, ever-hopeful stud, drawls: ‘I think we better find someone an’ tell ‘em that we're here.’
Trying to tell someone that he's there is the story of Joe Buck's life - 28 years of anxiety and dispossession fenced off by Priapian conquests that always, somehow, leave him a little lonelier than he was before. Joe is a funny, dim-witted variation on the lonely, homosexual dream-hero who used to wander disguised through so much drama and literature associated with the nineteen-fifties.
Midnight Cowboy, which opened yesterday at the Coronet Theater, is a slick, brutal (but not brutalizing) movie version of James Leo Herlihy's 1965 novel. It is tough and good in important ways, although its style is oddly romantic and at variance with the laconic material. It may be that movies of this sort (like most war movies) automatically celebrate everything they touch. We know they are movies – isolated, simplified reflections of life – and thus we can enjoy the spectacle of degradation and loss while feeling superior to it and safe.”
Vincent Canby2
“In the late 1960s, films such as Midnight Cowboy (John Schlesinger, 1969) and John and Mary (Peter Yates, 1969) were already heralding a changing relationship between film and environment, between environment and actors. But both films seemed to know very well what place they wanted to give to space, in what way they wanted to approach space. Schlesinger, for instance, dropped his actors into the urban environment and turned that environment into a sort of authentic setting that he portrayed in an authentic, that is, reportage-style way. Yates filmed his love affairs in a sort of ideal interior design: the interior here became a manual for adorning your flat. The new films emphasise the osmosis between the environment and its inhabitants. Very important are the bridges that can be built between the environment and its residents. After all, how do you express this osmosis, at what level do you situate it, in what way do you let it become visible? The contemporary figure seems to me to be: soiling. Not dirt (a visible element of the setting, painted, decorated dirt), but the soiling itself. This ranges from carelessness to apocalyptic soiling (Taxi Driver is a religious description of dirt and its cure). The dirt becomes an active principle: it stains and makes a mess, it neatly arranges the city.”
Dirk Lauwaert3
Theme from Midnight Cowboy, played by Toots Thielemans
- 1Judy Klemesrud, “Dustin Hoffman: From ‘Graduate’ to Ratso Rizzo, Super Slob,” The New York Times, 14 July 1968.
- 2Vincent Canby, “Review Midnight Cowboy,” The New York Times, 26 May 1969.
- 3Dirk Lauwaert, “New York Hollywood,” Sabzian, 28 June 2023. This text originally appeared in Dutch in Kunst & Cultuur 9, no. 14 (16 September 1976).