Best Picture Winner: 1969

Midnight Cowboy (1969)

The only X-Rated film to ever win Best Picture, Midnight Cowboy is an engrossing character study of two losers who form a friendship out of necessity. One of them finds himself without a place to live, while the other grows sicker by the day and needs someone to take care of him. What results is a touching story about two people whom, in real life, the average person would want nothing to do with.

Joe Buck (Jon Voight), a native Texan who thinks of himself as quite the stud, heads to New York City to make a living as a hustler. He plans to find wealthy women who will pay him for sex. But his total ignorance of the New York populace empties his wallet quickly. At a coffee house he meets a low-level con man, Enrico “Ratso” Rizzo (Dustin Hoffman) who tricks him out of twenty dollars by promising to put Joe in contact with a pimp. Joe eventually catches up with Ratso, who offers to let Joe stay with him in his room in a condemned building. The two start to look out for each other as they work small cons and engage in petty thefts to survive. But as Ratso’s health continues to decline, Joe remembers what happened to the girl (Jennifer Salt) he loved, and is determined to protect his friend from the same fate.

It is very clear from the beginning that Joe is not cut out for what he plans on doing. His first conquest actually gets money out of Joe to pay for cab fair. Later a client at a movie theater confesses he cannot pay, but successfully pleads with Joe not take his watch, the only thing of value he has. Joe is too much of a nice guy to get tough with anyone - that is, until he needs bus fare to get himself and Ratso to Florida. It’s a shocking moment of violence that is uncharacteristic of Joe, but shows how he has come to care about Ratso. Voight plays Joe as a sunny, bright, positive and cheerful person who always thinks success is just around the corner.

Hoffman’s Rizzo, on the other hand, is something of a weasel. He speaks in a whiny, nasally voice and immediately comes across as someone to avoid. But as we get to know Rizzo we start to understand him. Polio has left him a cripple and his father’s shoeshine job did not provide Rizzo with any kind of financial security. He is clearly ill (characters who cough in the movies are always doomed) and he is all alone. Joe may be Ratso’s first real friend. At first their relationship is a business arrangement. Joe can stay with Ratso as a way for Ratso to make up for the $20. They can work together to get funds need to buy food and cigarettes. But their shared, often humorous experiences (Joe getting thrown out of a posh apartment building, the two attending a trendy photography affair) bring them closer together. Voight and Hoffman have real chemistry as Joe and Ratso, and the audience starts to feel tenderness towards this unlikely duo.

John Schlesinger’s direction is full of quick cuts, hallucinatory images, and vivid nightmares. Joe is haunted by a gang rape of himself and his girlfriend, and by the sudden death of his grandmother. These memories will suddenly burst on the screen in black and white or unsteady focus. The sex scenes are energetic but chaotic. But, in spite of the stylish visuals, Midnight Cowboy remains focused on the two leads.

The result is a unique film experience, one that has the audience wrapped up in a story that deals in the exploits of unsavory characters. But the film reveals the humanity of these two misfits and that humanity is what makes their journey together compelling. Thus Midnight Cowboy emerges as one of the great films of the 1960s.