Midnight Cowboy Reviews

This movie is a very fine film with a lot of merits. The film does look great, with beautiful scenery and crisp cinematography and the lighting is very atmospheric and always fits perfectly with every scene. The music is wonderful, with the highlight being the excellent Everybody's Talking', the story is very strong focusing on the friendship of the two main characters and well-paced and the dialogue is thought-provoking and poignant. The direction is top notch using every trick in the book and wonderfully and the characters constantly captivate. And this is helped by the magnificent playing of Jon Voight and Dustin Hoffmann, especially Hoffmann who I personally think should have got the Best Actor Oscar that year. Overall, a truly fine film. 10/10 Bethany Cox

I already saw this movie but since it was a while back, I was quite eager to check it out again. Anyway, even though it was released in 1969, in my opinion, it actually belongs to the great wave of amazingly inspired US movies from the 70’s. Indeed, back then, the box-office was not ruled by giant robots or super-heroes, it was ruled by such deep and dark features and this movie was a fine example. To be honest, I have never been really impressed by Jon Voight (seriously, in fact, the guy is nowadays more famous for being Angelina Jolie’s father than for his actual acting legacy) but he did make a few impressive movies and this movie is definitely one of them. And, of course, Dustin Hoffman was at the time one of the best actors in the world and he gave here one of his best performances. I still think it is a tricky movie though. I mean, both of the main characters were not exactly really like-able and you might wonder why they didn’t even at least try to have a regular job. In my opinion, it was basically displaying the destruction of the American Dream, no less than that. Indeed, they gave us this naive guy coming from Texas hoping he would make it in New York. However, instead, he did end up in the dark underworld of New York filled with misfits, filth and despair. One thing that was also interesting was that, instead of plainly stating his background, they gave us some rather fleeting bits and pieces dealing with Joe’s past showing that the guy was in fact already some damaged goods probably even before getting to New York. I also liked the look given by Dustin Hoffman during some silent scenes showing so much depth and humanity. Anyway, to conclude, it is basically a classic and it is definitely worth a look, especially if you like the genre.

The infamous x-rated best picture really shows how movie evolved over the years, i mean to think that this movie got an x-rating for few random hallucination scenes that showed a little bit of nudity, nothing major and no full frontal, while today in 2013, a movie like the wolf of wall street get an R-Rating, although it had full frontal nudity, graphic violence and used the F word more that 500 times.
The movie was beautiful, i don't remember watching a movie with Jon Voight that i actually enjoyed other than this, he was really a good actor, and let's not forget the great performance by dustin hoffman, and the great chemistry between the two.
The story is really heart-warming as Joe buck travel to New York thinking about becoming a "Hustler" basically fuck women and get paid for it, he worked as a dish washer in a restaurant in Texas and raised money to travel, as he arrive in New york, he find it really different from what he was expecting, as he wonder off the street looking for women and find no-one to be interested in him, because of his cowboy outfit, and then he ran into dustin hoffman, playing as a small time thug who steal money from him and send him to a gay old man.
This incident effected Joe buck so much, that he becomes homophobic, he becomes out of money and have no place to live, the movie give you a great taste of character development as joe begin to realize what he's become.
He ran into Dustin hoffman again and they become friends, staying in abandoned apartment, living a shitty live, stealing food for living and dreaming of glory.
The movie have a sad ending which i won't spoil but at the same time, it had a great message and it was very entertaining, and let's not forget that song "everybody talkin", it was beautiful.

Ever watched a movie and gone “If I could yank that part out of the film and change this around it would make it so much better?” Cause Midnight Cowboy is that movie for me. In parts a completely realized and unique masterpiece, and in others a needlessly distracting and experimental holdover from the 60s.

As a portrait of two lost and hurt souls reaching through the urban decay and finding companionship with each other, Midnight Cowboy soars high. The problem is that the comedown from the swinging sixties causes us to insert needless dives into Warhol’s Factory and other flashy moments which distract from the grimy and gloomy study of these two men beautifully played by Dustin Hoffman and Jon Voight.

Katharine Hepburn has famously stated that the right actors win Oscars for the wrong roles, and no actor better exemplifies that quote then Dustin Hoffman. Kramer vs Kramer and Rain Man don’t exactly spring immediately to mind when I think of his most award-worthy and iconic work, The Graduate and Cowboy are. His Ratso is one of the greatest performances of all-time for me. Hoffman disappears and in his place is only this sickly, hard-edged street operator. It’s one hell of a performance as Hoffman descends into more desperation and by the end looks like walking pestilence and death.

And Voight meets him halfway. Midnight Cowboy is a two-hander, and if either performance didn’t click into place the entire thing would topple in on itself. And Voight’s dim-witted Texan who comes to New York to be a gigolo is a nice counter-balance to Hoffman’s cynicism. His character is almost like a sweet-natured Labrador dropped into the middle of the seediest kennel you could imagine, and he plays it perfectly. His character develops a cocksure walk and possesses a naïve handsomeness that visually works in synchronicity with Hoffman’s shorter, dirtier and curled up posture. The character’s questionable sexuality – the film seems to want to point towards him being gay, but never really commits is a sin of a script that can’t decide what it wants to do with this thread.

So why doesn’t Midnight Cowboy work entirely effectively? Far too many detours into situations and characters that don’t add anything of deep significance to the main narrative or the bigger theme of the film, and these scenes are too artsy and remove us from the truth of the film and call too much attention to themselves. Would these penniless drifters truly find themselves in a party with Warhol’s superstars? I don’t believe so, and this entire segment could be removed with relative ease and the film would only be the better for it. I also don’t know if I completely believe the film’s climax occurring with them hopping on a bus to Florida and trying to find that happy ending. The world of the film is Times Square when that was a dirty place.

In the end, Midnight Cowboy is the story of two souls struggling valiantly to survive and be a little less lonely. Every time the film swerves away from this basic conceit it ends up hurting it more than anything. But what is great is amongst some of the most ambitious and well-crafted film-making of the 1960s. I truly get why so many call this film essential, but I think many of us have done a mental self-edit of some of the more unnecessary parts of the film. But the central performances/characters are so finely detailed and thoroughly defined that all else almost doesn’t even matter.

Slapped with an 'X' rating upon it's release in 1969, "Midnight Cowboy" is neither as shocking or boundary-pushing as is once was. That said, it still holds up as a film and as a character study of men with lives verging on desperation.

None-too-bright Texan Joe Buck (Jon Voight) leaves his small-town home, fancying himself a life as a gigolo, and heads to New York City. After being tricked out of twenty dollars by physically disabled unsavory type Enrico 'Ratso' Rizzo (Dustin Hoffman,) Joe finds himself homeless and quickly running out of prospects.

How Ratso and Joe end up living together in a condemned apartment building. No, they're not gay- Ratso is vehemently homophobic, while impressionable Joe fills the loneliness in his life with random sexual encounters. While Joe is naive beyond belief, Ratso is shady and opportunistic, but by the end you manage to see the good in both of them.

The two lead performances are good, but Dustin Hoffman steals the show as cheap swindler Ratso. It is really his, and to a lesser extent, Voight's movie, so none of the other performers are particularily memorable. I'm not entirely sure why Sylvia Miles got an Oscar Nom, she was fine but in my opinion nothing special.

The character development of the two leads are good, and the friendship element rings true, despite the bumps along the way. Some of the the editing in the flashbacks is a bit confusing. I appreciate the fact that the filmmaker approaches the material in a radical (for it's time) and unconventional way.

Overall, "Midnight Cowboy" is an important movie in the way it deals with controversial issues and the profound grace and sympathy with which it treats it's characters. It should also be commended for refusing to provide a pat, Hollywood ending. This is an important movie and should not be missed.