by Chris Marshall:
As hard as it is to believe, we are now halfway through The
Oscar Project. 42 down, 42 to go. Midnight
Cowboy is as good a film as any to be at the halfway point, if only because
it is also the first post-Hays Code Best Picture winner. And man, they used their
newfound freedom to go all out. The difference between this and previous
winners is almost impossible to describe.
But that’s my job, so I’ll do the best I can. The film
starts out with Joe Buck (Jon Voight), Fox’s A-team football and baseball
announcer a Texan who’s dumb as a rock, packing his bag and moving to New
York City, convinced he can make a living by dressing up like a cowboy and
being a “hustler.”
As you might imagine, this plan is not as successful as Buck
would have hoped. He’s soon broke, and he’s kicked out of the room he was
staying in. As an added bonus, he can’t get into his room to get his stuff back
until he can pay his back rent. With no money and no source of income, he finds
himself out on the street, his only possession being his cowboy outfit.
He’s not alone for long, though. He meets a weaselly guy in
a bar and quickly forms a friendship. The man’s name is Enrico “Ratso” Rizzo, a
self-described “cripple” played by Dustin Hoffman, and he knows all the tricks to survive in New York
City. After some, um, unpleasantness between the two, they reconcile, and Buck
moves into Ratso’s apartment with him. Ratso’s a wise and crafty man, so he
knows how to live rent-free: move into a condemned building.
Maybe it’s not the most glamorous life style, but at least
they have a roof over their heads. Buck’s New York City dream isn’t working out
quite like he planned it. Then Ratso starts to get sick, and things begin to
spiral out of control.
There’s a lot to this movie, and it was revolutionary in its
way. In addition to being the first (and only) X-rated Oscar winner, it was
also the first to address, directly or indirectly, the subject of
homosexuality, which was part of the ongoing subtext surrounding Buck and
Rizzo.
 |
| Hoffman's role is slightly different than in The Graduate |
It was also the first Best Picture winner to have a “popular
music” theme song, as the film famously opens with Nilsson’s “Everybody’s
Talking at Me.” This is so commonplace now that it’s hard to imagine that it
could ever be a novelty, but at the time it was very rarely seen. Even though I
had never seen a second of this film before, I still felt some goosebumps when
the song started playing. It just felt
classic and historic.
Midnight Cowboy
was also the most heavily stylized winner yet, and I have to assume its average
scene length was the shortest yet seen. Director John Schlesinger experimented
with all sorts of flashbacks and quick cuts, and while they aren’t always
terrible effective, they do make the film one of the most visually interesting
Best Picture winners so far. I’ll admit that there were some times when I was
kind of confused about what was going on, but I sort of think that was the
point. Joe Buck is a very confused man, after all.
1969 was one of the great years in cinema history; four movies
released that year are on the current AFI list of the top 100 American movies. Midnight Cowboy, The Wild Bunch, Butch
Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, and Easy
Rider were all released, and it really kicked off one of the greatest film
decades we’ve ever seen. The elimination of the Hays Code was only part of it,
as it was being enforced less and less even before it was officially gone. It
was mostly just the perfect storm of a changing culture and the emergence of a
crop of supremely gifted and talented actors and filmmakers.
The second half of this project will be wildly different
than the first half, and I’m looking forward to that. There will still be
plenty of weak years along the way, but from now on there is a new freedom for
filmmakers to take chances and do innovative things with their films. It’s a
brave new world of cinema from here on out. I can’t wait.
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