Why ‘Midnight Cowboy,’ a Dazzling Mosaic of the Late Sixties, Retains Its Power To Shock

Released in 1969, “Midnight Cowboy” is often viewed, along with “Easy Rider,” as the beginning of Hollywood’s second golden age: the seventies. As is well-known, the movie focuses on two outcasts — Joe Buck and Rico “Ratso” Rizzo, played by Jon Voight and Dustin Hoffman — who meet at New York and develop a friendship as they struggle with poverty and hustle here and there. The film still retains its power to shock despite the changing social mores of the last fifty years, especially in its depiction of sexual transgression and violence. The film is also a profoundly sad portrait of two lonely young men, and considering American soldiers were still dying by the thousands in Vietnam, it’s not hard to understand why it won the Oscar for Best Picture in 1970.Playing at the Film Forum, the new movie “Desperate Souls, Dark City and the Legend of Midnight Cowboy” isn’t really a “making-of” type of documentary, where the filmmakers discuss the trials, triumphs, and coincidences on set, though some of its actors and crew members do appear on screen or are heard on the soundtrack. Nor is it about the influence “Midnight Cowboy” had on American cinema in the seventies. Furthermore, it doesn’t analyze the film’s themes and techniques per se. What the documentary does do, and brilliantly, is illustrate how the movie reflected its volatile, ever-changing, unstable time so well. It presents a strong case that the film is best seen as a dazzling mosaic of different issues prevalent during the period of the late 1960s, and even some still relevant today.Early in the doc, writer Lucy Sante (formerly Luc Sante) astutely observes that many of the major contemporary issues of the film’s day aren’t directly addressed, such as the Vietnam War. And yet, as director Nancy Buirski makes plain via a montage of war footage and protests set to the score from “Midnight Cowboy,” there’s no denying the war was on everyone’s mind as they were watching two young men scrape by in the wilderness of New York. Naturally, New York of the late sixties and seventies plays a big role in Ms. Buirski’s heady brew of imagery. Though the issues of crime and homelessness aren’t examined by the doc’s talking heads, another fantastically edited sequence features footage from the city during this period of decline. Set to The Guess Who’s “These Eyes,” real, grainy images of prostitutes, drug deals, and street fights are interposed with visually-sharper yet analogous scenes from “Midnight Cowboy.”One subject the documentary explores deeply is homosexuality, particularly since John Schlesinger, the director of “Midnight Cowboy,” was gay, and considering the Stonewall Riots occurred just a month after the movie’s premiere. Through audio of the director discussing his upbringing in England as a young, Jewish, and gay man, the film establishes how his outsider status informed the movie’s sensitive portrayal of an unconventional milieu and gay situations, though the relationship between the two main characters in “Midnight Cowboy” is kept nonsexual. The documentary delves even further into queer themes when it has authors Edmund White (via audio) and Charles Kaiser (on screen) speak about gay life before Stonewall, using imagery from sources such as the Audrey Hepburn movie “The Children’s Hour” and photos of LGBT activists like Marsha P. Johnson to contrast the repressive with the out and proud. There’s also amazing footage of Senator McCarthy, with an awkward Roy Cohn just beside him, laughing while an army chief mocks the words “pixie” and “fairy.”“Desperate Souls, Dark City” touches on many other topics that relate back to “Midnight Cowboy,” including how screenwriter Waldo Salt was blacklisted in the fifties, the impact of advertising and the counterculture, the western film genre, the 1964 election between Johnson and Goldwater, Abbie Hoffman and the Chicago Seven, Andy Warhol and the factory, Italian neo-realism and the French New Wave, and more. Yet this perceptive, if at times cluttered, documentary never loses sight of what writer James Leo Herlihy intended when he wrote the original book on which “Midnight Cowboy” is based: to document “man’s cruelty to each other and make the whole world cry.” Schlesinger’s film certainly accomplished that goal. And while this documentary doesn’t exactly make you weep, it will have you rushing to watch the iconic movie once again — not only to cry but to find even more resonating allusions.

Why ‘Midnight Cowboy,’ a Dazzling Mosaic of the Late Sixties, Retains Its Power To Shock

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