Midnight Cowboy (John Schlesinger, 1969)

Midnight Cowboy stands as one of the great phantasmagorias of 1960s Hollywood cinema. Visually and sonically, the film astonishes. It matters not a whit that Schlesinger interrupts the narrative with moments of short-shelf-life psychedelia (rapid editing, telephoto-flattened images, blue-and-white flashbacks, dazzling superimpositions) or that he puts them in the service of skin-deep critiques of consumerism or NYC savagery. They form little de facto avant-garde films that generate surges of jittery, intense excitement. And the music only heightens the effect. Listen to the record-scratch rhythms that overamp the sweetness in John Barry's "Florida Fantasy" or the eternally returning Nilsson version of Fred Neil's "Everybody's Talkin'" that drains the song of hope with each go around. Everything nags at you evoking both the energy and danger of city living. 

Then there are the myriad indigestible trills: a mother and son playing with a plastic rat in a diner; a bowl of matches behind a curiosity cabinet/color wheel; kids fishing off a bridge in Florida; radio voices linked miles away to the talking heads who own them; dozens of extras afforded a closeup. Rampant homophobia too, more an ugly part of the landscape than assurance that Joe Buck (Jon Voight) and Ratso Rizzo (Dustin Hoffman) enjoy a properly heterosexual bromance. In short, Schlesinger has expended a great deal of effort to fashion a complex outer and inner life for two (and more!) characters whom society would much rather sweep into a sewer. It's such a rich, surprising film that I might even claim it's the closest Hollywood ever got to Ulysses in deeming less-than-ordinary lives worthy of the highest art.

Grade: A