The Oscars best picture category has a long and ignoble history of favouring the inoffensive over the revolutionary – Citizen Kane lost out to How Green Was My Valley. Forrest Gump defeated Pulp Fiction. The Third Man, 2001: A Space Odyssey and Do The Right Thing failed to even be nominated for best picture. (It’s a cruel world when Crash can win the thing and that lot can’t even get a look in). As a rule, the Academy tends to be behind the times – #OscarsSoWhite is recent evidence of that.
All of which makes the decision to crown Midnight Cowboy best picture in 1970 seem, in retrospect, like such a welcome aberration. It was a rare moment when Hollywood saw the coming changes in cinema and, rather than ignore them and hope they went away, rolled out the red carpet.
To recap: Midnight Cowboy was the first and only X-rated film to be awarded best picture. The tale of a Texan dishwasher trying to find success as a gigolo in New York City, it featured themes – prostitution, homosexuality, drug abuse, et al – that were considered transgressive at the time and still feel distinctly adult today. Up until its victory, the best picture winners of the 1960s were, to paraphrase the Mighty Boosh, as edgy as a satsuma, broadly divided between glitzy musicals and hoary historical dramas, with the honorable exception of the Sidney Poitier-starring In The Heat Of The Night. The film that won the award the year before Midnight Cowboy? The film adaptation of Lionel Bart’s Oliver! (Their exclamation mark, not mine.)
Midnight Cowboy’s win then was very much a symbolic changing of the guard. Bonnie And Clyde is considered the moment when the new Hollywood – with its transgressive themes, loose European style and auteur driven direction – came crashing into the mainstream. But Bonnie And Clyde famously failed to win best picture (losing out to In the Heat of the Night). It was Midnight Cowboy’s win that truly opened up the floodgates. The 1970s best picture winners were a murderer’s row of game-changing cinema: The French Connection, The Godfather Parts I and II, One Flew Over The Cuckoo’s Nest, Annie Hall, The Deer Hunter. Even if Midnight Cowboy wasn’t a great film, its status as the first of this new wave would ensure its position among the giants.
But Midnight Cowboy is a great film. Its genius is in this framing: by transplanting a southern gent into the neon-lit excesses of New York City, it’s able to approach the counter-culture through innocent eyes, providing an outsider’s view of the outsiders. Jon Voight has a suitable cheery blankness as Joe Buck, the good ol’ boy whose wide-eyed demeanour masks a troubled past. He treats his move to New York as an opportunity – to worm his way into high society through being an escort to the wealthy and starry – but really it’s an escape. Joe flits through this city of swingin’ 60s excess with a mixture of trepidation and excitement, but never entirely abandons his wide-eyed nature (or perhaps obliviousness), treating Warholian parties and grim quotidian rent-boy encounters with the same can-do spirit.
Were that to be the extent of it, Midnight Cowboy might be regarded as a slightly sardonic snapshot of a time and place. But then Joe gets fleeced by Enrico Salvatore “Ratso” Rizzo (Dustin Hoffman, dramatically altered from the fresh-faced figure in The Graduate), shakes Ratso down in return and the pair begin a wary partnership. Joe and Ratso are one of Hollywood’s definitive buddy pairings, two figures on the margins who, cautiously at first then wholeheartedly, depend on each other: Joe a wide-eyed man-child ill-equipped to deal with the viciousness of the adult world; Ratso, opportunistic and independent, but a figure belittled and ignored by society at large. Their relationship manages to be both acerbic but ultimately and unexpectedly sweet, particularly in the way that Joe sacrifices success for his ailing friend. The final shot, of Joe staring blankly on a greyhound bus to Florida, lost and alone again in an adult world, while Ratso lies dead beside him, is one that is hard to shake.
Midnight Cowboy “has all the trappings of a film made for its time, swingingly right for the second half of 1969,” wrote then Guardian critic Derek Malcolm in a 1969 review of the film. True, but this is a story that still lingers. There’s a strange pertinence to the tale of a figure of middle America crashing into liberal New York (with an extra layer of curiosity provided by Voight’s later conversion to a Trump-supporting conservative). But more than that, there’s a universality to its wild, radical nature – the alien becoming strangely familiar. It’s one of those rare films that you end up thinking about all the time.
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