After the awfulness of Jackie, it was delightful to watch the opening shots of Midnight Cowboy and immediately realize that this is the work of a competent director. I don’t recognize many titles from director John Schlesinger’s filmography but I certainly will be adding more of them to my usual list. When this film was made Dustin Hoffman was already a huge star due to the success of The Graduate but I believe that this is the first time I’ve watched Jon Voight in any serious film and I was blown away by how good he is here.

The young, kind-hearted and somewhat simple-minded Joe Buck buys himself a new set of cowboy clothes, quits his dish-washing job and moves to New York in order to earn riches as a male prostitute. After a long bus journey however he finds it harder than expected as the New Yorkers take advantage of his naivety and his cowboy persona appeals more to gay men than to women. He meets Enrico Rizzo, nicknamed Ratso who at first appears to be a streetwise and well-connected fixer but turns out to be a con-man. In his desperation, Joe even tries to be a gay prostitute but still fails to get paid. When he runs into Ratso, he is understandably enraged and wants his money back but relents when he realizes that Ratso is even worse straits than he is. Since Joe is penniless and homeless, Ratso offers him to stay at his own place which turns out to be an apartment in a condemned building. The pair continue to dream up unlikely schemes to make money and bond together even as Ratso’s deteriorates as winter arrives.

As previously mentioned, it’s amazing to watch how the film establishes a time and place and lays out basic characterization and motivation for Joe Buck in just a few brief shots of him dressing himself in his new clothes and walking to the diner to quit his job. I had no idea that Voight was capable of such acting depth prior to this and his awkward combination of shallow bravado, innocence and vulnerability is just perfect. It’s not often that you get to say that an actor outshines Dustin Hoffman in a film but Voight not only does so here but the two manages to achieve a special kind of chemistry here that makes this film so memorable. The scenes in which they interact with other characters are fantastic as well, such as Joe’s first sexual encounter with the middle-aged woman in New York for which he expected to get paid and the time he accepts the teen-aged boy’s proposition in a movie theater. This film famously received an X-rating when it was first released but it is neither a salacious film nor in my opinion even an overwhelmingly dark one. It’s a film about two desperately lonely people in an unforgiving world and it doesn’t end well, but at the same time I think there’s a powerful resonance in the two of them finding each other and connecting.

Equally great is how the film delicately dances around the subject of homosexuality. Given the sensibilities of the time, it’s understandable that Schlesinger couldn’t make a film that shows homosexuality in a positive light. As such this is a film full of repressed, self-loathing characters at the fringes of society. Both Joe and Ratso are loudly homophobic, their vocabulary liberally speckled with faggots and cooties, yet while Ratso seems almost asexual, Joe protests too much to be completely heterosexual. The way he responds after being called a homosexual by the girl he picks up at the Andy Warhol is telling for example. At the same time, the film allows the essential humanity of the characters to shine through, making it easy for the audience to sympathize with them. You realize in particular that Joe is a decent person who doesn’t resort to violence despite being screwed by multiple people and finally does so when he has to do it for Ratso’s sake. It’s a skillful way to show the world the homosexual underworld of American society at the time and that they’re people too without being too blatant about it.

Overall I found this to be fully deserving of its reputation as a masterpiece of American cinema. Great directing, great acting and great photography. Perhaps my biggest surprise is that instead of being unrelentingly bleak as I expected, it has touches of bitter humor and even a touch of whimsy.