JON VOIGHT AND DUSTIN HOFFMAN STAR IN 'MIDNIGHT COWBOY'

Criterion Artwork for MIDNIGHT COWBOY Year: 1969 Rating: *****

A simplistic but mostly naive young man from Texas, Joe Buck, ironically becomes a cowboy after deciding to leave his hometown, headed to the last place that that kind of legendary hero exists, New York City, as every frame of MIDNIGHT COWBOY means something: starting from a sunlit drive-in to a public shower where Joe drops the soap...

An obvious nod for an inevitable detour within a disturbing, almost sadistic character-driven story that's also bright and cheerful, when centered narrowly on Jon Voight's title character, who shows enough humanity and vulnerability in what he's hiding as first-billed sidekick Dustin Hoffman's crippled con-man hustler, Ratso Rizzo, seems helpful up front...

Jon Voight as Joe Buck in MIDNIGHT COWBOY

A tattered and swarthy, street savvy con-man who walks in a permanent, unguided shuffle that, alongside the handsome, tall blond Texan, make for perhaps the most bizarre odd couple of top-grade exploitation cinema: in one of the most well-deserved films to win Best Director (for John Schlesinger) and Best Picture (although another movie cowboy would take the Best Actor)...

Curbing a seemingly endless gust of serious and often painstaking hard luck roadblocks (from con artist Sylvia Miles to street preacher apartment dweller John McGiver) are genuinely funny moments centered on and around the unlikely duo, teamed-up after what feels like fully-conceived vignettes...

Dustin Hoffman as Ratso Rizzo with Jon Voight in MIDNIGHT COWBOY

Including the initial bus trip; a clumsy attempt at hustling; and the doomed yet determined partnership before a sharp, frostbit winter cuts into Ratso's idyllic reverie of sunny Florida while the desperate, starving creature of a bleak and mysterious New York City (even haunting under a heavy dose of psychedelia) formidably reigns...

By the end, what the audience has experienced, and the characters suffered through, can't reach the unique form of dark, tangible reality that no movie has yet to challenge, or equal: A timeless celebration of futile optimism. 

Dustin Hoffman and Jon Voight in MIDNIGHT COWBOY

Dustin Hoffman and Jon Voight in MIDNIGHT COWBOY

Jon Voight in MIDNIGHT COWBOY

Dustin Hoffman and Jon Voight in MIDNIGHT COWBOY

Already missing home, Joe decides to send a postcard back to Texas, but then rethinks it the idea

The view of the lonely yet crowded bustling New York City outside of Joe Buck's hotel window

Character-actor M. Emmett Walsh, the right... He'd be Dustin Hoffman's parole officer in STRAIGHT TIME

Showing how certain things don't change in pop culture, a little bus girl plays peekaboo with Joe Buck

One would think Joe really arrived as lovely Florida waitress Joan Murphy welcomes him to the sunny state

John C. McGinley and Jon Voight in MIDNIGHT COWBOY

Dustin Hoffman and Jon Voight in MIDNIGHT COWBOY