Midnight Cowboy (1969)
Jon Voight stars as a Texan who has a gift with the ladies, thinking he'll find a rich woman to live with he sets off to New York as a hustler. He soon comes across the snaky Ratzo Rizzo (Dustin Hoffman) a fellow down n' out who rips him off but they soon become friends.
As the end credits rolled i was again left in an unusual frame of mind, similar to when watching another absolute favourite in Easy Rider, a film from that very same year. I don't know if it was the similarities in characters being basically two outcasts looking out for one another in a hostile world or maybe the music - Harry Nilsson's Everybody's Talkin' could have been lifted direct from Easy Rider or just the general feel that director John Schlesinger gives the film which filled me with laughs, joy, despair and heartbreak: basically everything a film can do.
Midnight Cowboy isn't a film that i'd recommend to total strangers unlike say Jaws or Raiders of the Lost Ark because it's seemingly a detached look at the seedy underbelly of urban life in the cess pits of late sixties New York but digging just beneath the surface there's so much more to it than that. Yet if i was to sum it up in a sentence i'd probably say it's a heartwarming story of friendship set in an ultimately depressingly f*cked up world
I didn't put this on until after 1:00 am last night / this morning, i dunno, it feels like the right time to absorb this masterpiece in a dark world with the early morning skies of redemption breaking through as it finishes.
I also watched the two thirty-Firth Anniversary Documentaries on the Criterion Blu-ray - After Midnight: Reflecting On a Classic 35 Years Later and Controversy and Acclaim which are both recommended. There's an enormous amount of supplemental material on the disc but they were my two of choice to finish of a night that began with a weird Mexican brain sucking monster.
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