Why ‘Midnight Cowboy,’ a Dazzling Mosaic of the Late Sixties, Retains Its Power To Shock
A new documentary, ‘Desperate Souls, Dark City and the Legend of Midnight Cowboy,’ shows how the film reflected its volatile, ever-changing, unstable time so well.
Released in 1969, “Midnight Cowboy” is often viewed, along with “Easy Rider,” as the beginning of Hollywood’s second golden age: the seventies. As is well-known, the movie focuses on two outcasts — Joe Buck and Rico “Ratso” Rizzo, played by Jon Voight and Dustin Hoffman — who meet at New York and develop a friendship as they struggle with poverty and hustle here and there.
The film still retains its power to shock despite the changing social mores of the last fifty years, especially in its depiction of sexual transgression and violence. The film is also a profoundly sad portrait of two lonely young men, and considering American soldiers were still dying by the thousands in Vietnam, it’s not hard to understand why it won the Oscar for Best Picture in 1970.
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