John Schlesinger | Midnight Cowboy / 1969

losers in love

by Douglas Messerli

 

Waldo Salt (screenplay, based on the novel by James Leo Herily) John Schlesinger (director) Midnight Cowboy / 1969

 

Including its 1969 premiere, I have watched John Schlesinger’s film Midnight Cowboy numerous times over the years, but for several reasons never to choose to review it until now. Certainly I recognized upon first seeing it was performed by two wonderful actors, Jon Voight and Dustin Hoffman, along with some fascinating other minor figures Sylvia Miles (who I’ve since met several times at Sherry Bernstein’s New York apartment), Brenda Vaccaro, Bob Balban (just a kid in those days), John McGiver, and Bernard Hughes. Its subtle gay narrative is generally quite powerful, and its major song “Everybody’s Talking at Me,” written by composer John Barry and sung by Harry Nilsson, is one of the hauntingly best movies songs, winning several awards.

      Schlesinger, moreover—who also directed Darling and Sunday Bloody Sunday—is clearly a more than competent director. I was living and working in New York City with film was first shown.

      Later I even met the gentle gay author, James Leo Herily,* residing in Silver Lake area of Los Angeles, who wrote the original novel upon which this film was based. What wasn’t there to like?

      For one, I did not like the black-and-white dreams scene which recounted gradually the naïve Texan dishwasher, Joe Buck’s past; nor the future dream sequences of Enrico Salvatore “Ratso” Rizzo’s imaginary life in Miami. Schlesinger’s somewhat expressionist use of certain images such as the constant MONY sign and the explosive tearing down of a building—presumably the Claridge Hotel where Joe stayed in his first days upon arriving in New York—rubbed me the wrong way in their overstatement of the themes, where the difference between the desirous starving losers and the overstuffed rich losers was already quite obvious.

    And then, the over-the-top performances by Miles (always rather tawdry in her acting), McGiver, Varraco, and other minor figures such as the drugged-mouse lady, dragging a plastic or perhaps even real mouse across her daughter’s face, all detracted, it seemed to me, from the core of the story which concerned a growing unnamed but obvious gay love between the central heroes, Buck and Rizzo, even as they continue to insist they are straight, and it is Buck’s intention, dressed up in what Rizzo describes as his “faggot” cowboy suit, to service the New York women for large sums of money.

      Both Hoffman and Voight, I’ve since read, went to Schlesinger, asking him to be clearer in the script’s delineation of their gay love, but he refused, insisting that it would delimit their audiences and probably get it a R rating. 

      But this time seeing it, I forgave some of these “flaws,” noting instead just how subtly screenwriter Waldo Salt gradually built up the homosexuality which finally blossoms into full love with Rizzo’s death as the two travel together by bus to Miami.

     Some of these hints are double-edged, as when early in the film a transgender waiter queries Joe and Rizzo: “How is he going to get his hands into your pockets,” given Joe wears the tightest of the cowboy’s pants. At one level, obviously, she is suggesting this dying con-man will somehow find a way to get money out of Joe (in fact, Joe has already given him $20), but it can also be read as  sexual desire, sticking his hands in his pocket in order to jerk him off.

      And it isn’t long after that Rizzo lures Joe to his derelict, empty building to share a bed next to him. Joe is shy about the deal, and is determined to leave before Rizzo admits that he wants him to stay. He even steals Joe’s boots so that he will not run off.

     When his relationships with women don’t pan out, Joe even picks us a young boy (Balaban) who sucks the cowboy off in a movie theater. But when it comes to payment, the adolescent admits that he has no money.

       Now playing Joe’s pimp, Rizzo arranges for an encounter with a gay man (McGiver). Joe is ready for the sex, but when the loon opens up his bathroom door backed with a plastic Madonna and demands he get down on his knees and pray, the cowboy angrily flees.

       Yet love is still love, and you have to take what you can get in this film. When Joe does finally return to Rizzo’s “apartment,” discovering his friend in a feverish condition, and Rizzo insists “We got to get out of here,” Joes picks up his own male trick to obtain enough money for their trip.

      He gets his money this time, but there is a suggestion that he might have killed him to obtain it. Whether or not the closeted gay boy who still thinks of himself as purely heterosexual also killed the man after sex is open to question. It’s one of the troublesome issues of Herlily’s dumb and bigoted character who would hate himself even more if he were able to comprehend who he is. And this, of course, is the problem with regard to LGBTQ representation of Schlesinger’s film, which pretends to be radically opening up the door to cinematic gay presentation while offering up an even more stereotypic vision of homosexuality than John Houston’s Reflections in a Golden Eye of two years earlier.

      After the sudden and expected death of Rizzo en route to Florida when the “cowboy” is told by the driver that they still must travel forward to Miami, Joe consummates his love by carefully sliding his arm around his dead friend’s shoulder for the remainder of the trip.

      Everywhere in Schlesinger’s Midnight Cowboy people are losers, losing in love and slowly losing their minds.

 

*Sal Mineo, I might mention here that Mineo very much wanted to the role Rizzo in Midnight Cowboy. In his infamous interview with Boze Hadleigh, Mineo responds to Hadleigh’s question:

     BH: Somebody in L.A. told me you'd wanted to be in Midnight Cowboy?

    SM: I was, once, interested in buying the rights. Did you ever read that novel? James Leo Herlihy—nice guy. The book's fuckin' fantastic, man. Even better than the movie. Anyway, I'd wanted to play Ratso.

 

Los Angeles, June 3, 2020

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (June 2020).