“Too much time alone had done something peculiar to his heart…”
― James Leo Herlihy, Midnight Cowboy
By Scott Ross
I have had a long and somewhat troubled relationship with James Leo Herlihy’s 1965 novel and the subsequent movie made from it, for well over four decades (see Enemy, a love story) and because of that, had until recently avoided re-encountering either. Reading Herlihy’s book again for the first time since my mid-teens it struck me that the essential search of his protagonist Joe Buck, beyond “something soft and fat and gentle, full of rounding sweet places to hide in,” is for the intense, intimate form of male friendship denied him by his peculiar upbringing, one that kept him out of school and alienated from the place where most of us connected with others in our childhood and adolescence, and which tended to cement the firmest friendships of our youths. Joe is no more adept at making friends than he is at his other failed quest, selling his body to wealthy women in New York City. He has no social skills, and cannot either read the signs people give him or separate the phony from the sincere.
It’s easy on the surface to see Joe as just the proverbial fish out of water, a Southwestern rube in the Big City and unused to its ways. But revisiting Herlihy now, after a period in which, during a crucial portion of their lives, children and teenagers with developing brains were denied the ability to read the faces of other human beings or to interact with their peers on a daily basis — and by the sorts of fools who out of unreasoning fear decree that “remote learning” is the same as being in a classroom and cannot admit that many children’s deprivation precludes their owning a personal computer — Joe Buck seems like an object lesson to all such officials (elected and un-), principals, teachers and parents who eagerly slapped cloth masks across small children’s faces and otherwise isolated them from each other and from their teachers for two years. No wonder Joe has such a hard time of it; like these kids, he has no experience of people’s faces. He’s been raised in such isolation he can’t interpret social signals and he’s so naïve, and so deeply in need of friendship he cannot in the novel comprehend the manipulative, ultimately masochistic hustler Perry, and partly as a result ends up being raped in a pathetic brothel by the madam’s grotesque son.
Although Joe Buck is, at least as far as he understands himself, heterosexual, his creator was gay, as was John Schlesinger, the man who directed the artistically exceptional (and unexpectedly successful) movie of Midnight Cowboy. As a result, some have questioned the intensity of the character’s need for male companionship, which readers of the novel may have more easily understood. Even Jon Voight and Dustin Hoffman, the young stars who played Joe and his grubby eventual friend Enrico “Ratso” Rizzo, misunderstood the parameters of the relationship and thought there should be a sexual encounter between the characters. Schlesinger wisely demurred. Both Joe and Rizzo (I have a hard time calling the poor, consumptive wretch “Ratso”; it just seems too cruel) are almost agonizingly lonely, yet there is nothing in their slowly growing friendship, at least in the book, that suggests a homoerotic attraction. The only exception to this in the picture is that moving moment just before they enter the Greenwich Village party when Joe tenderly wipes the sweat from Ratso’s hair and brow and Hoffman, his arms around Voight’s waist, briefly rests his face against his co-star’s flat exposed belly. It’s as far as the movie ever goes, and as far as it needs to. When Joe, unable to fulfill his fantasy of being a stud for rich women, offers himself to men, it’s with resignation that he’s broke and can’t do any better. (And anyway, he’s never the active partner in fellatio, nor passive anally.) It’s certainly not done out of any latent homoerotic desire; when the schoolboy played by a young Bob Balaban blows him in the balcony of a movie theater, Joe must fantasize about the insatiable girl he knew back home to achieve a climax.
Could Joe be deluding himself about his own erotic flexibility? It’s certainly possible; in both the novel and the picture he seeks men for friendship and women seemingly only for sex, and there’s something more than a little suspect about that… although that same neurosis, the same inability to integrate mature romantic and erotic impulses to one sex or the other and to separate them from compartmentalized juvenile desires afflicts any number of men outside of books and movies. How many seemingly heterosexual men have we known who can’t wait to leave their wives or girlfriends at home while they “spend time with the boys”? They equate their spouses with obligation and their male friends with fun.
But back to Joe Buck. What he shares with Rico, and what draws these unlikely allies together, is a sense of loneliness so vast it’s nearly overwhelming. It’s why the runty street hustler invites Joe, whom he had previously cheated out of 20 dollars, to share the “X flat” in the condemned building in which he shelters. Joe, understandably, can’t comprehend Rizzo’s motive in asking him to stay, especially since the crippled reprobate doesn’t, as he sees it, “seem like a fag.” Joe has needed companionship all of his life, but after the bitter experience with Perry he’s retreated further into himself and sees cultivating friendships as a sure road to being hurt, and exploited, again. Rico needs Joe to assuage his loneliness just as Joe needs “Ratso” as something human to cling to in a scowling metropolis that sneers at and rejects him.
Waldo Salt, the movie’s brilliant, blacklisted screenwriter, wisely jettisoned the first half of the novel depicting Joe’s experiences in Albuquerque and Houston but retained or elaborated on bits of his childhood and adolescence in brief, disturbing flashes — occasionally too brief, but too little is better in this case than the reverse. I do think he and Schlesinger err in depicting Joe as one of a gang of horny teenagers chasing the promiscuous girl (Jennifer Salt, the scenarist’s daughter) who metes out her favors to all and sundry but who appreciates the gentle, generous way Joe makes love to her. Why would Joe be part of that gang when he’s so clearly alone in life, his amorous grandmother (Ruth White) always off with this man or that and leaving him dinners and money for the movies in place of affection and supervision? If he could connect with a group of his peers that way, even superficially, he wouldn’t be so ill-equipped to make friends elsewhere.
That’s a rare miscalculation in a picture that gets almost everything else right, from the use of Fred Neil’s “Everybody’s Talkin'” to the casting of the supporting roles and the time-capsule view of New York as (in John Lindsey’s idiotic phrase) “Fun City” devoid of anything remotely approaching “fun.” Schlesinger was criticized for depicting a pedestrian face down on the street outside Tiffany’s while everyone except Voight passes him by as if he isn’t there but he witnessed the very thing himself on a different street. Like it or not, pictures like Midnight Cowboy, as much as the stories on the nightly news, fixed New York in the late 1960s for most Americans as a nightmare city being destroyed by crime, pollution, decaying structures and a system on the verge of collapse. (Schlesinger arrived in New York just as the infamous 1968 garbage strike began, which can’t have brightened his artistic vision.) Not that New York was alone in that sense of dystopia; nearly every large city in America then was also teetering on the edge of an abyss. But there were few movies set in New York during that period, apart from expensive musicals and bright, frothy comedies, that didn’t in some way emulate or take a leaf from the imagery Schlesinger’s gifted cinematographer Adam Holender captured.* It was certainly how I thought of New York in those years. Now, with everything on the fritz in every American city, citizens priced out of living in them, the entire population faced with manipulated inflation and shortages, seething with anxiety and wondering when the next manufactured crisis will hit, Schlesinger’s New York may not seem quite so terrible.
It’s interesting, and instructive, to view a movie at different times in your life and to see, not how the passage of time has changed your reaction but how the movie has altered the years. Few things date faster than contemporary stories, and few contemporary periods of American and European movies could become dated more quickly than those made between the mid-’60s and mid-’70s, when the cinéma vérité style exploited by directors such as Truffaut and Goddard on the Continent and quickly borrowed by British filmmakers like Tony Richardson, Lindsay Anderson and John Schlesinger, crossed the Atlantic. When I saw Midnight Cowboy as a teenager at a late-show screening in early 1979, only a decade since the picture’s release, the visuals by Schlesinger and Holender, the effects by Pablo Ferro and the editing of Hugh A. Robertson occasionally felt hopelessly dated, especially the mod Warholesque party scene in the third act. Seeing the movie again in the splendid Criterion Blu-ray, only the party felt out of date. The costumes and hairstyles worn in the movie were of their time of course, but you accept those things about motion pictures made in an increasingly distant era. (It shocks me a little to acknowledge that a picture released when I was eight years old is now further away from the present than Charlie Chaplin’s The Kid was from the world of 1969.) The way the movie was put together feels more organic today, and you can see where others, usually less talented, took from it so often and so blatantly in the years after its release that perhaps my 18-year old self was irritated because he’d seen too many tiresome knock-offs of Schlesinger’s impressionistic style.
The moments I’ve cited, and things like the flashes from Joe Buck’s past and the fantasy sequence in the Florida sun, however, are merely obvious and ostentatious examples of style — the dated stuff. The more important and lasting aspects of Schlesinger’s real style as a filmmaker are not flashy handheld camerawork and frantic editing but the compassionate manner with which he observes his characters and their milieu. Although I’ve never been wild about Sylvia Miles’ outré performance as an overripe call-girl (no wonder some people thought of her as the ultimate fag-hag)† even that character is treated, if not with sympathy, at least without condescension. I’ve read at least descriptions of the street preacher played with uncharacteristic brio by the wonderful John McGiver which call him a phony, but he’s not; if he were only that he could have been ridiculed. He’s a true believer, which is what makes Joe’s encounter with him more than merely a funny reversal set up by Rizzo to con Joe out of his money. (He’s been led to believe McGiver’s character is a procurer.)
There’s obvious feeling in the depiction, both in writing and in direction, of the two homosexual characters Joe picks up, the first (Balaban) because he’s so young and so freaked out by what he’s doing he vomits after Joe’s climax and begs him not to take his watch in payment; and the second (the superb Barnard Hughes) because the man is such a miserable, hag-ridden, self-hating fraud. Salt was right to condense the two separate encounters with the Hughes character into one; it’s not really believable in Herlihy’s novel that the man would open the door to Joe when he returns. But the scene is a bit rushed; we don’t, as we do when reading the book, have the same chance to experience just how thoroughly the pretentious conventioneering paper manufacturer from the Midwest bores the everloving bejeezus out of Joe, so that by the time he threatens and then attacks the man, there doesn’t seem any other means of dealing with him. The scene, short, sharp and brutal, doesn’t carry the sexual undertones of the novel (i.e., the older man’s arousal as he’s being beaten) but does retain the awful, almost black-comic, moment in which his dentures fall out of his mouth, allowing Joe to stuff the telephone receiver into his open maw. It’s a sad, rather terrible depiction of what the closet does to some men, and the false bonhomie Hughes affects gives his admission that he loathes life even more poignancy.
Waldo Salt’s nearly perfect screenplay includes every important character and incident in the second half of the novel and adds to them in small but significant ways, the best being how he incorporated the actors’ rehearsal improvisations into his script, enriching the dialogue, especially between Joe and Rico. Rizzo’s sneering at Joe’s Western get-up as “fag stuff,” and Joe’s retort. “John Wayne! You gonna tell me he’s a fag?” came from those improvisations, as did some of their domestic arguments, and Joe’s jokes at Rico’s expense. In the sequence between Voight and Brenda Vaccaro when, due to his imbibing drugs at the party he’s impotent, her gentle probing of him over a game of what she calls “Scribbage” does not come from the novel; that exchange emerged from Waldo Salt’s fertile brain, confronts head-on the question of Joe’s sexuality, and has the desired effect on his libido: her suggesting he might be gay turns him into a (hetero)sexual tiger. For the first time since coming to New York, Joe has a successful liaison, and gets paid for it. Ironically Rizzo’s ill health becomes worse and he begs Joe to get him to Florida just as Joe finally achieves an erotic victory and a recommendation that makes him feel his luck has turned, and he can finally leave Rico behind. The even greater irony is that it won’t matter, although as in the book Joe finally admits to himself on the bus ride south that his dream was impractical.
We’ve watched Jon Voight on the screen for over half a century now, so unless you saw Midnight Cowboy when it was new you may not quite appreciate how fresh his performance as Joe Buck was, nor how fully he inhabits the role. Voight captures Joe so completely — he even pitched his natural voice higher to approximate the character’s Southwestern accent — the actor entirely disappears. Voight absolutely mastered Joe Buck’s naïve enthusiasm and his narcissistic sense of his own erotic irresistability as well as his innate kindness, all of which his experiences in the city do their best to destroy; his turn to brooding suspicion of everyone is as thoroughly believable as his previous inability to perceive the malicious intentions of others. The actor knew Joe Buck was a star-making part, and attacked it with gusto. His performance is one of the great imaginative leaps in post-war movies. I don’t see how it, or he, could have been bettered.
If I am less enamored of Hoffman’s portrayal of Rizzo it’s because he doesn’t subsume himself in the role as thoroughly as Voight. His is a more actorly performance, full of the tics and mannerisms he would display throughout his career and which damage some otherwise splendid work elsewhere: The nasal whine, the way he pushes the Noo Yawk accent a shade too vigorously, the repeated “G’head,” which reminds me rather forcefully of his constant invoking of Judge Wapner in Rain Man: Imitable. You can imitate Hoffman as Ratso Rizzo; you can’t really parody Jon Voight as Joe Buck. And yet for all of that, Hoffman is undeniably effecting. Although emotionally closed off from others and encased in the thick armor Rizzo has had to encrust about himself in order to survive, there’s a vulnerability about Hoffman’s performance that is enormously touching, particularly when he tearfully admits to Joe that he can no longer walk. Just take his assertion that he improvised the famous “I’m walkin’ here!” encounter between Rico and the law-ignoring taxi driver with more than a grain of salt; although the line may have been the actor’s, the moment was laid out in Waldo Salt’s screenplay.
John Schlesinger made a modest name for himself as a filmmaker with British working-class pictures like A Kind of Loving and Billy Liar before gaining notoriety collaborating with the novelist and screenwriter Frederic Raphael on the “Mod London”-skewering Darling, which made Julie Christie a star and led to his being permitted to make anything he wanted. What he wanted was Far from the Madding Crowd, an interesting failure (again with Raphael) that cost MGM a bundle and embarrassed its maker. He was advised to be very careful about his next project, yet chose the adaptation of a novel treating of alienation, sex-for-hire, masculine rape, furtive homosexual encounters, poverty, disability, degradation and death — all those things the family audience can’t get enough of. One has to tip one’s hat to such audacity, and to United Artists for agreeing to it, but it would have all been for naught had Schlesinger and his creative associates not made so brilliant a movie out of it. Even the staid, moribund Motion Picture Academy took notice: At the same time John Wayne was given the Best Actor award, Midnight Cowboy took home not only the Best Director and Screenplay awards but also Best Picture, the first and only time a movie carrying an X (or NC-17) rating has copped it.‡
Schlesinger’s team was so concerned with authenticity that the production designer John Robert Lloyd had the X-flat the director wanted to film in removed from its condemned building and reassembled in a studio, and the party sequence is populated with Andy Warhol’s Factory crowd: Viva, Ultra Violet, Paul Jabara, International Velvet, Taylor Mead, Paul Morrissey and, although I have been unable to spot him, Joe Dallesandro. And while viewers tend to remember the bits and pieces of Joe Buck’s youth and childhood because of their flashiness, far less commented upon, and much more notable, is the sequence in which Joe, his ever-present transistor radio to his ear and shot from below and behind, walks the city streets in a series of rapid transitions from daylight to darkness, darkness to daylight, the repetition encapsulating the soul-deadening monotony of his search for something well outside his grasp.
The use of Fred Neil’s “Everybody’s Talkin'” is representative of the picture’s integrity and its artful sense of feeling. United Artists wanted a new song it could exploit for its record division but Schlesinger was adamant about Neil’s extraordinary ballad, tossed off for an album and expressing the singer-songwriter’s desire to return to his home in Florida.§ The plangent vocals by Harry Nilsson, the music beautifully arranged by George Tipton and anchored to Al Casey’s exquisite acoustic guitar fingering (which are likely the first thing you recall when you think about it) and those long, haunting high string chords, give the picture some ineffable, even inevitable, sense of place, and being. It sounds as if Neil wrote it for this story; his song is now inseparable from the picture, cannily used in five slightly differing versions in the movie’s first half-hour. John Barry’s compositions for the picture are limited (aside from the Nilsson vocals the bulk of the music is diegetic pop recordings by The Groop, Leslie Miller and Elephant’s Memory) and his most important musical contribution is the plaintive theme for Joe which is heard in subtly different variations throughout the picture and features melancholy harmonica work by “Toots” Thielemans. The theme, and Thielemans’ playing, encapsulate Joe Buck’s journey, and when it comes in at the end, as the bus heads into Miami and Joe holds on to his lifeless friend, the sense of loneliness and loss are nearly unbearable. It’s possible the scene would have played just as well, and been equally as moving, with no music at all. But that theme accretes to Joe in such an intrinsic way it is nearly inseparable from him, and from his journey.
Joe is blasted beyond words by the experience, and his lack of preparedness goes with his inability to read people; he’s been deluding himself all along about how sick Rizzo is, and Rico’s sudden yet inevitable death rocks his only friend to the core. As a novelist, Herlihy throughout his book gives us Joe’s thoughts, which are limited by his nearly total lack of education, as well as authorial observation concerning Joe denied even the greatest screenwriter, unless he wishes to quote large swaths of the prose he’s adapting, as narration. The last lines of his novel are stark, and frightening, and seem to question the notion that Joe Buck can ever climb out of the mess he and circumstance have made of his life. The final moments of Midnight Cowboy bring everything together — photography, writing, direction, acting, music — to suggest what a movie, particularly a great movie, which this is, has no words to say. And shouldn’t.
*Movies as diverse as The Out of Towners (in which the city’s malevolence was the entire plot), Desperate Characters, The Hospital, They Might Be Giants, The French Connection, Shaft, Across 110th Street, The Seven Ups and The Taking of Pelham One-Two-Three viewed the city as a place that for all its cultural advantages existed in a state only slightly above that of an abattoir. About the only major filmmakers of that time who didn’t see New York as filthy and dangerous were, on opposite extremes, Sidney Lumet and Woody Allen, both of whom loved it too much to depict it pessimistically. One interesting exception was Klute; however frightening the action in that seminal thriller, the city itself looks pretty inviting.
†In an incident recorded in New York magazine in the 1990s, Miles ordered a cup of coffee in a Village restaurant. When the waiter asked how she wanted it the actress trotted out that old wheeze, “I like my coffee like I like my men.”
Waiter: I’m sorry, Ms. Miles. We don’t serve gay coffee.
‡About that “X”: Among the other then-current MPAA ratings (“G,” “M” and “R”) only the “X” was not trademarked; anyone could use the rating, and did. United Artists simply applied it to Cowboy, which later embarrassed the MPAA (as well as the Motion Picture Academy) when the movie won Best Picture. The censoring body begged United Artists to take a token frame out and submit the movie so it could be re-rated “R.” U.A. refused. The fact that the “X,” alone of its recently adopted rating letters, was not copyrighted suggests that the board of the MPAA knew it would become associated with pornography, with which it gradually became synonymous. That’s why it wasn’t trademarked. They never wanted it to begin with. Not copyrighting the letter ensured it would disappear, which it eventually did, although not perhaps as soon as the bluestockings hoped. I care neither about the censorious Ratings Board nor the Motion Picture Academy and the annual awards its millionaires give to each other. What bugs me is the hypocrisy of both.
§Nilsson, who had recorded “Everybody’s Talkin'” for his 1968 Aerial Ballet LP and hoped to write and perform the new song himself collaborated with John Barry, the movie’s musical director, on a number called “I Guess the Lord Must Be in New York City.” It’s a pleasant song with a prominent banjo and some unusual and ingratiating percussion but it ultimately sounds too much like the Neil composition, without its simple genius. It’s included on Nilsson’s 1969 album Harry.
Text copyright 2022 by Scott Ross
So few critics, so many poets 