Midnight Cowboy (Movie)

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    ‘Desperate Souls, Dark City and the Legend of Midnight Cowboy’ Review

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    A documentary examines how the winner for best picture of 1969 captured shifts in American life.How many ways did “Midnight Cowboy” occupy the nexus of the cultural changes of the 1960s? The documentary “Desperate Souls, Dark City and the Legend of Midnight Cowboy” cites plenty.The film was revolutionary in its depiction of sex, and particularly in its acknowledgment of the existence of gay life. It tweaked the movie-cowboy archetype at a time when westerns allegorized the United States’ involvement in Vietnam. Its screenwriter, Waldo Salt, had been blacklisted in the 1950s. It took advantage of the possibility of filming on location in New York and of capturing aspects of the city — such as hustlers and homelessness — that had scarcely been shown onscreen, or had been limited to experimental cinema. A late interlude in the film documented elements of the Warholian art scene.And in winning the Oscar for the best picture of 1969, “Midnight Cowboy” may have represented a rare instance of the Academy Awards’ accepting important shifts in American life. (Or perhaps the academy looked forward and backward simultaneously: Two interviewees note that John Wayne, a supporter of the war and an icon of a more conservative America, took best actor that year for “True Grit.”)Whether “Midnight Cowboy” deserves or can bear the weight that “Desperate Souls” accords it, the director Nancy Buirski presents these issues with a good mix of small-bore and big-picture insights and only the occasional overstatement or fuzziness. The documentary might have pinned down more clearly, for instance, why “Midnight Cowboy” received its X rating, later changed to R.But “Desperate Souls” convincingly argues that there’s no other time at which Joe Buck (Jon Voight) and Ratso Rizzo (Dustin Hoffman) could have become enduring movie characters, let alone have the tenderness between them depicted so subtly. (The documentary was inspired by Glenn Frankel’s 2021 book, “Shooting Midnight Cowboy: Art, Sex, Loneliness, Liberation, and the Making of a Dark Classic.”)Buirski’s film gives much of the credit to John Schlesinger, the celebrated British director who was shooting his first movie in America. “Desperate Souls” notes that in his next film, “Sunday Bloody Sunday” (1971), he would break ground again in showing gay life (and, through Peter Finch’s character, perhaps acknowledge some of his own outsider’s perspective as a gay, Jewish, relatively upper-class Briton).Interviewed in the documentary, Voight recalls making a facetious — but accurate — prediction to Schlesinger that they would live in the shadow of the movie. (He’s also shown in a screen test that makes you wonder how he got the part.) Schlesinger (who died in 2003) and Hoffman are heard in voice clips.But some of the strongest commentary comes from writers who can stand outside the film itself, like Charles Kaiser (author of “The Gay Metropolis”), the critic Lucy Sante and J. Hoberman, a regular New York Times contributor (whom I also know personally). All situate the film in a historical context, its importance in which, Sante suggests, came at least partly by chance: “When people express their own time, it’s generally by accident.”Desperate Souls, Dark City and the Legend of Midnight CowboyNot rated. Running time: 1 hour 41 minutes. In theaters. More

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      When Best Picture Winners Overcome a Release Early in the Year

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      “Everything Everywhere All at Once” isn’t the first top film to have its debut long before awards season. But it is one of the few to go the distance.When “Everything Everywhere All at Once” made its debut last March at the South by Southwest film festival, followed by a nationwide release the next month, expectations were modest.Maybe the quirky A24 film about a multiverse-jumping mother striving to finally connect with her daughter — and busting some martial arts moves along the way — would make some money. And then “hot dog fingers” mania happened. Seemingly overnight, TikTokers glommed on to the prompt “If the multiverse is real, I hope there’s one where …” and imagined alternate timelines for their lives. Moviegoers across the country flocked to see the film once, twice, nine times. But back in spring 2022, no one could have anticipated the movie’s best picture triumph at the Oscars on Sunday night.Conventional wisdom has it that films released in the fall make stronger contenders. So when “Everything Everywhere” won, it joined a select group of films that were similarly released early — or early-ish — in a previous year, and that went on to capture the most coveted prize in Hollywood.Here are nine times a release in spring or summer — or, once, even in January — has gone on to win big.January 1943‘Casablanca’A release early in the year was not viewed as a competitive disadvantage until the early 1990s, when the former Hollywood producer Harvey Weinstein’s guerrilla-style efforts on behalf of smaller indie films like “The Crying Game” (1992) and “Il Postino” (1995) kicked off the modern era of Oscar campaigning. The World War II-set romantic drama “Casablanca” was actually in good company among the 10 best picture contenders: All but three were released between January and August.May 1952‘The Greatest Show on Earth’In the 1950s, it was common for best picture winners to also be box-office behemoths. “The Greatest Show on Earth,” Cecil B. DeMille’s 152-minute circus extravaganza, became the highest-grossing film of the year in 1952, thanks to its extended stay in theaters.March 1965‘The Sound of Music’David Lean’s epic romance “Doctor Zhivago,” a December release, was the favorite after he won best director for his previous two movies (“The Bridge on the River Kwai” from 1957 and “Lawrence of Arabia” from 1962). But audiences loved Maria — “The Sound of Music” became the highest-grossing film of 1965 — and the film won five statuettes, including best picture.May 1969‘Midnight Cowboy’The only X-rated film to ever win best picture hit theaters long before the four other best picture contenders. The idea of releasing awards contenders as close as possible to the date of the ceremony — just before the eligibility cutoff at the end of the previous year — so they’d be top of mind for voters was just beginning to take hold and would become common in the 1980s.March 1972‘The Godfather’ Paramount brass locked horns with the director Francis Ford Coppola on every major decision, and the studio chief at the time, Robert Evans, fought to push the film’s original Christmas 1971 release to the spring to force Coppola to do another edit. (That made the film, which runs nearly three hours, even longer!) To be fair, “The Godfather” would have been Oscars catnip no matter when it was released.February 1991‘The Silence of the Lambs’Like “Everything Everywhere All at Once,” “The Silence of the Lambs” was bolstered by huge word of mouth and strong reviews. The cannibalistic thriller — still the only horror movie to win best picture — topped the box office for five consecutive weeks after it was released in February 1991. Then it hit VHS just before Halloween, vaulting it back onto voters’ radar.July 1994‘Forrest Gump’This crowd-pleasing baby boomer tale was up against a stacked lineup of best picture nominees that included “Pulp Fiction” and “The Shawshank Redemption.” But moviegoers had embraced the tale of Tom Hanks’s kindhearted Alabamian, and it spent the summer hovering at or near the top of the box office, a run that Oscar voters surely noted.May 2005‘Crash’The divisive, Los Angeles-set race-relations drama pulled off one of the biggest upsets in Oscar history. The gay western “Brokeback Mountain” was an early front-runner and theories abound about why voters gave its filmmaker, Ang Lee, the best director Oscar but the top prize to Paul Haggis’s urban drama. In hindsight the win wasn’t exactly definitive. In 2012, Film Comment named “Crash” the worst best-picture winner of all time.June 2009‘The Hurt Locker’“The Hurt Locker,” Kathryn Bigelow’s low-budget American war thriller, had a slow rollout in theaters, going from four to 535 by the end of July. But it racked up strong performances at precursor award shows leading into the Oscars. More

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      Jerome Hellman, Producer of ‘Midnight Cowboy,’ Dies at 92

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      His movie producing career consisted of just seven films, but they earned him six Academy Awards, three for “Midnight Cowboy” and three for “Coming Home.”Jerome Hellman, who produced “Midnight Cowboy” (1969), the only X-rated film ever to win the best picture Academy Award, and who went on to solidify his reputation with other tough-minded dramas, like the Oscar-winning “Coming Home,” died on May 26 at his home in South Egremont, Mass., in the Berkshires. He was 92.The death was confirmed by his wife, Elizabeth Empleton Hellman.Almost no one at the 1970 Academy Awards ceremony expected “Midnight Cowboy” to win. The movie was the gritty urban story of Joe Buck (Jon Voight), a young, handsome, naïve and not particularly bright Texan who decides to start a new life in New York City as a male hustler catering to wealthy older women, and Ratso Rizzo (Dustin Hoffman), a grubby Bronx con man with a debilitating limp who becomes Joe’s unlikely ally.Shot with an initial budget of only $1 million, the movie included straightforward but far from pornographic depictions of straight and gay sex, prostitution and gang rape. The film’s rating was later upgraded to R.Vincent Canby’s review in The New York Times seemed hesitant to overpraise the film, which was based on James Leo Herlihy’s 1965 novel of the same name. It was “tough and good in important ways,” Mr. Canby wrote, “slick, brutal (but not brutalizing)” and “ultimately a moving experience.”Mr. Hellman didn’t even bother to write an acceptance speech.“I probably only said 10 words” after Elizabeth Taylor handed him the trophy, Mr. Hellman told The Los Angeles Times in 2005. “It must have been the shortest speech in the history of the Oscars.”Mr. Hellman’s entire movie producing career consisted of seven films, but they earned him six Academy Awards, not to mention an additional 11 nominations. Three Oscars were for “Midnight Cowboy”; John Schlesinger also won as best director and Waldo Salt for best adapted screenplay.The other three — for best actor, best actress and best original screenplay — were for “Coming Home” (1978), an ambitious drama directed by Hal Ashby. Mr. Voight and Jane Fonda starred in the film, he as a paraplegic Vietnam War veteran with a social conscience, and she as a military wife who becomes his lover while her conservative straight-by-the-book husband is deployed in the same war.Jon Voight, left, and Dustin Hoffman in a scene from the 1969 film “Midnight Cowboy,” the only X-rated film ever to win the best picture Oscar.United ArtistsBetween those two successes, “The Day of the Locust” (1975), also directed by Mr. Schlesinger, was another story altogether. Based on Nathanael West’s novel, set on the fringes of 1930s Hollywood, it was a depressing tale of a seductive but tainted promised land where some people came to fail and some to die. William Atherton, Donald Sutherland and Karen Black starred, respectively, as an Ivy League designer, a sexually repressed accountant and an untalented starlet.Many critics found the film off-putting, and it did not do well at the box office. Pauline Kael of The New Yorker said it had “no emotional center.” Although Roger Ebert of The Chicago Sun-Times loved Mr. Sutherland’s performance, he found most of the characters too clearly doomed to care about.But Mr. Canby wrote in The Times that the film was “in many ways remarkable,” declaring its subject a metaphor for the decline of Western civilization and “second-rateness as a way of life.”Judith Crist, then the acclaimed founding movie critic for New York magazine, praised “The Day of the Locust” in a full-page review. “So brilliant is” this film, she began, “so dazzling and harrowing its impact, so impotent are the superlatives it evokes” that you almost want to avoid looking at it directly, like a solar eclipse. She concluded, “To call it the finest film of the past several years is to belittle it.”The National Board of Review named it one of the year’s 10 best films.Jerome Hellman was born on Sept. 4, 1928, in Manhattan, the second child of Abraham J. Hellman, a Romanian-born insurance broker, and Ethel (Greenstein) Hellman. After high school, he served two years in the Marine Corps, then began his working life as a messenger in the New York office of Ashley-Steiner, a talent agency.He rose through the ranks and founded his own agency in 1957, before he was 30. But he sold that business in 1963 and became a full-time movie producer, beginning with George Roy Hill’s comedy “The World of Henry Orient” (1964). Peter Sellers played the title role, a New York concert pianist who is trying to initiate an affair with a married woman but is being stalked by two adoring adolescent girls. The film was both well reviewed and a hit.His other films as producer were Irvin Kershner’s “A Fine Madness” (1966), starring Sean Connery as a poet with writer’s block, and “Promises in the Dark” (1979), starring Marsha Mason as a doctor treating a teenage cancer patient. It was the only film that Mr. Hellman ever directed, and only because Mr. Schlesinger, who was scheduled to do so, had dropped out.Mr. Hellman’s last film was “The Mosquito Coast” (1986), directed by Peter Weir from Paul Theroux’s novel about an inventor who moves to a tropical island with his family, tries to create a utopia and fails. Harrison Ford starred.Mr. Hellman in 2009. At one point he described his earlier films as “unique, different, fraught with risk, problematical.”Neilson Barnard/Getty ImagesMr. Hellman was married to Joanne Fox from 1957 to 1966 and to Nancy Ellison, a photographer, from 1973 to 1991. In addition to his third wife, a film promoter whom he married in 2001, his survivors include a son, J.R.; a daughter, Jenny Hellman; and a grandson.Authors and commentators considered Mr. Hellman a driving force in the creation of what some called the New Hollywood of the 1970s, where power shifted from big-studio committees to independent filmmakers with purpose. But the era didn’t last long. In 1982, in an interview with The New York Times, he described the films he had made up to that point as “unique, different, fraught with risk, problematical.”“People just can’t believe that after the success of ‘Coming Home,’ I couldn’t just do what I wanted,” Mr. Hellman observed. But the studios, he said, were now run by business types who needed every film to be a blockbuster.“All that my success has won me is the luxury of immediate access to top executives,” he said. More