One of the British New Wave’s most versatile directors, John Schlesinger came to New York in the late 1960s to make Midnight Cowboy, a picaresque story of friendship that captured a city in crisis and sparked a new era of Hollywood movies. Jon Voight delivers a career-making performance as Joe Buck, a wide-eyed hustler from Texas hoping to score big with wealthy city women; he finds a companion in Enrico “Ratso” Rizzo, an ailing swindler with a bum leg and a quixotic fantasy of escaping to Florida, played by Dustin Hoffman in a radical departure from his breakthrough in The Graduate. A critical and commercial success despite controversy over what the MPAA termed its “homosexual frame of reference,” Midnight Cowboy became the first X-rated film to receive the Best Picture Oscar, and decades on, its influence still reverberates through cinema.
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Supplements
- Audio commentary from 1991 featuring director John Schlesinger and producer Jerome Hellman
- Desperate Souls, Dark City and the Legend of “Midnight Cowboy" (2022), a documentary by Nancy Buirski
- Video essay with commentary by Adam Holender
- Photo gallery with commentary by photographer Michael Childers
- The Crowd Around the Cowboy, a 1969 short film made on location for Midnight Cowboy
- Waldo Salt: A Screenwriter’s Journey, an Academy Award–nominated documentary from 1990 by Eugene Corr and Robert Hillmann
- Two short 2004 documentaries on the making and release of the film
- Interview with actor Jon Voight on The David Frost Show from 1970
- Jon Voight’s original screen test
- Interview from 2000 with John Schlesinger for BAFTA Los Angeles
- Excerpts from the 2002 BAFTA LA Tribute to John Schlesinger, featuring Jon Voight and actor Dustin Hoffman
- Trailer
- An essay by critic Mark Harris