Midnight Cowboy: On the Fringe

The three essential years it took Midnight Cowboy to reach the screen after that coincided with an astonishingly rapid revolution in what was permissible in American movies. In 1966, frontal nudity in a mainstream Hollywood film was unthinkable; the Production Code, which governed the content of movies and banned certain subjects altogether, was still in place, though hanging by a thread; and Warner Bros. was negotiating over every goddamn in Mike Nichols’s Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? A movie about a young southerner who idolizes Paul Newman and John Wayne, comes to the Big Apple to make his fortune with the ladies, and ends up living meal to meal and attempting to sell himself to sad men in rented rooms or movie-house balconies was inconceivable. Hellman and Schlesinger audaciously gambled that the time it would take them to steer Midnight Cowboy toward production would be enough time for the world to change, and they were right. By the late spring of 1969, when the film opened, the Code had collapsed and been replaced by a fledgling ratings system: G, M (for “mature audiences”), R, and X. As long as something can be rated, it can be depicted, and Midnight Cowboy became (and remains) the only X-rated film to win a best picture Oscar, although the MPAA’s embarrassed ratings board reconsidered a couple of years later and down- or upgraded it to an R with no changes.

After Darling, Schlesinger went off to film Far from the Madding Crowd and left the task of adapting Herlihy’s novel to another outsider. Waldo Salt was unlikely casting for a revolutionary: he was in his midfifties and had been writing scripts since 1937, and although this movie, Serpico, and Coming Home would make him one of the most celebrated screenwriters of the next decade, at the time he got the assignment he was a blacklist victim whose career had never fully recovered; he hadn’t had a meaningful credit in years and had been toiling pseudonymously in British episodic television.

Like all great adapters, Salt knew when to be faithful and when to be ruthless; he jettisoned most of the first third of Herlihy’s novel, intuiting that Midnight Cowboy’s story truly begins when Joe Buck (Jon Voight) arrives in New York. From then on, all of the movie’s most memorable episodes—Joe’s first failed street encounter; his comical assignation of miscommunication with a hard-bitten, aging prostitute (Sylvia Miles); the wild party that Schlesinger, with an assist from Viva and Ultra Violet, reimagined as a voyage into Andy Warhol’s New York; Joe’s encounter with the terrified, determined boy (Bob Balaban) who begs him not to take his watch (“My mother . . . she’d die!”); and the brutal attack that precedes his flight from the city—are all taken directly from the novel, often with swaths of dialogue left intact.

Most of all, Salt understood that Joe’s friendship with Ratso had to be the story’s center. Although Dustin Hoffman (who was the first actor to be cast and was in his early thirties during production) did not fit Herlihy’s description of “a skinny, child-sized man of about twenty-one or twenty-two . . . [a] little blond runt,” his Ratso feels even more right: an older, sadder inversion of Joe. Midnight Cowboy is about two lonely men (the movie is true to the novel’s description of Joe as someone who, “never having had a friendship on his own . . . knew nothing of how to bring [one] about”) who alternately sustain each other in their delusions and shatter them. Just as New York is, for the small-town Texan Joe, the land of Oz, Florida is, for the Bronx-born Ratso, the promised land: the oranges-and-sunshine posters and ads he has tacked up on the walls of his hellish unlit squat are practically the only splashes of nonlurid color in the movie, and in his begrimed life. And just as Joe sees himself as a stud, Ratso sees himself as a player—he brims with knowing advice for Joe about how to do everything, what women want, and the best way to work the game.