The naive but hardly innocent Buck soon learns that he can't give it away to women, even nymphomaniac socialite Cass (Sylvia Miles). Voight is conned by creepy cripple Ratso (Dustin Hoffman), who demands a referral fee to place Buck with O'Daniel (John McGiver), the oddest presumed pimp or john in screen history.
Buck soon flees McGiver, and confronts Ratso, demanding his money back. Instead, the now homeless Buck moves in with Ratso, and the two eke out an existence in the latter's condemned flat, which lacks electricity but somehow has running water.
Buck, still wearing his souvenir cowboy outfit, is so desperate that he tries to become a male prostitute, with Bob Balaban as his first client. This proves as unsuccessful as it is distasteful.
Things look up when Buck is invited to a psychedelic party, where he meets friendly and well-to-do Shirley (Brenda Vaccaro). It seems that Buck's fantasy of a posh feminine clientele might come true after all, but instead strange turns to violent during his encounter with nearly elderly and self-loathing homosexual (Barnard Hughes).
Meanwhile, Ratso has become seriously ill, and instead of seeing a doctor, insists on a bus trip with Buck to his land of paradise, Florida.
How others will see it. Midnight Cowboy is well known as the only X-rated movie to win the Oscar for Best Picture. The rating was soon seen as unjustified, and was later changed to 'R'.
Midnight Cowboy should have won a Best Actor Oscar as well, jointly shared by Voight and Hoffman. Unfortunately, the Academy Awards lacked such imagination, and instead gave the coveted prize to John Wayne for True Grit, which doesn't rank within the ten best of his films.
The movie did win Oscars for director Schlesinger (who skipped the ceremony), and screenwriter Waldo Salt. Voight and Hoffman were nominated for Best Actor, and Sylvia Miles, seen only in a brief segment, somehow secured a Best Supporting Actress nod. The movie also won acclaim outside the states: BAFTA gave it six awards, including in four of the top five categories.
Today at imdb.com, the movie has a respectable 70K user votes, and the user rating of 7.9 is both high and consistent across all demographics. Most viewers shower praise on our two leads, but there are the usual few sourpusses who dislike the myriad brief flashbacks, surreal scenes, and general depravity, which might confirm a civilization in decline if the movie wasn't more than 45 years old.
How I felt about it. Midnight Cowboy is often strange. I still haven't figured out whether John McGiver is a lunatic, a preacher, or a homosexual. Well, maybe he's all three. I can believe that Brenda Vaccaro is a free love type who would lead a strange man she's just met into her apartment, I can't say the same about Sylvia Miles: doesn't anybody have common sense?
That said, Jon Voight and Dustin Hoffman have wonderful characters and play them perfectly. In fact, they are both so good that it is hard to pick which one should have beaten Wayne for the trophy. Hoffman wins by a nose.
The movie does have a point. New York City has been romanticized, like Paris, as the place where the bumpkin arives from Kansas or such place and soon becomes a star on Broadway, or something similar. For every person who achieves such success, there are hundreds of Joe Bucks, whose dreams are proven mere fantasies, and end up in dire poverty.
It is true that the weird scenes are often the most memorable. But the ones that seem most real are also the most effective, such as Joe Buck forced to sell his beloved transistor radio, or worse yet his own blood, in order to put food on the table.
It is also interesting to watch Joe Buck wrestle with what is right and wrong in a place where starvation looms for those who can't compromise their principles. What do you do when your customers turn out to be troubled men instead of well-to-do women? Is it wrong to steal a coat, but okay to shoplift from a street vendor?
Too bad Andy Warhol doesn't appear in the movie. He would have fit in great during the lengthy party scene.