Midnight Cowboy embarks lonely journey

Like so many figures from reality and art, naive small-town Texan dishwasher Joe Buck comes to the city to live the good life, only to awaken from the American dream into a harsh reality. His particular brand of the dream helps make Midnight Cowboy the powerfully depressing vision of city life that it is.

Joe (Jon Voight) comes to New York City to become a prostitute who lives off rich women, a quest which makes him the subject of the movie's title. Through Joe's dealings in prostitution, the viewer discovers the sordid indifference of city life. The first woman he sleeps with ends up taking his money instead of paying for sex. Soon after this incident, Joe meets Rico Rizzo (Dustin Hoffman), a handicapped consumptive, who cons him out of money.

When heterosexual sex fails to make ends meet, Joe turns to homosexual sex, portrayed as a desperate, joyless, lonely activity. To make things worse for Joe, nobody pays him, and as occurs with his first female client, he is too nice to assert his claim on the money. Penniless and with hardly an acquaintance, he ends up squatting in a condemned apartment with the equally desperate Rizzo, whom everyone calls Ratso.

Midnight Cowboy is fraught with void. Although the film centers on the close friendship between Joe and Ratso, it's hardly a fulfilling social life. They need each other to make each other less lonely.

It is loneliness that arouses his excitement when two Andy Warhol factory types, presumably intrigued by his outrageous cowboy get-up, invite him to a party. The fact that someone takes notice of Joe is an exciting occasion for him.

The viewer sees that a room full of partiers does not provide a human bond. But even just entering the party, Joe feels he should signal his presence to someone, but he doesn't know who to talk to, and nobody cares that he is there. He, and everyone else around him for that matter, are merely a part of the drug-induced "experience." The party is a microcosm of the disorientation of Midnight Cowboy's New York City as a whole, although the psychedelic camera work, complete with flashing lights to highlight the effects of the drugs, make it significantly more fun.

Despite the tedious repetition of a mediocre country music song (the only substantial flaw of the film), Schlesinger's powerful depiction of the lives of the down-and-out creates the framework for a cinematic classic. It is the wonderful chemistry of Voight and Hoffman, however, that ensures the success of Midnight Cowboy.

Hoffman, especially, is at his best in his role, and renders Ratso as truly pathetic. His performance alone has the power to elicit tears from a portion of any audience. But when it appears within the context of one of the best films of the 1960s, nobody in the audience comes away from the theater unmoved.

Midnight Cowboy shows tonight at Kettering 11 at 7:30 p.m., 9:30 p.m. and 11:30 p.m. for $1.