Day 72: 1969(Part 2)

My feelings about Midnight Cowboy parallel many of my feelings about Easy Rider. I first saw it on video around the same time, saw it again not long after, and I don’t think I’ve seen more than the occasional clips since then. I still think it’s a brilliant film with remarkable performances, but I didn’t experience a great deal more than I did on initial viewings, aside from the incredible location shooting of 1969 New York City, not a high point in beauty for the city, but great to see nonetheless. Joe Buck(Jon Voight), in continuing peripherally with the western theme noted earlier is a young Texan who has decided that his lot in life is to go to New York City and make his fortune having sex with rich women. It soon becomes clear that this isn’t as easy as he had assumed. Much like immigrants who came to America believing the streets were paved with gold, Joe isn’t quite ready for big city living. The clients never materialize. His first(Sylvia Miles) hustles him out of $20. Even when he hits a low and decides to let what he assumes to be a young rich kid(Bob Balaban) blow him, it doesn’t pan out. One lowlife named Rizzo(Dustin Hoffman) even swindles him out of much of his cash to meet an alleged pimp who just turns out to be a batshit Bible thumper(John McGiver). When Joe stumbles across Rizzo(whom everyone calls Ratso, much to his chagrin), he’s homeless, penniless, and at the end of his rope. Though he’s ready to throttle him, Rizzo makes peace with him by offering him shelter in a dump that he’s squatting in. These are the people who live on the margins in New York City and it follows them as they scrape, not even to get by, in the conventional sense, but to keep breathing. Ratso literally has a problem with the latter and after Joe scrapes together enough cash by dubious means to get them a bus ticket so he can get them to a climate that might improve his health. But it’s too late. Ratso dies in his arms on the bus, leaving him as alone if not more than he was when he arrived from Texas. Curiously, this is the second title on the list which ends with Dustin Hoffman on a bus, presumably trying to improve his life, but with less than positive results. Though, to be fair, this makes the ambiguous ending of The Graduate look positively uplifting by comparison. Another similarity this one has to comparison is that it’s a great time capsule, in this case of ‘60’s NYC. Hoffman made quite a splash with The Graduate, but this must have established him as someone who could do just about anything, as the crippled lowlife Ratso Rizzo couldn’t be a further cry from Benjamin Braddock and garnered him his second Oscar nomination. Voight is compelling and memorable as well, especially considering that it’s basically his story. The film is filled with flashbacks that tell just enough without spelling out all the details of his damaged psyche. As noted in the intro, this is one film that shows that even Oscar voters(in some categories anyway) were ready for challenging material that showed the most lowly and seedy parts of society. Despite an unpleasant subject matter, it was nominated for seven Oscars and won three for Best Picture, Best Director, and Best Adapted Screenplay. On top of that it was initially rated X, one of two X films in history to be nominated as such. The curious thing about Midnight Cowboy is that, despite this, the vast majority of the film can, by today’s standards, be shown on broadcast television. I can’t say the same for the other title, A Clockwork Orange. How many times have I brought that title up? Is it obvious I’m looking forward to it?

On Dec. 24, my parents arrived and they were game enough, through their slightly extended stay(due to a blizzard in NYC) to join me for the next five screenings, including the next title on the list, Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid. As noted earlier, 1969 was a strange year for the western as a genre. True Grit was more a relic of old Hollywood, The Wild Bunch was groundbreaking in its portrayal of graphic violence in the genre, and this film, in the words of critic J. Hoberman, “insouciantly trashed the genre’s remaining moral pretensions.” Watching this one brought Bonnie and Clyde to mind more than once, most specifically because it portrays a version of real life events and people, also buying into(or perhaps commenting on) folk legends about them. And, of course, Butch and Sundance are similarly charming, witty, and doomed. I mentioned earlier about the mix of movie stars and new talent present on the list. Paul Newman was an established star with, apparently, the soul of an artist. Always recognizable as the star that he was, he seemed to gravitate towards more challenging material. Redford is an even more curious figure. Though he’d been working fairly steadily for nearly a decade, this is the film that made him a star. Unlike more quirky stars like Hoffman and Nicholson, Redford had more of the conventional qualities that could have made him a movie star in any era. I must admit, when I first found myself being drawn to acting in my teens, I had a hard time understanding his appeal. Admittedly, I was more dazzled by chameleons like Hoffman, Robert DeNiro, and as far as my generation goes, Sean Penn. I always found Redford to be rather bland. I should say that as I’ve grown older I’ve come to appreciate him on many levels, though at this point, more as a producer, humanitarian, and the founder of the Sundance Institute and film festival. He’s got a lot of titles on this list, many of which I haven’t seen, and I’m looking forward to giving him a closer look. I saw this film on video for the first time just a few years ago and enjoyed revisiting it. Newman has his usual easygoing smiling charm and Redford plays it a little more sullen than in a lot of his work, sort of the tightly wound angry straight man to Newman’s clown, and their chemistry is undeniable. The film has a jokey tone with a fatalistic underpinning. I was particularly impressed with the sequence, criticized for its length by some, where they’re pursued by a “super posse” consisting of some of the best known lawmen of the time. Though they’re named in a later scene, the choice to make them faceless was inspired. When they emerge from their hiding place you mostly just see the hooves of the horses. When seen pursuing, they’re shot either from a distance, from behind, and other obscuring techniques. They almost serve as Butch and Sundance’s past chasing them. It comes out later that the super posse is costing the banker more than the money they’re protecting. Screenwriter William Goldman mentions in one of the accompanying interviews that this was actually true and he included it because it was so unusual. But it doesn’t seem that unusual to me as it is indicative of what a rich man will do to, not to hold onto his wealth, but to hold onto his power. Though we’re told that anyone in America can scrabble to the top, those that are already there will do whatever they can to push you back down. You may be able to best them occasionally, but their deep pockets and entrenchment with the powers that be will win out every time. I realize that this may make it sound as if I’m buying into the myth and sympathizing too much with characters that even some of their accessories in the film refer to as “two bit thieves.” Though it romanticizes them and shows how much everyone likes them and is charmed by them, it never shies from the truth of what they are and what their eventual fate will be. Katharine Ross, as Sundance’s girlfriend, eventual accomplice, and surrogate mother to them both, periodically repeats, “I’m not going to watch you die” and, indeed, vanishes just soon enough to avoid it. I also want to salute the innovative storytelling techniques involved, first with the opening newsreel, and more notably, with a transition scene in the middle. When the three decide they’re going to move to Bolivia, there is a shift showing their trip to New York and eventual departure entirely through a musical montage showing only a sepia toned series of still photographs. Overall, this one doesn’t quite rank with the best of these as far as I’m concerned, but I found it very enjoyable nonetheless.