How this ‘dirty movie’ changed Hollywood
History will be made Feb. 24 if Alfonso Cuaron’s Spanishlanguage drama Roma wins Best Picture at the Academy Awards, the first non-anglophone film to do so.
It would also mark the first time filmdom’s top prize went to the Netflix streaming service — a seismic shift for Hollywood, where theatrical releases are sacrosanct.
But a far bigger shakeup to traditional movie-going and the Oscars was underway 50 years ago this year, as the urban western Midnight Cowboy — considered a “dirty movie” by many because of its adultsonly “X” rating — arrived to challenge audiences, critics, the film industry and the Oscars.
After Midnight Cowboy, which would go on to win Best Picture at the 1970 Academy Awards, the only X-rated film ever to do so, the movies would never be the same again. It would become a leading example of the reality-driven, independence-minded New Hollywood movement of the late ’60s and throughout the 1970s, which included such groundbreaking films as Easy Rider, Medium Cool and Taxi Driver.
Midnight Cowboy paired newcomer Jon Voight with Hollywood star Dustin Hoffman as lost, desperate souls who find each other on New York’s grubby streets. It was the first U.S. film by British director John Schlesinger, who was part of the U.K.’s “Angry Young Men” movement of social-realist cinema.
Voight plays naive cowboy wannabe Joe Buck. He journeys from his small Texas town to the big city with dreams of getting rich as a male prostitute. Joe tells the bemused cook at the diner where he’s been washing dishes that New York women need his services because “the men are mostly tutti-fruttis” there.
After a series of setbacks and rip-offs, a nearly defeated Joe is befriended by Brooklyn grifter Enrico (Ratso) Rizzo, a man whose detested nickname describes his clothes, behaviour and state of ill health. The bonding between these two men, which earned Best Actor nominations for Voight and Hoffman at the Oscars, recalls the migrants George and Lennie from John Steinbeck’s classic Of Mice and Men.
There is sex and nudity in Midnight Cowboy, some of it in surreal flashbacks Joe experiences that recall a childhood and young adulthood savaged by gang rape and incest. None of it would shock a moviegoer or TV watcher in 2019; the film’s casual and constant homophobia would be far more troubling to modern audiences.
In the iconoclastic mood of 1960s cinema, typified by the Nouvelle Vague and Free Cinema movements, Schlesinger also edited into his film brief montages attacking American consumerism.
This prompted Pauline Kael, the influential critic for The New Yorker, to dismiss Midnight Cowboy as a “cult film” that relied on “grotesque shock effects and the brutality of the hysterical, superficial satire of America” to make its point.
Roger Ebert of the Chicago Sun-Times was almost as caustic, calling Midnight Cowboy “a trendy, gimmick-ridden exercise in fashionable cinema” — although he and Kael both admired the performances by Voight and Hoffman.
Other media outlets, the Toronto Star among them, simply didn’t review the film. That’s likely because it had the mark of shame called the “X” rating, created in 1968 by the Motion Picture Association of America in an overhaul of its public warnings. (There was no “X” rating in Ontario, where Midnight Cowboy received an “R” designation, meaning access was restricted to people aged 18 and older.)
The “X” rating, no longer officially in use, was intended to put films of zero artistic quality — mostly pornography — into a cinematic “leper colony,” as Motion Picture Association of America president Jack Valenti said in an Associated Press interview. He was not alone in his dim view.
A Texas senator named Ralph Hall proposed a “dirty movie” tax of 50 cents be levied on Midnight Cowboy and other X-rated movies, as a penalty for their anti-social ways.
Many U.S. newspapers in 1969 refused to carry ads for X-rated films. The ABC television network faced a crisis when it realized the 1970 Oscars show would show clips from Mid- night Cowboy, since ABC had a policy against broadcasting X-rated material. Consumerism won the day — those ad dollars were too lucrative to ignore — and Midnight Cowboy went on to win three of its seven Oscar nominations: Best Picture, Best Director and Best Adapted Screenplay.
Despite all the hand-wringing by critics and defenders of public morality, Midnight Cowboy became an instant and massive hit with moviegoers, who responded to how it depicted life in the underclass — conveying a far greater sense of reality and empathy than did the fictional musical Oliver!, Oscar’s Best Picture winner the year before.
Among those flocking to Midnight Cowboy was Pierre Trudeau, then Canada’s prime minister, who strolled from Parliament Hill to a nearby theatre to catch an early evening screening. As federal justice minister two years earlier, he had introduced sweeping changes to the Criminal Code that decriminalized homosexuality and lifted the ban on contraceptives, among other things.
A front-page Star story reported that Trudeau had no bodyguard with him — these were very different times — but that he was mobbed by “a swarm of squealing young women” when he stopped for a sandwich and milkshake at a deli prior to the screening.
Review or no review, the Star couldn’t ignore that the movie had turned into a cultural phenomenon. A story by freelancer Ken Sherman reported that the film was breaking attendance records at the Odeon Hyland theatre on Yonge St. and that many in the crowds were young people seeking a more realistic type of movie.
“This is why Hollywood can no longer depend on its old formulas to bring in the buck,” Sherman wrote. “Movie audiences are demanding more. If movies like Midnight Cowboy are indicators, they are getting what they want.”
Another Star story from 1969 reported that more than 50 per cent of the moviegoers in cinema-mad Toronto were people under the age of 30 — otherwise known as the baby boomers. This demographic shift was considered so significant, that same year the Famous Players theatre chain created a “youth marketing research department” to attempt to cash in on it.
Even as caustic a critic as Kael finally had to admit that something was happening with Midnight Cowboy and she didn’t quite know what it was.
In a September 1969 New Yorker essay titled “The Bottom of the Pit,” she wrote that Midnight Cowboy and films like it had created a youthful new audience that wanted to connect with the challenges of modern life while also enjoying the escape from daily cares that movies offered. “The difference between the old audiences and the new ones is that the old audiences wanted immediate gratification and used to get restless and bored when a picture didn’t click along; these new pictures don’t all click along, yet the young audiences stay attentive. They’re eager to respond, to love — eager to feel.”
I watched Midnight Cowboy again this week. You can still feel it, 50 years later.