So this is the next one from the AFI podcast, and it’s been a while since we’ve watched an AFI movie, because ugh, this sounded terrible. Of course, it sounded terrible without me even knowing what it’s about. My belief going into the movie was that some country kid went to the big city and his life fell apart and he ended up having to do sex work to make ends meet.

Which turns out to be close, but ironically almost exactly backward: This dumb-ass Texas kid is going to New York City because he wants to be a sex worker. “The place is just full of old rich ladies” is his thinking, plus also this is the era when NYC was a degenerate hive of scum and villainy, so put two and two together and there you are. There are weird flashback sequences of him being brought up by his grandma that kinda lead you to think he’s got some psychosexual old lady stuff going on, so hey, try to be passionate about your work, I guess.

Well and so, he gets to New York and discovers that he actually has no idea how to market himself (and also perhaps, that old rich ladies don’t quite need to pay for sex as much as he might have imagined); his first encounter ends up with him lending money to a woman for taxi fare, and her being vocally upset when he hints around at the notion that he expected to be paid for that.

Eventually of course, after some more dead ends (including finding a would-be manager who ends up asking him to pray to a glowing Jesus) he makes the realization that the main way he’ll monetize himself is with a more masculine clientele, and you will probably not be shocked to learn that a movie from 1969 is, uh, pretty loaded with some hardcore homophobia. Like, I suspect this actually qualified as progressive for its time (it got an X rating despite being a very light R by modern standards; not sure if that’s for the core premise or the gay stuff, but I’d believe either), but also drops f-bombs of the slur variety on the regular.

So anyway, that’s not going well for him either, and he meets up with a quasi-friend, played with maximum annoying power by Dustin Hoffman, who I have come to hate in these AFI movies. This character, Rico Rizzo, is like 30% Rainman, 60% absurd Italian stereotype, and 30% bonus free-floating annoying. They move into a condemned building together, because sure, that’ll work out well.

So at this point, the cowboy’s career starts picking up. He randomly gets an invite to a party that everything describes as Warhol-esque, and I’ll be honest, I don’t really know what a Warhol party was like, but if it’s lots of really cool-seeming people and drugs and casual nudity and trippy light shows and music, then yeah, that’s what this is. (Apparently there are actual Warhol-scene people in this party scene, which is something that I only even know about because their names in the credits — “Viva,” “Ultra Violet” — seemed too cool to be real, and I looked it up.) One of the ladies wants to sleep with him, and is rich enough that paying $20 for that seems like a fun lark, so ka-ching, he’s got himself a client.

And after a night that eventually goes well (after a bit of impotence and a game of something called “Scribbage,” which was apparently so common then as to need no explanation, but which I’ve never seen in my life — it’s a word game played with letter dice?), she recommends him to a friend of hers, and hey, now he’s got a customer base building up! Is the movie going to take a happy turn to success?

Haha no. Instead, Rizzo is starting to get a terrible cough, and their no-heat condemned building seems not really suited for winter living (plus also the city is about to tear it down). Rizzo’s always wanted to go to Miami, and the cowboy wants to make that happen for him, so he commits some light battery and robbery to get the money for a bus ticket, and they start riding down to Miami. On the way, the cowboy reflects that maybe regular work is actually easier and more lucrative than sex work and he’ll just get a job in Florida. Rizzo keeps coughing, and then dies. The movie ends with the cowboy holding his friend’s dead body on a bus in Florida, which you have to admit is really just piling awfulness on top of awfulness.

It’s a weird movie. Like, it never really explains what’s up with the cowboy’s backstory. There’s clearly some trauma in it, but it’s told in these trippy dream-like flashbacks that are non-linear and also clearly are mixing reality with fantasy — like someone idly thinking back about events, and imagining them differently — so it’s hard to tell what actually did or didn’t happen. (There’s an implication that he’s gay, but the movie mostly shies away from exploring that too hard.) Those dreamy sequences combined with the trippy party make it feel a bit Lynchian, but then most of the rest of it is actually just this brutal cavalcade of misery.

I can’t say that I liked the movie as such, but… y’know, it was actually interesting. The misery doesn’t get too overwhelming (or at least I didn’t think so; my wife thought it was grim af), largely because the protagonist is so stupid and cheery all the time — he’s got a kind of holy innocent vibe going, as much as you can be a holy innocent when your goal is to get paid to have sex with old ladies.

Plus, there’s just a sense in which this is an interesting time capsule of a place that’s now lost. Ebert, in his 1994 re-review of it, says:

The characters and their immediate world are absolutely right, then. But the director, John Schlesinger, was not willing to tell their story with the simplicity I think it required. He took those two magnificent performances and dropped them into a trendy, gimmick-ridden exercise in fashionable cinema. The ghost of the Swinging Sixties haunts “Midnight Cowboy,” and robs it of the timelessness it should possess.

I’m a lot less positive about the performances (Jon Voight’s cowboy is great, but fuck Dustin Hoffman so hard), but also I think Ebert was writing that at precisely the wrong time, when a historical moment just seemed dated and silly rather than actually passed into history. For him then, a movie about 1969 felt like a movie about the mid-’90s would feel now — good for some cheesy fun (as indeed we’ve been having with those ‘90s trash movies we’ve been watching), but something that would detract from a serious quality movie if the period details were foregrounded too heavily.

But another quarter century later, and now NYC in the ’60s is an era that’s completely lost and unknowable directly, and things like this are the closest we might have to a portrait of this time and place, and that counts for something in my book.

So yeah, this is a grim sleazy movie with at least one annoying main character, and it’s full of homophobia and general unpleasantness, but despite all that, I think there’s something here worth watching. Lightly recommended.