Midnight Cowboy: Music From The Motion Picture

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In a 25th anniversary retrospective in 1994, Owen Gleiberman of Entertainment Weekly wrote: " Midnight Cowboy 's peep-show vision of Manhattan lowlife may no longer be shocking, but what is shocking, in 1994, is to see a major studio film linger this lovingly on characters who have nothing to offer the audience but their own lost souls. There he meets a low-life named Ratso Rizzo, played by Dustin Hoffman, and a friendship of necessity is ultimately reached between them. The film stars Dustin Hoffman and Jon Voight, with supporting roles played by Sylvia Miles, John McGiver, Brenda Vaccaro, Bob Balaban, Jennifer Salt, and Barnard Hughes. Voight is brilliant as the pie-eyed small-town cowboy moving to the big city to be a hustler, but without the rich and dark turn from Hoffman, this Oscar winning film would be lacking. At the end of the film there is redemption of sorts for Buck, even though he beats a man to death, but not for the seriously ill Ratso, who dies on the bus journey to Florida where the two had planned to make a new life for themselves.

After leaving the army, Barry took a jazz composing course and went on to work as an arranger for the Jack Parnell and Ted Heath Orchestras. Set in New York City, Midnight Cowboy depicts the unlikely friendship between two hustlers: naïve sex worker Joe Buck (Voight), and ailing con man Rico Rizzo (Hoffman), referred to as "Ratso". Joe Buck was the dumb tall Cowboy from Texas with an idea to hustle older ladies out of their money while Ratzo Rizzo was the rat like cheap grifter from the Big Apple. Rico tells Joe his father was an illiterate Italian immigrant shoeshiner whose job yielded a bad back and lung damage from inhaling shoe polish.I go on and on about John Schlesinger's directorial style, but it's mostly subtle, and when it really kicks up, it often shakes up the momentum of the film through unevenness and overstylization, but it's hard to not praise Schlesinger's use of Hugh A.

Young Texan Joe Buck quits his dishwashing job and heads by bus to New York City in cowboy attire to become a male prostitute. It is the perfect example of a composer managing to capture pictures in sound; it’s music in the key of savannah.

The 1969 flick stars Jon Voight as Joe Buck, a country bumpkin trying to make his way as a Texas gigolo in the big, bad world of New York City. Teary-eyed, Joe sits with his arm around his dead friend as the bus drives on past rows of Floridian palm trees.

In the film, Joe stays at the Hotel Claridge, at the southeast corner of Broadway and West 44th Street in Midtown Manhattan. Nilsson's rendition of "Everybody's Talkin'" is poignant and brilliant, the film is often caught with snippets of the tune blowing here and there.

Some critics have read a homosexual theme into the friendship between Jon Voight's Joe Buck and Dustin Hoffman's Ratso, but the simple fact is that many if not most of the strongest friendships are based on things far more precious than sex, in this case the relationship was largely symbiotic. Joe spends his days wandering the city listening to his Zenith portable radio and sitting in his hotel room. Midnight Cowboy holds an 89% approval rating on online review aggregator Rotten Tomatoes as of 2022, with an average rating of 8.