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Bookmark this pageMidnight Cowboy (1969)
Director: John Schlesinger
Movie review
From Time Out Film Guide
Outrageously overrated at the cynical end of the Swinging Sixties, when the seedy New York milieu in which the pathetic buddy-buddy story takes place was thought to be truthfully depicted. Instead, as Voight's likeably dumb Texan hick hustler teams up with limping guttersnipe Hoffman in an effort to make enough money from the wealthy women of New York to fulfil dreams of living in sunny Florida, the film indulges in bland satire, fashionable flashiness, and a sodden sentimentality that never admits either to its homosexual elements or to the basic misogyny of its stance. Add to that a glamorisation of poverty and an ending that makes Love Story seem restrained, and you have a fairly characteristic example of Schlesinger's shallow talent. (From a novel by James Leo Herlihy.Author: GA
User reviews of this film
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- yduric said...
- Posted on Sep 01 2007 02:36 I will be even harder than TimeOut towards this film: the fact that it was so praised and even oscarized is beyond my belief: first of all, the film is caricatural, exploiting the equation: big city=cruelty and road to perdition to such an extreme that it achieves quite the opposite: all the supposedly 'bad' characters that our 'poor little heroes' encounter are in fact far more likeable than them. Second, the suggestion that New York is responsible for their condition never rings true: I had quite the oppossite feeling, that they thought the world owed them everything and that this was an excuse for any kind of hatable behaviour. And with all this, are we supposed to feel sympathy for two characters who are as wretched morally as materially? It should be rememebered that Joe Buck even MURDERS the old man that invited him to his hotel room in order to get his money!!! (the excuse: he must put his buddy on a bus to Florida!!!) No, I do not buy it, this is only a display of cheap and self-indulgent miserabilism that no 'outcast' condition will ever justify.
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Cast & crew
Director: John Schlesinger
Producer: Jerome Hellman
Cast: Jon Voight, Dustin Hoffman, Sylvia Miles, Brenda Vaccaro, John McGiver, Barnard Hughes, Ruth White, Jennifer Salt, Gil Rankin, Bob Balaban, Viva full cast
Duration: 113 mins
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