The 1969 film has become famous for being ahead of its time, but it may be most revealing as an artifact of its time—a turning point in the history of movies.
remains a bleak and troubling work of novelistic and cinematic invention, floating far above most other books and films of its era.” Frankel’s book is generous with context, but it is, essentially, the biography of a movie. He has also written books on “The Searchers” and “High Noon.” These have the same interest that biographies of famous people do: they show us the “what if”s and the “but for”s hiding in the backstory of the finished product.
What most people remember from the movie, after Hoffman’s and Voight’s performances, is Harry Nilsson singing “Everybody’s Talkin’.” Frankel says that Nilsson actually disliked the song, and had recorded it on one of his albums only as a favor to his producer. What might have been: Leonard Cohen pitched “Bird on the Wire” by singing it to Schlesinger over the phone, and Bob Dylan wrote a song for the movie, probably “Lay Lady Lay,” but it didn’t make the cut, because he submitted it too late.
Frankel thinks that the association is important. He sees the movie in the context of “the rise of openly gay writers and gay liberation.” And Mark Harris, in the liner notes for the Criterion DVD, says that “Midnight Cowboy” is, “if not a gay movie, a movie that at least helped to make the notion of a gay movie possible.” They’re right, but it’s a tricky case to make.
There are few gay characters with speaking roles in the movie. One is a sad-sack teen-ager, played by Bob Balaban, who goes down on an obviously grossed out Joe in a Times Square movie house and afterward confesses he has no money to pay him. Another is a self-hating middle-aged man who takes Joe to his hotel room and gets beaten up, which excites him.
Whatever effect “Midnight Cowboy” might have had on attitudes toward homosexuality, one thing it had a negative effect on was attitudes toward New York City. The movie was shot on location, in Texas and New York. The cinematographer was a serendipitous discovery, too. He was a twenty-nine-year-old Pole named Adam Holender, recommended by Roman Polanski. It was his first feature film.
What happened? The decline of Forty-second Street had something to do with changes in the movie industry and in Broadway theatre . But Traub thinks a crucial factor was the relaxation of legal restrictions on pornography and sex work.
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