Midnight Cowboy (1969)

Directed by John Schlesinger. With Dustin Hoffman, Jon Voight, Sylvia Miles, John McGiver. A naive hustler travels from Texas to New York City to seek personal fortune, finding a new friend in the process.

Midnight Cowboy is a 1969 American buddy drama film. Based on the 1965 novel of the same name by James Leo Herlihy, the film was written by Waldo Salt, directed by John Schlesinger, and stars Jon Voight and Dustin Hoffman, with notable smaller roles

A con man and a Texas hustler try to survive on the tough streets of New York.

Midnight Cowboy (1969) is an ultra-realistic, adult film (shot on location) with sordid, downbeat and serious content, from British director John Schlesinger, who had previously directed the widely-acclaimed Darling (1965) - with a Best Actress win for Julie Christie.

Long after it was first released, "Midnight Cowboy" remains one of a handful of films that stay in our memory after the others have evaporated. Its love story between two drifters, the naïve Joe Buck and the street-savvy Ratso Rizzo, is a reference point for other films. Some of its moments, like the one where Ratso pounds on a nudging taxi and shouts, "I'm walking here!" have entered into the folklore.

One of the British New Wave’s most versatile directors, John Schlesinger came to New York in the late 1960s to make Midnight Cowboy, a picaresque story of friendship that captured a city in crisis and sparked a new era of Hollywood movies. Jon Voight delivers a career-making performance as Joe Buck, a wide-eyed hustler from Texas hoping to score big with wealthy city women; he finds a companion in Enrico “Ratso” Rizzo, an ailing swindler with a bum leg and a quixotic fantasy of escaping to Florida, played by Dustin Hoffman in a radical departure from his breakthrough in The Graduate. A critical and commercial success despite controversy over what the MPAA termed its “homosexual frame of reference,” Midnight Cowboy became the first X-rated film to receive the best picture Oscar, and decades on, its influence still reverberates through cinema.

Amazon.com: Midnight Cowboy: Dustin Hoffman, Jon Voight, Sylvia Miles, John McGiver, Brenda Vaccaro, Barnard Hughes, Ruth White, Jennifer Salt, Gilman Rankin, Gary Owens, T. Tom Marlow, George Eppersen, Adam Holender, John Schlesinger, Hugh A. Robertson, Jerome Hellman, Kenneth Utt, James Leo Herlihy, Waldo Salt: Movies & TV