John Schlesinger's drama starring Jon Voight and Dustin Hoffman. The only X-rated film to win Best Picture. The New York-arrival narrative that helped end the Production Code era.
Texas to New York, 1968. Joe Buck, a young Texan dishwasher with vague aspirations to become a high-paid escort to wealthy New York women, packs his cowboy outfit into a single suitcase and rides the Greyhound bus to Manhattan. He arrives without contacts, money, or knowledge of how the New York escort economy actually operates. After several initial failures, he encounters Enrico 'Ratso' Rizzo — a small-time hustler with a serious limp and progressive tuberculosis — who becomes first his exploiter, then his friend, then his roommate in a condemned New York tenement.
The film tracks Joe and Ratso across approximately their first winter together. Ratso's tuberculosis progresses. Joe's escort work produces minimal income. Both men decline materially across the runtime. The film's closing sequence — Joe and Ratso travelling by Greyhound bus from New York to Florida, with Ratso dying during the journey — is among the most-emotionally-direct conclusions in late-1960s American cinema.
Midnight Cowboy was rated X by the MPAA on initial release — the new rating system's most-restrictive designation. The film won Best Picture at the 1970 Academy Awards. It is the only film with the X-rating designation to win the prize. The MPAA subsequently re-rated the film R in 1971 (without any content changes); the rating system's specific operational use of the X designation had, by the early 1970s, substantially shifted as the broader cultural reception of the rating evolved.
What's structurally significant is that the film's X-rating did not, in 1969, indicate substantially-explicit content by contemporary standards. The film's specific 'X-rated' elements involved depiction of homosexual encounters, a brief sequence of explicit drug use, and various other content that, by 1970s and 1980s commercial-cinema standards, was substantially less explicit than R-rated material became. The contemporary X-rating's actual operational meaning shifted across the decade following Midnight Cowboy's release; the rating became progressively associated with pornographic content, leaving Midnight Cowboy as a structural orphan — a Best Picture winner with a rating designation that subsequent commercial cinema essentially abandoned.
Jon Voight and Dustin Hoffman were both nominated for Best Actor at the 1970 Oscars — the first time two co-leads of the same film had been nominated against each other in the category since the early 1950s. They lost to John Wayne for True Grit. The dual-lead structure of Midnight Cowboy is, in some sense, the foundational text of the contemporary American buddy-film tradition (see our buddy films list for the broader tradition).
What makes the Voight-Hoffman pairing structurally distinctive is the specific contrast between their performances. Voight's Joe Buck is built on physical confidence undermined by emotional naivety — the Texan cowboy who genuinely believes his fantasy of New York escort work is operationally plausible. Hoffman's Ratso Rizzo is the inverse — physical decline (the famous limp, the progressive tuberculosis) combined with significantly-sharper street-survival intelligence. The two performances are, in some sense, two halves of a single dramatic argument about what survives the urban-economic conditions the film depicts.
Harry Nilsson's recording of Fred Neil's 'Everybody's Talkin' is, by general critical consensus, one of the most-recognised film-music pairings of late-1960s American cinema. The song was used across multiple Midnight Cowboy sequences, including the famous Greyhound bus departure from Texas and the broader Manhattan-arrival montage. The song won the Grammy for Record of the Year in 1970; the broader Nilsson album was a substantial commercial success.
The structural significance is that Midnight Cowboy, like The Graduate two years earlier, extended the model of using existing pop-folk recordings as film score rather than commissioning conventional orchestral work. The Nilsson recording was not originally composed for the film (Fred Neil had written the song in 1966; Nilsson recorded it in 1968 for an album); the production licensed the recording for film use. The pattern — pop-music recording as primary film-score material — has, across the subsequent five-plus decades, become standard practice. Midnight Cowboy is, alongside The Graduate, the structural foundation of contemporary needle-drop convention.