Midnight Cowboy (1969) is a bruising New York drama that turns the American dream inside out, and it still hits like cold air in the lungs.
Have you ever watched a film that feels like it’s looking straight back at you, daring you not to flinch? John Schlesinger’s Midnight Cowboy (1969) is an American drama released in 1969, adapted by Waldo Salt from James Leo Herlihy’s novel, and it became an instant cultural landmark. It matters because it made mainstream audiences sit with poverty, sex work, and male loneliness without offering a tidy moral escape route.
What stays with me is the raw tenderness that keeps peeking through the grit. The film isn’t “nice,” but it is deeply human.
It also deserves a place on my “101 must-watch films” list on probinism.com, because it’s one of those movies that changes how you read a city on screen.
And yes, it’s famously the only X-rated film to win the Oscar for Best Picture, a fact that still feels slightly unreal.
I’m writing this from the perspective of someone who values cinema when it refuses to flatter us. Midnight Cowboy (1969) doesn’t ask you to “like” Joe Buck or Ratso Rizzo, but it quietly insists you recognize them. According to Encyclopaedia Britannica, the film follows the “desperate friendship” of two broken drifters, and that phrase is perfect because friendship here is survival, not sentiment. If you care about film history, it’s a New Hollywood-era jolt that proved mainstream American cinema could stare into darkness and still be art.
It runs 113 minutes and first opened in New York on May 25, 1969. The commonly cited budget is about $3.2 million, and the commonly cited box office total is about $44.8 million.
So let me take you into the world that Midnight Cowboy (1969) builds—one harsh step at a time.
Background
Midnight Cowboy (1969) arrives with the confidence of a studio film and the soul of something closer to a street confession.
Schlesinger was a British director making his first Hollywood film, yet he captured a particular late-60s Manhattan mood with startling intimacy. The story came from James Leo Herlihy’s 1965 novel, shaped for the screen by Waldo Salt into something spare, jagged, and memorable. The central setup is simple: a naive Texan and a sickly small-time con man collide, then cling to each other because nobody else will.
That simplicity is deceptive, because the movie keeps cutting into memory, fantasy, and shame. The flashbacks don’t feel like exposition so much as emotional shrapnel.
The setting matters: this is New York City not as postcard, but as pressure.
The film’s reputation is inseparable from its rating history, because it was released with an X rating and later re-rated R.
It also has the kind of institutional recognition that signals lasting importance. It won Academy Awards for Best Picture, Best Director, and Best Adapted Screenplay, and (per the Library of Congress framing) it’s remembered as a story of a Texas “cowboy” and Ratso Rizzo enduring a long, hard winter in the city’s underbelly.
In 1994, it was selected for preservation in the US National Film Registry, which is basically America saying: this isn’t just entertainment, it’s cultural record. When I read that, I don’t think of prestige—I think of responsibility, because the film preserves faces and streets that power would prefer you forget.
And that’s why Midnight Cowboy (1969) still feels morally awake.
If you want a strong companion piece after this, the Criterion Collection essays are a smart next stop for context and interpretation.
Now, let’s walk through the full plot of Midnight Cowboy (1969), spoilers and all, including what that ending is really doing to you.
Midnight Cowboy (1969) Key facts
- Title: Midnight Cowboy
- Type/Genre: American dramatic film
- Release year: 1969
- Director: John Schlesinger
- Based on: 1965 novel Midnight Cowboy by James Leo Herlihy
- Screenplay: Waldo Salt
- Studio: Jerome Hellman Productions
- Music: John Barry (uncredited)
- Why it’s famous: Became the only X-rated film to win the Academy Award for Best Picture (rating later changed to R)
- Awards (high level): Won five BAFTA Awards (including Best Picture) and three Academy Awards; selected for preservation in the National Film Registry (1994)
- Oscar wins (per Britannica list): Best Picture, Best Director, Best Writing (Screenplay)
Midnight Cowboy cast
| Actor as Character | Description (why they matter) |
|---|---|
| Jon Voight as Joe Buck | The Texas drifter who arrives in NYC dreaming of making money as a “cowboy” hustler—his illusions collapse as survival gets brutal. |
| Dustin Hoffman as Ratso Rizzo | The seedy, sickly street operator who becomes Joe’s closest companion and “manager,” driving the film’s friendship-and-survival core. |
| Sylvia Miles as Cass | The first big reality check in NYC—Joe expects a payday, but the encounter flips and he ends up paying her. |
| Brenda Vaccaro as Shirley | The socialite who pays Joe and briefly makes the “hustle” feel possible—until Ratso’s condition worsens. |
| John McGiver as Mr. O’Daniel | The false “break” Ratso promises—he’s a religious fanatic seeking sex, and the encounter underlines Joe’s vulnerability and naïveté. |
| Ruth White as Sally Buck | Joe’s grandmother in flashbacks—key to understanding his damaged past and the film’s sense of exploitation and abandonment. |
| Jennifer Salt as Annie | Joe’s former girlfriend in flashbacks—adds emotional context to his longing and broken self-image. |
| Bob Balaban as the young man in the movie theater | A bleak turning point: Joe agrees to a sexual act for money, but there’s no payment—showing how desperate things have become. |
| Barnard Hughes as the man Joe sells his services to | The moment Joe crosses into violence to fund escape—he attacks and robs the man to pay for the Miami trip. |
Midnight Cowboy Plot
Joe Buck begins as an idea more than a person: a young Texan dressing as a cowboy like it’s armor, then leaving home on a bus because he believes New York will pay him for being handsome.
He arrives in Manhattan with a fantasy of rich women, easy cash, and a kind of glamorous independence. The city answers him with indifference, then humiliation, then hunger. Almost immediately, Midnight Cowboy (1969) makes a brutal point: wanting something badly does not make you entitled to it.
Joe’s first “success” is quietly catastrophic because it proves how little he understands the rules. He sleeps with Cass in her Park Avenue apartment, tries to collect payment, and realizes too late that she is not his customer in the way he imagined.
Instead of getting paid, Joe gives her money, which is the film’s first clear inversion of his dream.
Then he meets Rico “Ratso” Rizzo, limping, hustling, and instantly readable as someone who has learned how to survive by lying faster than the world can correct him.
Ratso offers Joe an “introduction” to a pimp for $20, and Joe—still operating like a tourist—pays. The supposed pimp turns out to be Mr O’Daniel, a religious fanatic who is also predatory in his own way, and the whole encounter leaves Joe rattled and furious. One of the film’s sharpest choices is that it doesn’t romanticize innocence; Joe’s naivety isn’t pure, it’s simply uninformed.
So when he runs, it’s not heroic flight, it’s panic at realizing he walked into a trap that he didn’t even know existed.
Money disappears quickly, because Joe’s confidence is not a business plan. The hotel locks him out and impounds his belongings, and suddenly his cowboy costume stops reading as swagger and starts reading as a joke.
In desperation, he accepts oral sex from a young man in a movie theater, but the man can’t pay, so Joe threatens him and then lets him go.
Even here, Midnight Cowboy (1969) refuses easy labeling because Joe is both victim and aggressor in the same breath. He is being exploited, and he is also capable of cruelty when his pride is cornered.
When Joe runs into Ratso again, rage finally finds its target, but Ratso is slippery and oddly persuasive.
He calms Joe down, invites him to share a condemned apartment squat, and proposes a “business relationship” where Ratso becomes the manager and Joe becomes the product. Ratso insists on being called “Rico,” not “Ratso,” and Joe refuses at first, partly out of spite and partly out of a stubborn need to keep the power of naming. Their partnership begins with resentment, but it slowly mutates into something closer to family, because survival creates its own intimacy.
They’re poor in a way that isn’t poetic. They steal food, fail to land paying clients, and try small humiliations that add up: pawning Joe’s radio, selling Joe’s blood, and shivering through winter with no heat while Ratso’s cough keeps getting worse.
The film keeps slicing into Joe’s past, and these flashbacks feel less like “story” and more like damage leaking through. We see his grandmother raising him after his mother abandons him, and we see fragmented memories of Annie, a girlfriend whose presence is tied to trauma and confusion.
In hazy pieces, the film reveals a rape by a cowboy gang, and the flashbacks don’t clarify so much as accuse.
This is where Midnight Cowboy (1969) deepens, because it suggests Joe didn’t just arrive in New York naive—he arrived wounded. His cowboy outfit becomes more than costume; it becomes a defense against the feeling that he was once powerless and violated, and that powerlessness might still define him.
Ratso, in a different key, carries his own inheritance: illness, poverty, and a father whose labor destroyed his body. Their friendship, then, isn’t cute contrast, it’s mutual recognition between two men who suspect the world will never be gentle with them.
Ratso dreams of Miami the way Joe once dreamed of New York.
He imagines warmth, ease, and dignity, and the film literalizes that dream in fantasy sequences where the two of them frolic on a beach and get pampered at a resort.
Those fantasies matter because they show what Ratso really wants: not luxury, but relief. And they also show what Joe is slowly learning: desire is often just a request for safety disguised as ambition.
The city keeps testing their bond with small humiliations that feel unbearable. Ratso tries to attract clients by shining Joe’s cowboy boots at a stand, but police show up, sit down, and casually press their dirty footwear into the frame like a warning.
It’s a simple scene, but it lands like a thesis: in this world, authority can ruin you without even raising its voice.
A turning point arrives in a diner when a Warhol-like filmmaker and an extrovert artist invite Joe and Ratso to a “happening.” They go, and you can almost feel them trying to pass as people who belong in a room that was not built for them. Ratso’s poor health and hygiene draw contempt, Joe gets high, and the night slips into hallucinatory disorientation.
The party isn’t liberation; it’s a mirror that shows them how visible their poverty is. And because the film is cruelly honest, even the counterculture space has hierarchies, and Joe and Ratso are still near the bottom.
Joe leaves with Shirley, a socialite who pays him $20 just to spend the night. He can’t perform sexually at first, and the film refuses to play this for easy comedy because his impotence feels tied to fear, shame, and confusion about what he is “supposed” to be.
They play a word game, and her teasing suggestion that he may be gay flips a switch, after which he can perform.
It’s a complicated moment, and Midnight Cowboy (1969) doesn’t reduce it to a simple statement about sexuality. It’s more like the film is showing how Joe’s identity is being forced into the open under pressure, and how desire doesn’t always follow the story a person tells about himself.
The next morning, Shirley sets Joe up with a female friend, and for a brief second it looks like his hustling career might actually become sustainable.
Then he returns home to find Ratso feverish and collapsing, and suddenly money becomes a medical emergency. Ratso refuses help and begs Joe to get him on a bus to Florida, because Miami isn’t just a dream now, it’s a last request.
This is where the film tightens its grip: Joe could walk away, but he doesn’t, because somewhere along the way the “business relationship” turned into devotion. Joe’s love isn’t sentimental, but it’s real, and it’s expressed the only way he knows how—by doing something practical and costly.
To get cash fast, Joe picks up an effeminate middle-aged man in an arcade and follows him to a hotel room. Joe demands money, the man refuses to give more than $10, and Joe snaps into violence.
He beats and robs the man, and the film strongly implies he smothers him, which is a moral point-of-no-return for Joe.
This is the darkest irony in Midnight Cowboy (1969): Joe came to New York to sell sex and ended up selling pieces of his conscience instead.
He wanted to be a “cowboy” as myth—free, admired, in control—and the city turns him into something closer to a predator, which is exactly what he thought he was escaping.
If you’re tempted to judge him from a safe distance, the film blocks that comfort by reminding you how desperation works: it narrows your world until brutality feels like a tool. That doesn’t excuse what Joe does, but it explains the emotional mechanics that lead him there. And in a film this bleak, explanation is the closest thing to mercy anyone gets.
With the stolen money, Joe buys two bus tickets to Florida. Ratso repeats his request—call me “Rico,” not “Ratso”—and Joe finally honors it, which lands like an apology.
On the bus ride, Ratso’s body fails in humiliating detail, including urinary incontinence, and the film refuses to look away.
Then comes the symbolic shedding. At a rest stop, Joe buys new clothing for both of them and discards his cowboy outfit and boots, as if he’s finally admitting that the costume never saved him.
This is not a “makeover” scene; it’s a quiet funeral for the boy who believed New York would reward his performance of masculinity.
Back on the bus, Joe talks about getting a regular job in Miami, about an easier way to live, about the possibility of a future that doesn’t involve hustling. The tragedy is that Joe is speaking like someone who has just learned how to grow up, but he is learning it too late for the person he loves.
Ratso doesn’t respond, and Joe realizes he has died right beside him. A bus driver tells Joe to close Ratso’s eyelids, and they keep driving toward palm trees and sunlight like the universe is indifferent to timing.
The ending devastates because it’s both tender and brutally practical: Joe holds his dead friend upright with his arm around him, crying quietly, while life continues forward.
So what does the ending of Midnight Cowboy (1969) mean beyond sadness? It means Joe’s dream finally dies—and something better is born in him, which is love without performance, love without profit, love that costs him everything and still feels necessary.
It’s a bleak ending, but it’s also the film’s strangest kind of hope: Joe is no longer pretending he’s invulnerable.
Midnight Cowboy Analysis
Midnight Cowboy (1969) doesn’t just tell a story—it traps you inside a feeling, and then watches what you do with it.
John Schlesinger directs Midnight Cowboy (1969) with a kind of documentary patience, letting embarrassment and silence do as much work as dialogue.
The cinematography by Adam Holender makes New York look both hyperreal and nightmare-soft, as if the city is always half memory and half threat. I also love how the camera often stays close enough to make you feel the characters’ breath, but wide enough to show how small they are against the streets.
Jon Voight gives Joe Buck a fragile pride that keeps cracking, and the cracks are where the truth lives. Dustin Hoffman’s Ratso is a masterpiece of physical storytelling—every limp, cough, and flare of temper feels like a survival technique.
The script by Waldo Salt turns humiliation into momentum, which is why the pacing feels cruelly inevitable rather than merely “slow.”
Musically, Midnight Cowboy (1969) is haunted by John Barry’s score and by “Everybody’s Talkin’,” which the film uses like a dream you can’t stop replaying.
Theme-wise, Midnight Cowboy (1969) is a film about the American dream as a con—one you can fall for even when you know it’s a lie.
It’s also about masculinity as performance, where Joe’s cowboy costume isn’t confidence so much as a shield he hopes will keep his past from touching him. Beneath that, the film keeps circling loneliness, especially the kind that forms in big cities where you can be surrounded and still unseen.
Scholars have read the film as speaking to late-1960s cultural tensions (including shifts around sexuality and national identity), and that context makes its rawness feel less random and more historically charged. And emotionally, the most radical thing Midnight Cowboy (1969) does is treat male tenderness as real, not a punchline, even when the world around it stays brutal. (JSTOR)
If you love character-driven New Hollywood grit, Midnight Cowboy (1969) sits in the same emotional neighbourhood as films like The Graduate in its era-defining unease, but it’s harsher and more intimate in the way it refuses escape.
What sets it apart, for me, is that the “buddy” bond isn’t a genre comfort—it’s a last rope between two men falling.
And yes, it’s one of those films where the craft is so tight that even a single sidewalk moment can feel like a thesis statement.
Audience appeal, reception, and awards
Midnight Cowboy (1969) is best suited for adults who can handle bleak realism, sexual content, and a story that refuses neat moral packaging.
According to Rotten Tomatoes, Midnight Cowboy (1969) sits at 89% on the Tomatometer (114 reviews) and 88% on the Popcornmeter (25,000+ ratings), which tells you it’s both canonised and still watchable for modern audiences.
The critics’ consensus there calls it “gritty” and “unrelentingly bleak,” and that bluntness is exactly the point—you don’t “enjoy” it so much as absorb it. If you’re a casual viewer wanting comfort, you might struggle, but if you’re a cinephile chasing emotional honesty, Midnight Cowboy (1969) rewards attention.
Awards-wise, the official Oscars site notes Midnight Cowboy won Best Picture, Best Director (Schlesinger), and Writing—screenplay based on material from another medium (Waldo Salt) at the 42nd Academy Awards.
It was also preserved by the Library of Congress as part of the National Film Registry, and AFI has included it in its “100 Years…100 Movies” list (with the film appearing at #36 in 1998 and #43 in 2007).
If you’re asking, “Is Midnight Cowboy (1969) worth watching today?”, my honest answer is yes—provided you want a film that doesn’t protect you from discomfort.
It’s also a film that speaks directly to people who feel out of place in the world they were told would welcome them.
What I keep returning to, years after first seeing Midnight Cowboy (1969), is how modern it feels in its emotional economics: who gets care, who gets dignity, and what people do when they’re priced out of both.
Joe Buck arrives thinking his body is a ticket, which is painfully close to how many people now approach big cities and big platforms—sell a version of yourself, brand it, hustle it, and pray the algorithm (or the rich woman, or the next gig) notices.
Ratso Rizzo is the film’s blunt reminder that “hustle culture” has always had a body count, just usually a slow one: illness untreated, cold endured, shame swallowed, and finally the quiet collapse that no one wants to look at.
The ending becomes a lesson about what actually saves a person, because it isn’t ambition or reinvention or a new postcode—it’s the moment Joe stops performing and starts caring, even when caring costs him; that’s the film’s most uncomfortable miracle.
And if there’s a message I feel in my bones today, it’s that a society can measure its cruelty by how normal it becomes to step around suffering as if it’s street trash, which is exactly what Midnight Cowboy (1969) forces you to notice.
In 2025, the film’s ugliest scenes also feel like warnings about isolation: once you’re alone long enough, you start believing you deserve it, and that belief makes you easier to exploit.
That’s why the Joe–Ratso friendship matters so much to me—because it suggests dignity can be rebuilt in small, stubborn acts of loyalty, not in grand “success” stories.
Pros and cons
Here’s what I think Midnight Cowboy (1969) does brilliantly—and where it can be challenging.
Pros: • stunning, unglamorous New York visuals • gripping central performances • emotionally fearless ending • iconic music choices and mournful score;
Cons: • slow pacing in parts • intentionally bleak tone that can feel punishing • some viewers may find its sexuality and violence confronting.
Conclusion
Midnight Cowboy (1969) remains one of the most emotionally honest films about poverty, friendship, and the American dream’s underside that mainstream cinema has ever allowed itself to make.
I recommend it most to viewers who want cinema that leaves a mark—students of film history, New Hollywood lovers, and anyone interested in how a city can shape (and break) identity.
If you only know it through pop-culture echoes, watching it properly is a reminder that the “classic” label can still mean “dangerous.” It’s also exactly why I flag it as one of the 101 must-watch films on probinism.com: not because it’s pleasant, but because it’s necessary.
Rating: 4.5/5.
