"Best American film ever made" ....High praise indeed for a film made by John Schlesinger, an Englishman another of our great exports!❤

I agree that, it is a brilliant film, but Joe did kill that guy in the Hotel room for money so he and Ratso could go to Florida.

It wasn't ever clear to me , that Joe actually killed him or just badly beat him.

@@Joseph-wp7ru When Ratso said to Joe on the bus “You didn’t kill him, did you?” Because Joe had blood on his shirt. And Joe said he didn’t want to talk about it, I took that as meaning he had killed him. Would Joe escape the law in Florida? Who knows.

I am virtually shaking your hand right now, sir. Happy I stumbled onto your comment. 👊

During the war?

@@bittmanbobby sure was. About thirty guys, movie provided by the USO. A rare moment indeed.

@@robertmills2375 wow, that's an experience. Thank you for your service

That's what I think too.

yes thats the core of it

A buddy film.

I love the scene where Joe lays down on a cot the moment he gets inside Rico's place (almost collapses), because he's been homeless and has had nowhere to sleep. Rico then reaches up to close the blinds of a window to make the room darker and more comfortable for Joe to sleep. That small gesture of kindness is so indicative of the building bond between the two men.

John Schlesinger made several breakthrough movies in the 1960's and '70's that left me feeling and thinking differently after watching them Sunday Bloody Sunday and Darling are two of my other favorites.

were you really that lonely? it was the foundation for mind set change and it came!

I was about 15 when I first saw it. We snuck into the theater thru the rear exit after the lights went dark. I certainly did cry when Ratso died on the bus. It has left a mark on me for over 50 years.

I can watch this movie over and over movies ment something back then....👍👍👍👍👍👍😁

Same here. The protective arm around his pal protecting from the impersonal stares of the other passengers and knowing that he is once again all alone is truly heart wrenching.

The main controversy is Jon went full MAGA and full White Nationalist. His family disowned him and he is still kicking that can.

@@honkyjesuseternal That does not in any affect his performance in the movie and does not deserve to mentioned. I do not support him politically but do appreciate his acting skills. Your comment is misplaced and does not belong here! Enough said!

@Richard B That's your opinion and you know what they say about opinions!

@@jimbo33 First Rule of White Power Club? Never talk about white power, only acting "skills". I am sure you also like the acting of Marky Mark?

A masterpiece created by a BRITISH (and gay) director.

I saw it too at 14 on commercial tv. I kinda understood it.

@@chicovoylez3216 : The print they showed on commercial TV was an abomination that, if they were honest, they should have had to call something ELSE, because it was hardly the same movie. The censors had hacked out so much of the film that Judith Crist (I think it was her) said they should have called it the "11:25 Cowboy".

I think you understood it perfectly.

crazy. i think i was 14 also. born in '54.

Only X rated or now NC-17 film to win best picture it also won best director and best adapted screenplay

Thanks for sharing your story!

jj sounds like it touches u as deep as me

You're easy to please.

Yeah it blew me away at that age too.

this is one of those movies that you think will just be overly melodramatic, boring and drawn out. you think - how can they make a good film from this subject matter? every time i watch it i do so reluctantly only to be mesmerized again and again. night of the living dead and taxi driver were both rated X. the former chose to reject the rating and the latter had to de-saturate the blood scenes and eventually was re-rated as R. today, ALL these movies can be played on tv and the "f" word and other expletives are ridiculously allowed in PG movies. i saw an ad for a kids feature length cartoon that had a testicle joke in it. things have gone to the gutter BIG TIME in the last 50 years, that's for sure. people don't understand what an X-rating means. porn movies AREN'T X-rated. they're unrated. the XXX-rating was invented by the porn industry to distinguish their films from the mainstream X-rating. the way i remember it, the original rating system had 3 ratings - G, R and M. anyone could see a G. with an R rating a minor had to be accompanied by a parent or guardian. and a M rating stood for mature (adult) audiences only. M was later changed to X. and later a GP rating was added between G and R and later changed to PG. many state and local ordinances prevented M and X rated movies from being shown so a lot of movies in the late sixties and early 70's were recut to attain the more widely distributed R rating. or they showed different versions in different markets. or they chose to reject any rating and went "unrated" which was just a much a death sentence for a film as a X rating.

Mmm... the Duke was a brilliant name and True Grit was brilliant... These were impossible choices on too many levels.

John Wayne should have won an Oscar in the 40s or 50s like in The Searchers…..True Grit was a joke

My dad was also in the Army when he saw it for the first time. Then he showed it to me just before I left for basic in 1993. Welcome home brother

scene

Aww bless y', know just what you mean, breaks y' heart and so achingly beautiful and sad, just a perfect film

Great choices: both NYC and both gritty with reality.

And yet for everyone at that time it perfectly encapsulated Ritzo's "I refuse to be invisible!" character. We teens, even if we hadn't seen the movie (!), repeated that line ad nauseam. Fascinating how a well-timed improvisation is so often that tiny detail that communicates the whole better than the whole.

It's no accident that Hoffman did something noteworthy in every one of his films that I've seen.

Through the 1970s in New York City the directors would film from office windows or trucks or Van's, you can see passersby staring at actors.

Frankel's "Shooting Midnight Cowboy" debunks this a little. The cab scene was in Salt's screenplay six months before shooting began and Schlesinger and Hellman say the cab driver was crew, but the line was improvised by Hoffman.

@@nihilistmarmot Good info, thanks. Love to hear stories how all the scenic layers, improvised and scripted, came together.

If ever two men deserved the oscar it was Hoffman and Voight; I would have been pleased with either of them winning.....and they gave it to John Wayne. The category is BEST performance by an actor. "John Wayne for True Grit... gimme a break"

Agreed. James Leo Herlihy, the writer of the book, seems to have got barely any lasting recognition. I have read everything he ever wrote, and admire him a lot, but I think he wrote the saddest stories ever. Do not read him if you are feeling low.

Explain how he (Voight) goes from understanding the characters in this movie to supporting Trump? I know apples and oranges but still

@@jl3322 i would ask what those two things have to do with each other, but it would be a rhetorical question.

Haha! My parents took me to a movie once and something similar happened. My mother made me go sit in the lobby until the movie was over.

I don't remember her role

​@@thememo9941 She is Crazy Annie, the girl in the flashbacks, the only true love of Joe Buck. It's hard to remember how cute she was because she does not appear in extensive sequences, try to watch Sisters by Brian de Palma, she is the protagonist of the movie and absolutely gorgeous, really my kind of woman, great actress too. She acted also along with John Voight in another movie called The Revolutionary but I've never seen it because here in Italy it's not so easy to find but I'd like to watch it one day.

Get vaccinated Joe.

@@tracy2648 You know what.....I did it today, not kidding, second injection 15 of May ......I can keep walking

@@MrJoebuck74 LOL - nice.

Siskel & Ebert did a retrospective on it, and they said that it was time for everyone to acknowledge that it was a gay love story. Joe and Ratso were in love.

It's possible for two men to have a platonic relationship.

@@thesecondKZfaq : It's possible -- in the same way a man and a woman can have a "platonic" relationship. (I saw an interview with a woman who said, "If it's your third date, and he has not seen the interior of your boudoir yet, ONE OF YOU is gay!") It's just not common -- or some would say, likely. What Siskel & Ebert were saying was that, if you watch the development of their relationship, it grew into a kind of mutual dependence, respect, and LOVE. They mentioned specifically when Joe used his shirt tail to wipe the sweat off Ratzo's face after the party, and Ratso presses his face against Joe's bare stomach while he does it. And on the bus, when Joe changes Ratso's pants into the pair he had bought for him, they were like a loving and CARING couple. Ratso murmurs softly, "Thanks, Joe" -- his last words. And in the final shot, when he sits with his arm so protectively around his dead buddy's body, he looks like a devastated lover.

Amen to that, perfection

Not corny at all

And he was in Seinfeld as the boss of NBC

She was amazing ,a really special sexual chemistry .......wow,,,

I think people have a wrong idea about her cause she played "bitchy" character here and in Paul morrissey's Heat.

I never realized that she was the "Tootsa" from Midnight Cowboy.

cancel culture? this was 52 years ago.

There is ALWAYS those who want to eradicate other people and their existence... we just have an Internet now to demonstrate how little we care about the concept (let alone the reality) of FREEDOM of EXPRESSION!

@@TheGeoDaddy the internet IS freedom of expression. no one is stopping you from doing whatever the hell you want. your rights to express yourself are fully intact.

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