Rough, dirty, crude but fascinating

By Emerson Batdorff

It is almost incredible that a rough, dirty, crude series of events such as

ter, a man whose father was a bootblack and died of wax on the lung.

“We never could get his

those depicted in "The Mid-fingernails clean," Rizze rasps. “We had to bury him night Cowboy" would be so rasps. “We had to bury him with gloves on." endlessly interesting.

I kept asking myself, "Why am I so fascinated?” And I kept getting no answer. It can't be merely be cause the picture showed a couple of people communicating, at long last, with one another. I don't usually care if such people never get a sensible conversation going.

What interested me, it may have been, was the fresh, honest way in which the story is told and the vigorous, sensitive perform ances of Jon Voight in the title role and Dustin Hoffman as Ratso Rizzo, confirming the intimations of greatness that he showed in "The Graduate.”

In any event, there I sat almost spellbound. This is a grubby story of a young man who takes up the profession of stud and tries to hire out to wealthy ladies in New York, having had considerable success on a freelance basis in his native Texas.

Down 42nd Street he strides in his high boots, looking for rich women and finding only streetwalkers and homosexuals.

Ratso Rizzo, in the person of Dustin Hoffman, cens him into being his manager. Rizzo is a complex charac-

Rizzo is a cripple. He walks with braces and lashes out at the world in his impotent anger. If there is a prize for snarling, Hoffman gets it.

The Cowboy is essentially a nice man, although once he plans to kill Rizzo who as

"Midnight Cowboy"

If there ever was a treasure made of dung, this is it. How so sordid a batch of episodes can be so fascinating is not easily explained. Adults. 119 minutes.

his manager has sent him to a homosexual who preaches to him and tries to conduct services before a statue that lights up.

From flashbacks and dreams, we learn about the Cowboy. How his mother gave him to his grandmother. There he stands in his own dreams, a smiling but scared little kid. How his grandmother takes off all the time with various men and leaves a TV dinner for him.

How finally his grandmother dies without even letting him know as he complains voicelessly.

Drawn together by their loneliness, Ratso and the Cowboy live in Ratso's apartment in a condemned building without heat and in filth and squalor. Why are these scenes fascinating? I don't know.

Eventually Rizzo, who has been ailing all along from

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some terrible cough, is so bad he can no longer walk. He must get to Florida. The Cowboy takes up with a strange, quirky man who won't pay off so the Cowboy beats him to get his money. Then this 'peculiar pair, neither of them really Hellman, United Artists. queer, takes off for Florida and the mean fate that awaits them there.

Here is a picture that transcends its story. Direc-. tor John Schlesinger has wrought with a sure hand and more than a little intuition to make a movie that is

like none other.

Directed by John Schlesinger script by Waldo Salt from a novel by James Leo Herlihy, produced by Jerome Ruiso

Joe Buck Case

Mr. O'Daniel Shirley .Towny

Dustin Hoffman ....................... Jon Voight

Sylvia, Myles John McGiver Brenda Vaccaro Barnard Hughes