Midnight Cowboy
Though “X-rated” means something different than it did in 1969, it’s still a badge of honor that Midnight Cowboy is the only film with that “for adults only” label to have won the Best Picture Oscar (Last Tango in Paris being the other great “X-rated” flick of the era). Midnight Cowboy is less shocking today; sexually, it’s not the graphic images that provide the punch it’s the intellectually complicated nature of the characters’ sexuality that still can move an audience. As a follow up to The Graduate, Dustin Hoffman proved he was more than a one-hit wonder and instead that he had a long and vital career ahead of him. It also deservedly made a star out of a little known pretty-boy actor named Jon Voight. And it also put British director John Schlesinger on the American A-list, a guy whose deep sensitivity and open homosexuality put him ahead of his time. The film’s theme song, “Everybody’s Talkin’” performed by Harry Nilsson, has become the iconic standard bearer for images of a lonely guy walking the streets of New York. Midnight Cowboy also is a fascinating peek at an era both for representation for how an artist works at a time when the movie studios were willing to take a chance on a grubby flick about a would-be male prostitute and his new BFF while also revealing a dark side to the Big Apple during what has sometimes been considered a golden age of self-expression.
Apparently screenwriter Waldo Salt (who was just emerging from two decades of being blacklisted) took a lot of liberties with James Leo Herlihy’s undergrou...
Thunderbolt and Lightfoot
Clint Eastwood hit the big time with his trio of Sergio Leone-directed genre-bending spaghetti westerns and then propelled to superstardom with the vigilante-cop Dirty Harry flicks. But even while playing the mega-star in commercial fare he still managed to make a number of unusual flicks you wouldn’t expect from an actor riding such a glorious wave. Films like the gothic, civil war, teen lust thriller The Beguiled or playing a sociopathic rapist gunmen in the western High Plains Drifter (both great flicks) matched by what could only be called a homoerotic, action, road, buddy-dramady called Thunderbolt and Lightfoot, it’s like Midnight Cowboy but with fast cars and guns. The other thing that makes the movie so unique in Eastwood’s filmography; it was the only time in the era that he was paired with a co-star with so much measurable talent. In his best performance after his debate in The Last Picture Show, Jeff Bridges gives a fascinating performance and shows why he would also eventually reach iconic status (he also got well-deserved Oscar nominations for both films). Thunderbolt and Lightfoot provides Eastwood fans with the expected muscle, but also an odd dose of heart.
After the syrupy theme song by Paul Williams called “Where Do I Go From Here?” Eastwood first appears on screen as a minister giving a sermon in a church. When an assassin tries to shoot him, clearing the church, he takes off on foot and is saved when an ecc...
