Midnight Cowboy

Based on a James Leo Herlihy novel, British director John Schlesinger's first American film dramatized the small hopes, dashed dreams, and unlikely friendship of two late '60s lost souls. Dreaming of an easy life as a fantasy cowboy stud, cheerful Texas rube Joe Buck (Jon Voight) heads to New York ...more

After earning notoriety as one of the first major studio films to be given an X rating, Midnight Cowboy made history as the first X-rated film to win an Oscar for Best Picture. A brutal depiction of broken dreams and lives asunder in the fetid backwash of the swinging Sixties, Cowboy shocked audiences with its squalid subject matter and signaled a trend towards films that explored lurid and personal material. Whereas the mere suggestion of a blow job in Cowboy was scandalous in 1969, the film ...more