American Cinematographer - May 2006 - 14

Cowboy to the screen, they tapped a
legendary roster of talent that
included formerly blacklisted screen¬

and left-channel sound effects.
The DVD's

now

matographer Adam Holender (Panic in
Needle Park, Blue in the Face). Holender
had established a strong reputation in

pointless gallery of trailers for other
MGM/Sony special editions, but no
trailer for Midnight Cowboy. There is
also a series of production stills and,
tucked into the gatefold jacket, eight
postcards featuring images from the
film. (Criterion recently began adding
postcards to its DVDs - is this a new
industry trend?) There are also three

-

seedy Manhattan, Joe's

Texas and Ratso's Florida

1.85:1 (16x9 Enhanced)
Dolby Digital 5.1, Monaural

MGM Elome Video, $29.99
Almost 40 years

before Brokeback Mountain, a similar degree of
controversy surrounded the release of
Midnight Cowboy, perhaps the original
"gay cowboy movie." From its stark
opening shot of a dilapidated drive-in
movie screen to the final shot of tropical
bliss juxtaposed over a doomed couple,
John Schlesinger's drama, which won
the Oscar for Best Picture, remains a
unique and groundbreaking film.
Thrown together by chance in
Manhattan's seedy Times Square, a
just-off-the-bus Texas hustler, Joe Buck
(Jon Voight), and a crippled petty thief
from the Bronx, Enrico "Ratso" Rizzo

(Dustin Hoffman), form an unlikely pair.
Savvy Ratso tries to assist Joe in his
quest to be the ultimate ladies' man,
seeing a way for both of them to bene¬
fit. The two men eventually commit to
each other as they travel through the
darker side of Manhattan, finding only
failure, and they begin to nurture the
hope of escaping to Florida, where the
tubercular Ratso
air" and Joe

can

can

breathe "better

attend to

lonely

matrons.

When

Schlesinger and producer

Jerome Heilman decided to commit
James Leo

Herlihy's novel Midnight

commen¬

tary track by Heilman and a rather

worlds

Collector's Edition

supplements include

anecdotal and informative

writer Waldo Salt and future ASC cine¬

the commercial world but had yet to
shoot a feature. In capturing the film's

Midnight Cowboy (1969)

an

-

he faced

several

challenges. He and Schlesinger
felt the urban sequences should be grim
and unpleasant, so the cinematographer
underexposed his negative, creating a
cool, grainy image that conveys the tone
perfectly. For Joe's flashbacks of Texas
and Ratso's many fantasies of Florida,
Holender overexposed by as much as 2
stops to create a washed-out halo
effect, heightening the dramatic
contrast between those sequences and
the urban material.

MGM Home Video's

recently
Midnight Cowboy does
an admirable job of translating Holender's work to the small screen. Although
released DVD of

there have been several home-video

incarnations of the

picture, including

an
excellent Criterion laserdisc in 1992 and
an

even

more

impressive

MGM

short documentaries: the 30-minute

"After

Midnight" gathers Heilman,

Holender, Hoffman, Voight and others
comment on their experiences
making the film; and two 10-minute
featurettes, "Controversy and Acclaim"
and "Celebrating Schlesinger," feature
to

interviews with other filmmakers and
actors. Each

segment offers interesting
details, but in his interviews, Heilman
repeats much of the information he
shares in the commentary track. It is

regrettable that neither MGM's excel¬
lent documentary from the 1994
laserdisc, which featured extensive
interviews with the late

Schlesinger,
track

the director's commentary
from the Criterion laserdisc
nor

was

laserdisc (which benefited from the
studio's restoration of the picture) in

included in this

1994, the only DVD incarnation prior to

story of Joe and Ratso has been given a
solid treatment in this DVD, which is

this

was

a

single-platter, bare-bones

edition released in 1999. MGM rectifies
the situation with this

new

DVD transfer,

which is

certainly an improvement over
previous one. Holender's work
seems well represented, with much of
the image strikingly clear and clean.
the

There

are

deliberate instances of visible

grain that appear correct in the transfer,
which is generally very accurate. The
sound is available in a Dolby Digital 5.1
mix or the original monaural track. Both
are fine, and the 5.1 mix only enhances
the music and some minor frontal right-

package.

Nevertheless, the now-classic

bound to

help the film find a new
Sylvia Miles notes
in one of the interviews, "Young people
today, new audiences, react just as
the original audiences did." Time
hasn't diminished Midnight Cowboy's
dramatic impact, and the film continues
to shine light on characters audiences
generally wouldn't clamor to see on the
audience. As actress

screen.
-

Kenneth

Sweeney
>-
American Cinematographer - May 2006

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