‘Desperate Souls, Dark City and the Legend of Midnight Cowboy’ Review: A Documentary About What Made a New Hollywood Classic Indelible

A movie, good, bad or indifferent, is always “about” something. But some movies are about more things than others, and as you watch “Desperate Souls, Dark City and the Legend of Midnight Cowboy,” Nancy Buirski’s rapt, incisive, and beautifully exploratory making-of-a-movie documentary, what comes into focus is that “Midnight Cowboy” was about so many things that audiences could sink into the film as if it were a piece of their own lives.

The movie was about loneliness. It was about dreams, sunny yet broken. It was about gay male sexuality and the shock of really seeing it, for the first time, in a major motion picture. It was about the crush and alienation of New York City: the godless concrete carnival wasteland, which had never been captured onscreen with the telephoto authenticity it had here. The movie was also about the larger sexual revolution — what the scuzziness of “free love” really looked like, and the overlap between the homoerotic and hetero gaze. It was about money and poverty and class and how they could tear your soul apart. It was about how the war in Vietnam was tearing the soul of America apart. It was about a new kind of acting, built on the realism of Brando, that also went beyond it.

And it was about love. Jon Voight’s Joe Buck, that rangy Texas good ol’ boy with his fringed buckskin jacket and his jutting-front-teeth grin and his sexy bright naïveté, and Dustin Hoffman’s Ratso Rizzo, sweaty and unshaven, long hair greased back, hobbling through the streets, hording his change in a shoe with a hole in it and no sock — these two had nothing in common except that they were losers, hanging by a thread, and only after a while did they realize that they had nothing in the world but each other.

The risky, offhand greatness of “Midnight Cowboy” is that the movie, while it knew it was about a lot of these things, also didn’t know it was about a lot of these things. More, perhaps, than any other formative New Hollywood landmark (“Bonnie and Clyde,” “The Graduate,” “Easy Rider”), the film channeled the world around it. “Desperate Souls, Dark City” tells the story of how “Midnight Cowboy” got made, and how the people who made it — the director John Schlesinger, the screenwriter Waldo Salt, Jon Voight and Dustin Hoffman, and James Leo Herlily, who wrote the 1965 novel on which the film was based — took the essence of who they were and poured it into a personal vision of what we were seeing onscreen.

As a documentary filmmaker, Nancy Buirski (“By Sidney Lumet”) comes at you from a heady impressionistic angle. For all its tasty anecdotes, and there are lots of them, “Desperate Souls” is less concerned with production war stories, with the everyday nuts and bolts of how “Midnight Cowboy” got made (we see the famous scene in which Ratso bangs on a car and shouts “I’m walkin’ heah,” but don’t get the usual story about shooting the scene), than with the emotional metaphysics of how a movie about a blinkered hustler and a homeless loser came to embody what Hollywood was becoming: not a dream factory but a truth factory, an eerie moving mirror of who we were.

Jon Voight, now 84, gentler than his combative offscreen political image would suggest, is interviewed in the film, and he tells a good story about how Schlesinger, on the last day of shooting in Texas, was despondent, convinced that he’d made some self-destructive misfire about “a dishwasher who fucks all these women.” Voight, struggling to reassure him, said, with no real conviction, that this was the movie they’d all be remembered for. It never occurred to him that it might be true. That’s because “Midnight Cowboy” broke so many rules that no one could have guessed it was actually rewriting the rules.    

We’re shown a screen test of Voight, before he’d nailed the drawl, but you still see why he got the part — he was already investing Joe Buck with a belief in himself that would carry the audience through the movie. “Midnight Cowboy” was framed as an adventure, almost an old-fashioned one: good-looking kid from Texas heads for the big city, ready to make it as a gigolo, and the nature of movies is that we’re rooting for him. But as soon as he meets Sylvia Miles, we know he’s in over his Stetson-wearing head.

Buirski digs into the life of John Schlesinger, and reveals him to have been a courageous giant of a filmmaker. Born in 1926, he came from an upper-crust British family and was poised between the fears shared by gay men at the time — homosexuality was still a criminal offense, notably in Britain, where the cops made a habit of entrapping men in cruising spots — and the fact that his family knew who he was and accepted him for it.

The film demonstrates how so many of the creative decisions that defined “Midnight Cowboy” sprung from Schlesinger’s revolutionary impulse to splash aspects of queer consciousness and experience all over the screen in the context of a major Hollywood production. The scene in which Joe, having realized that his stud act with women is not going to pay the bills, picks up a young trick (played by Bob Balaban) who goes down on him in a movie theater; the scene in which he picks up a middle-aged gentleman (Barnard Hughes) and winds up gay-bashing him in a hotel room; even the flashbacks to Joe and his young girlfriend, Annie (played by Jennifer Salt, the daughter of screenwriter Waldo Salt), getting pulled, naked, out of a car by roughnecks in Texas — Schlesinger invested these scenes with a passion, sleaze and terror that he ripped out of his own experience.

The realism didn’t end there. I was 11 when I first saw “Midnight Cowboy” at a drive-in theater with my parents, and while scene after scene etched itself into my imagination, the moment that haunted me, that literally upended my view of the universe, was the one where we see a man, collapsed on the sidewalk, being ignored by midtown pedestrians. You could argue that the fact that he’s well-dressed, and is laying right in front of Tiffany, makes the scene unrealistic. Yet I’ve seen homeless people, collapsed and unconscious on the sidewalk, in recent months in New York City. What that moment in “Midnight Cowboy” captured was the new indifference that was defining our world.

That would become an indelible theme of the ’70s, expressed most brilliantly in Robert Altman’s “Nashville,” with its mad swirl of characters at once interacting and brushing right past each other. But in “Midnight Cowboy,” it was all about how the moment was shot. Schlesinger, working with the brilliant cinematographer Adam Holender, filmed it like a grainy, caught-on-the-fly documentary. He made it real. (“Bonnie and Clyde” and “The Graduate” did not look like documentaries.) In doing so, he effectively erased the line between what happened onscreen and the life offscreen.

“Desperate Souls, Dark City” captures what a disarmingly intimate film “Midnight Cowboy” was, but the documentary is also an essay on how the movie acted as a kind of portal: a passage from the old world to the new one. The whole idea that Joe paraded himself as a “cowboy” wasn’t just a sexual fetish; it embodied what a man used to be and wasn’t anymore, outside of the erotic realm. The critic J. Hoberman takes us inside how the Western, with its increasingly rootless cowboys, had become an allegory of Vietnam (in fact, it was the only movie form then dealing with Vietnam, outside of John Wayne’s absurdly jingoistic “The Green Berets”). And the author Charles Kaiser makes a brilliant connection between the collapse of belief in the American system represented by Vietnam and the rise of gay liberation. If we were being lied to about the war — about how we got into it, its real purpose, if it was “winnable” — then maybe the door was open to believing that the demonization of homosexuality was a lie, too.

In that way, the very “collapse of values” that courses through “Midnight Cowboy” carried a strange current of hope. You hear that hope in the music: in the burble of Harry Nilsson’s “Everybody’s Talkin’,” and in the stunning melancholy devotion of John Barry’s harmonica-led theme music. Yet no one, from Schlesinger on down, could have expected the film to become the paradigm-smashing success it did. Its triumph at the Oscars was the most powerful testament yet to the film industry’s acceptance of the rise of the New Hollywood, though the fact that John Wayne, at the same ceremony, won best actor for “True Grit” revealed that the industry was still looking in two directions at once. Wayne’s Rooster Cogburn was the real (fake) cowboy; Voight’s Joe Buck was the fake (real) cowboy. In 1969, they represented the yin and yang of what movies, and life, could be. As “Desperate Souls, Dark City” so eloquently captures, they were one dream giving way to another.

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