Midnight Cowboy (1969)

[Akijama]

Midnight Cowboy (1969)

One of the British New Wave’s most versatile directors, John Schlesinger came to New York in the late-1960s to make Midnight Cowboy, a picaresque story of friendship that captured a city in crisis and sparked a new era of Hollywood movies. Jon Voight delivers a career-making performance as Joe Buck, a wide-eyed hustler from Texas hoping to score big with wealthy city women; he finds a companion in Enrico “Ratso” Rizzo, an ailing swindler with a bum leg and a quixotic fantasy of escaping to Florida, played by Dustin Hoffman in a radical departure from his breakthrough in The Graduate. A critical and commercial success despite controversy over what the MPAA termed its “homosexual frame of reference,” Midnight Cowboy became the first X-rated film to receive the best picture Oscar, and decades on, its influence still reverberates through cinema.

Disc Features

• New 4K digital restoration, with uncompressed monaural soundtrack on the Blu-ray
• Alternate 5.1 surround soundtrack, presented in DTS-HD Master Audio on the Blu-ray
• Audio commentary from 1991 featuring director John Schlesinger and producer Jerome Hellman
• New selected-scene commentary by cinematographer Adam Holender
• The Crowd Around the Cowboy, a 1969 short film made on location for Midnight Cowboy
• Waldo Salt: A Screenwriter’s Journey, an Academy Award–nominated documentary from 1990 by Eugene Corr and Robert Hillmann
• Two short 2004 documentaries on the making and release of Midnight Cowboy
• Interview with actor Jon Voight on The David Frost Show from 1970
• Interview from 2000 with Schlesinger for BAFTA Los Angeles
• Excerpts from the 2002 BAFTA LA Tribute to Schlesinger, featuring Voight and actor Dustin Hoffman
• Trailer
• PLUS: An essay by critic Mark Harris