Midnight Cowboy (50th Anniversary Screening)

Special 50th anniversary screening, introduced by filmmaker Brian Henry Martin, whose favourite film is Midnight Cowboy. Followed by Q&A with Brian and guests. 

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 Motion Picture Association of America termed its “homosexual frame of reference,” Midnight Cowboy became the first X-rated film to receive the best picture Oscar, and fifty years on, its influence still reverberates through cinema.

DIR: JOHN SCHLESINGER • 1969 • USA • 1 HR 53 MINS • CERT 18