Midnight Cowboy (1969)

Well that was a trip. I was thinking about the films of David Lynch the other day and how they all had decay as something lurking beneath a seemingly benign surface, well this film has no such surface, everything is decay. While watching I was struck by what an important ancestor of modern, especially independent film making it is. The montage, the fractured narrative, the character study, the sexuality and psychology of it. I've seen other counter-culture type films of the sixty's before like Blow-up and Easy Rider, but this had a grit, and strung-outness, and a sensitivity to it that, wow. It reminds me of a film like Into the Wild, the sense of being on the edge of society, of being marginal, of all those folks that somehow live amidst the nothingness, were the pointless meets the profound. I can't do this film justice, and I haven't even mentioned the soundtrack. It's very much a piece of cinema, experimental cinema even, but its also very literary, dense, nuanced, it doesn't force feed you much. The price of decency in a heartless world maybe, that's one take. Anyway at the time cinema was doing all kinds of experimenting, and here's a movie that was then rated X that still managed to win a best picture Oscar and be a standout amid the long and varied careers of stars Jon Voight and Dustin Hoffman, that should tell you something. Obviously not for all tastes but I think profound, and all the more surprisingly so for all the build up its had for decades, usually that can deflate a film for me some when I finally get around to seeing it, that was not the case with this however. A great movie.