MIDNIGHT COWBOY (John Schlesinger, 1969)

Based on James Leo Herlihy’s novel, Midnight Cowboy is barely watchable today, although it was more so in its own day when it won a best picture Oscar. (It is the only X-rated film to have done so, although its rating has since been eased.) This is a tawdry film, cheap and reductive, sentimental and grotesque. Much of the fault can be ascribed to “mod” director John Schlesinger, a Brit who had no business addressing the film’s American themes and context. His sneering attitude overcomes whatever degree of talent he brought to the assignment. A work about New York City’s underbelly shouldn’t be as theatrical as the thing Schlesinger has tiresomely wrought.

The two lead characters are American loners; one’s impoverished existence is buoyed by his dreams, while the other is betrayed into poverty by his dreams. The latter is Joe Buck, a handsome cowboy-outfitted young Texan who leaves his minimum-wage job as dishwasher to venture north, to New York City, in hopes of becoming a well-paid stud for rich women. He turns out not to be the bankable commodity he imagined and ends up as a reluctant gay street hustler. “Ratso” Rizzo is as canny as Buck is naïve. Rizzo’s sub-subsistent existence is greased by petty confidence schemes, to one of which Buck falls prey before they become friends. Rizzo dreams of hitting the lucky jackpot of wealth, of being dashing, and of not being a tubercular cripple. In the meantime, he lives in quarters in a condemned building, into which he brings Buck. They share their loneliness. On a bus ride to Miami, Rizzo dies, leaving Buck, who is seated next to him, bereft.

This is potentially rich material, but Schlesinger provides no serious analysis that might help explain America’s penchant for converting gifted individuals—Rizzo is quick-witted, intelligent; Buck, attractive and, at times, affable—into “losers.” His grating pot shots at the role of religion in American life are unhelpful in this regard, but they do contribute to the freak show that the scenarist, Waldo Salt, and the director have devised, as does a psychedelic “underground” party, to which Buck is improbably invited. The oversized nature of the performances is another contributor. Schlesinger’s Midnight Cowboy is shallow and opportunistic. It is also irritatingly violent, indulging in a flashback of a gang-rape and an incident where Buck brutalizes a pathetic gay client by shoving a telephone receiver down his throat. When the film first came out, our foremost film critic, Andrew Sarris, noted how unconvincing is the gang-banging episode as a result of Schlesinger’s technique of presenting it piecemeal rather than as a coherent action. Throughout, Schlesinger employs a frenetic, “stylish” technique when a more subdued, more probing technique would have better served the material.

Schlesinger, who is now deceased, was a gay man, and he populated this film (though not the two leads) with gay actors. It is therefore distressing that throughout the film he so strenuously denies the homosexual basis of the Buck-Rizzo relationship. Indeed, the film refuses to admit even a homosexual element in the relationship! This is bet-hedging of the worst sort, although the film’s enormous popularity emboldened Schlesinger to make Sunday, Bloody Sunday (1971), about a young man who is shared, separately, by both a woman and another man. It is doubtful that this film, probably Schlesinger’s finest, could have been made had Midnight Cowboy not preceded it.

Jon Voight plays Buck; Dustin Hoffman, Rizzo. Both give good, if superficial performances. (Asking Hoffman to get beyond mannerisms is always a losing proposition.) The following year, Voight would be wonderful in Paul Williams’s The Revolutionary, as sober and serious a film as Midnight Cowboy is a flighty one, a film as ostentatious as Joe Buck’s cowboy get-up.

BATTLESHIP POTEMKIN (Sergei M. Eisenstein, 1925)

The following is one of the entries from my 100 Greatest Films list, which I invite you to visit on this site if you haven’t already done so. — Dennis

One would never guess that Sergei Mikhailovich Eisenstein heralded from the stage. Thrilling and kinetic, his Battleship Potemkin is purely cinematic.
      The film re-creates the Kronstadt naval mutiny that triggered the doomed 1905 Russian Revolution—an event preceding the Bolshevik Revolution. In graphic detail, the film shows the conditions onboard that led to the mutiny.
      Perhaps cinema’s most celebrated passage is the Odessa Steps Massacre. In reality, this event never occurred, but, because of the power of Eisenstein’s images, it is widely believed to have occurred. Potemkin, then, reinvents history, translating documentary and fiction each into the other—what has remained cinema’s signature strategy for fathoming time and investigating social and political realities. It is important to note that Eisenstein’s fiction remains true to political circumstance in Russia. His fabricated event captures the cruelty and oppressiveness of tsarist rule, creating for these a stark, fiercely lit metaphor. (Eduard Tissé is Eisenstein’s essential black-and-white cinematographer.) In a rush of images, the masses, in enraged sympathy with the mutineers, are cut down by the police in the streets. Shot rapidly follows shot; but this ferocity gives way to another kind of passage later on—mysterious, meditative, lovely, one that is wrapped in silken darkness: dusk-cloaked sails on moonlit water—images that evoke the eternal note of sadness attending humanity’s struggle to assert fundamental rights in the face of oppression. Somewhere, always, the battle continues.
      Eisenstein’s militant masterpiece is a national epic for his young nation, set a dozen years before its existence. It is a film full of anticipation—a look back for the courage to move ahead, united. The Soviet Union no longer exists. Today, Battleship Potemkin is cinema’s most poignant elegy, and its most powerful expression of a now largely dormant idea: the people.

NIGHT AND FOG (Alain Resnais, 1955)

The following is one of the entries from my 100 Greatest Films list, which I invite you to visit on this site if you haven’t already done so. — Dennis

The subject of the Holocaust has generated countless documentaries, including outstanding ones as the twentieth century drew to a close: Harun Farocki’s Images of the World and the Inscriptions of War (1989), Héctor Faver’s Memory of Water (1993) and Dariusz Jablonski’s Fotoamator (1998). But, closer to the event, Alain Resnais’s Nuit et brouillard remains the finest.
      Resnais’s theme is the need to preserve historical memory—memory ever poised to slip away. At the sight of the Auschwitz death camp, careless green grass sways in the breeze, while black-and-white photos and newsreel snippets commit the reality of Auschwitz to flypaper. A long overhead shot of a blank field is held until the camera descends to reveal the surrounding barbed wire fence, with this ironical accompanying voiceover: “A placid landscape . . . An ordinary field over which crows fly”—author Jean Cayrol’s reference to Van Gogh’s symbol of matter’s passage into ephemera.
      The film’s signature mode is the tracking shot. The camera surveys the camp, noting the massive fence, this time from the inside, and remnants of some of the abandoned structures. The film cuts from one tracking shot to another, edited to compose, seemingly, one mind’s haunted journey, perhaps the return of a ghost. As the camera explores one of the barracks, we hear, “No description . . . can restore [the inmates’] true dimension: endless, uninterrupted fear.” What we cannot grasp is already lost.
      Intermittently, Night and Fog revisits human horrors—historical memory’s overload: SS surgical experimentation on prisoners; the bulldozing of mounds of corpses into a mass grave. The commentary ends by weighing the matter of collective guilt (“War nods, but one has one eye open”), addressing denial and revisionism, and wondering aloud how much “the next executioners” will resemble ourselves.
      Indeed.

A MAN ESCAPED (Robert Bresson, 1956)

The following is one of the entries from my 100 Greatest Films list, which I invite you to visit on this site if you haven’t already done so. — Dennis

Unsurprisingly, one strong nondocumentary about the Nazi death camps is Wanda Jakubowska’s The Last Stop (1948), for which the filmmaker drew upon her own internment at Auschwitz. Robert Bresson was a prisoner of the Germans in Occupied France for a year. His Un condamné à mort s’est échappé, ou Le Vent souffle où il veut, is similarly authentic—and taken from actual events.
      In Lyon in 1943, Resistance fighter Fontaine, based on André Devigny, is the prisoner of Germans, who have condemned him to die. Fontaine plots his escape. Long self-sufficient, he must cross a chasm of suspicion to an ambiguous cell-mate, a teenaged boy who may be a plant. Will Fontaine take the risk and include this stranger in his plans?
      A Man Escaped is one of the great works of French Existentialism. It is also unmistakably Bressonian, emphasizing the sights and sounds punctuating the routines inside the Gestapo prison. Throughout, subtle lighting implies, too, a gracious presence in the frames. When a fellow prisoner tells him that God will save them, Fontaine responds, “Only if we give him a hand.” But how? All one can do is make personal choices and accept their consequences.
      Fontaine, at the last, does the humane thing. We know the outcome, from what happened to Devigny. Yet each fresh viewing revives the suspense that Bresson’s filmmaking, including Fontaine’s voiceover, develops by bringing us into the young lieutenant’s mind in the moment. And just as Fontaine is ultimately rewarded by escape, to execute which his companion proves absolutely essential (God at work?), we are rewarded with one of the most moving shots in cinema: the camera at their backs, the two men, side by side, walking their way at night, barefoot, to freedom.
      The Spirit breathes where it will.

THE SEARCHERS (John Ford, 1956)

The following is one of the entries from my 100 Greatest Films list, which I invite you to visit on this site if you haven’t already done so. — Dennis

The protagonist of The Searchers is Ethan Edwards (John Wayne, powerful), an embittered veteran of—from his vantage—the War Between the States. Edwards provides the occasion for John Ford’s brilliant investigation of American racism; the film explores the darkest American terrain, where bigotry seems a primitive and instinctual birthright but is, really, a kind of insanity corrupting the moral landscape and tying all into a tangle American ideals, sentimentalism, territorial arrogance, loneliness, isolation, regional paranoia.
      Ford sets the film’s action, then, along the great divide of American racial consciousness and collision. In postwar Texas, Edwards searches for his niece, whose parents were murdered in a Commanche raid motivated by revenge following the murder of Commanches by whites. Over time, “tainted” by her sexual relations with Scar, a Commanche, the kidnapped child (Natalie Wood—the film’s one piece of ineptitude) comes to draw her uncle’s hatred, changing the complexion of his mission. At the last, with her, terrified, in his arms, the memory of his having held her in his arms years back restores a profound sense of family connection. But Edwards knows he has no place in the racially mixed U.S. future that she and his adopted nephew, Martin, represent. Dispossessed, although finally emptied of racist demons, Edwards must wander endlessly between the winds.
      Ford astonishes with gorgeous seasonal imagery that ironically reflects on a cycle of madness in the American soul. Shot after shot appears to project a facet of Edwards’s mental state: images that disclose the danger and desolation with which America is fraught—for the loneliness that connects Edwards with many other Americans isolates each of them.
      Contributing to the film’s ineffable sadness, its sense of monumental lament, is the haunting ballad that dominates Max Steiner’s score, “The Searchers,” by Stan Jones.