MIDNIGHT COWBOY A United Artists Release. With Jon Voight and Dustin Hoffman; screenplay by Waldo Salt; based on the novel by James Leo Herlihy; cinematography by Adam Holender; music supervised by John Barry; directed by John Schlesinger.

MIDNIGHT COWBOY is an ugly picture, and experience that can be likened only to having one’s nose rubbed in the proverbial “it.” Yet it’s an ultimately beautiful film on many levels — outstanding performances by Jon Voight and Dustin Hoffman, superb direction by John Schlesinger, and a theme which powerfully comes across, despite the ugliness of some of the plot incidents.

MIDNIGHT COWBOY is the story of human debris, flotsam and jetsam that has been cast ashore in the seamier sections of Fun City. Its hero, Joe Buck (Voight), is a small town stud who fancies himself up in a cowboy outfit and takes off for New York, intending to sell his stud service to rich women who have to buy whatever sex they get because “all the men back East are tuttifruitti.” But Joe proves woefully inept as a hustler--he’s too sensitive, and so hopelessly naive.

Thus, on his first score, he ends up paying the woman $20. Ratso Rizzo (Hoffman), a crippled consumptive Bronx con man, soaks him for another $20. Joe discovers himself locked out of his Times Square hotel room, and takes to roaming the streets. Finally, with stubbled chin and ketchup-stained trousers, he is forced to enter the gay world.

But even as a pickup for cruising queers, Joe is ill-suited as a prostitute. Hired by a bespectacled high school student and taken into a sleazy movie theatre, he passively engages in an act of oral sex (and later applogizes to the kid for making him sick), physically submitting himself, but emotionally tortured by the realization of what he has become.

So it is that Joe, terribly lonely, confused, woefully ' inept at his chosen profession, once again meets Ratso Rizzo, and thus begins a tender, symbiotic relationship between two lost humans--the stud from Texas, Iresplendent in leather-fringed jacket, black hat, and sunburst-decorated boots, and the cripple from the Bronx, with his rotting teeth, filthy clothes, and overwhelming desire to retire to Florida.

Voight and Hoffman complement each other so effectively and so perfectly that their performances actually seem to become part of each other, each picking up a gesture, an inflection, a nuance, from the other and using it to build the relationship, and is in turn built upon by the other. If Voight, (a newcomer to films, but well-known for his stage work in New York) leaves the greater impression, it is because the script obviously favors the Joe Buck character-it is through his eyes all our perceptions come.

Through his eyes, and through his mind. John Schlesinger has enriched his basic plot with quite a few subliminal flashbacks to Joe’s past, flashbacks which are ultimately rationalized in a truly harrowing nightmare sequence, which features a hetero-homo-sexual gang bang, graphically explicit. But flashbacks are not the only tricks up Schlesinger’s directorial sleeve: irony often drips off the screen, and many shots have a cinema-verite quality, probably achieved through hidden cameras and non-professional actors. And Schlesinger makes it quite clear that Joe is a media child. The first thing we see is a giant drive-in screen, and Joe is often shown watching television, or with his transistor radio up against his ear. In one hysterically funny (yet strangely sad) sequence, a television becomes an active participant in sexual intercourse.

Slowly, Schlesinger strips Joe, first of his ppssesions, then of his self-respect, finally of his self-image. Thus, at the end of the film, Joe bears a striking resemblence to the astronaut in 2001, ready to be molded into a different personality, a new human being. It was this concept, or theme, or whatever you want to call it, that of the re-shaping of a human destiny, which I think gives MIDNIGHT COWBOY its ultimate visceral power: that a man could live through the degradation Joe lives through and still emerge a human speaks well of the species.

Waldo Salt’s screenplay follows closely the novel by James Leo Herlihy, with minor changes in Joe Buck’s past. If we have a tendency to overlook Salt’s work in this film, it is only because the film doesn’t seem to have been written at all—it was acted and directed. The cinematography by Adam Holender is, at times, sub-standard--I think the story calls out for the nitty-grittiness of black and white film, and Holender’s use of color is one of the few flaws in the film (in all fairness, I should point out that some of Holender’s color images refuse to leave my mind, but, on the whole, I’d have preferred black and white). John Barry has put together a rock score that runs the. gamut from pop country ballad (sung by Nilsson) to a sort of funky acid rock (performed by, among others, Elephant’s Memory, a group 1 had the misfortune to hear at the Toronto Pop Festival). Barry’s music is a solid asset to the film.

MIDNIGHT COWBOY should hit you like a blow below the belt. You will be disgusted at times; you will be holding your sides in laughter at others; you will probably find yourself staring with rapt attention, amazed by the beauty of the performances by Voight and Hoffman, more than once; your mind will cry out to disbelieve more than one incident (I cannot forget the haunted woman in the diner, with a boy-her son? brother?--and a plastic rat~l couldn’t believe what I saw, but I had to believe it, for the incident was too horrifyingly real to be phony); but you will never forget MIDNIGHT COWBOY: you will never again be able to look at a bum, a whore, a junkie, and not recognize their humanity..

James L. Jones