This coming Monday, the 24th of May, Astor Theatre is engaging with lonely subject matter. John Huston’s “The Misfits” (1961) and John Schlesinger’s “Midnight Cowboy” (1969) both use the loneliness of the Western film genre and its cowboy archetype to discuss sexuality, landscape, alienation and the art of drifting aimlessly. Their experimentation with genre still succeeds decades on.
Both films excavate and explore ideas of solidarity. Schlesinger’s feature remains – after four decades – a brilliant study of masculinity and isolation on the streets of New York City. Similarly, Huston’s film follows, in poetic style, the actions of drifting cowboys – Guido (Eli Wallach), Gay Langland (one of Clark Gable’s last roles) and Perce Howland (Montgomery Clift) – and how they hold themselves in the midst of lonely, loveless Nevadan territory. In “Midnight Cowboy”, however, these themes of solitude are dealt with by the film’s two antiheroes: Joe Buck (amazingly, yet vulnerably played Jon Voight) and Enrico “Ratso” Rizzo (excellently portrayed by Dustin Hoffman). Schlesinger uses both characters to show how the fast-moving, unforgiving American cityscape around them gives birth to their isolation, as they hustle for money, desperate and shunned. It is safe to say that both films are diverse, despite sharing fundamental similarities thematically. Schlesinger gives us a queer buddy film with a dark fish-out-of-water narrative twist, whilst Huston gives us a lonely cowboy story – in black and white vision – with hints of comedy and romance. Unlike Schlesinger, who reveals in bleak, engaging detail what happens when city meets country, Huston’s narrative, still, has the potential to be comical.
Both narratives, quite obviously, have existentialist undertones, something that can still be seen today. Huston conducts commentary on love and loneliness most effectively through the unstable marriage and consequent break-up of Guido (well played by Eli Wallach) and his indecisive next of kin, Roslyn Taber (also brilliantly portrayed by Marilyn Monroe). Whilst thematically similar, Schlesinger’s tale is different in that it prefers to explore the ill symptoms that come with the loss of innocence and coming of age, as Buck and Rizzo continue to dissolve in New York City’s big smoke. Whilst both film narratives focus on sexuality – “Midnight Cowboy” has remained the subject of various homoerotic readings and “The Misfits” focuses on one failed relationship and the search for love afterwards – their approaches are, of course, much different. One similarity that Buck’s sex work and Rizzo’s pathetic theft share with Perce, Gay and Guido’s recklessness is their relationship to the flâneur figure. Like the street poet found in Charles Baudelaire’s literature and Edgar Allen Poe’s short stories, Buck and Rizzo drift in and out of New York City, revealing the community’s dirty social underbelly through their own sufferings, whilst Huston’s trio live for rodeo and sadness, themes that continue to resonate with audiences.
The concept of the lonesome cowboy is old. On Monday night, however, Astor Theatre is playing, black-to-back, two films that approach this theme uniquely, specifically, from angles of sexuality, alienation and the landscape’s effect on both. A classic double!
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