I was seventeen when I read this novel for the first time, either late in 1968 or early in 1969. The film adaptation was in progress, so my paperback copy was one of those Soon-to-be-a-Major-Motion-Picture editions. This dark, downbeat story had a profound effect on me, and I was eager to see the film version, which was released in May 1969. When I saw it, I was disappointed. The movie, impressive as it was, didn't bring the novel to life for me. Most importantly, Jon Voight's portrayal of the title character did not ring true for me. He was not Joe Buck. Not for me.
Over the years, I saw the film a few times, eventually owning it on home video. As my memory of, and attachment to the novel gradually faded away, I was able to appreciate and enjoy the film on its own merits, including the performance of Jon Voight. And I thoroughly enjoyed Glenn Frankel's book: Shooting Midnight Cowboy: Art, Sex, Loneliness, Liberation and the Making of a Dark Classic, published in 2020 and reviewed on this blog.
Recently, I've started revisiting favorite books that I read years ago, not only to refresh my memories, but to see how my perceptions may have changed with time. My old copy of Midnight Cowboy disappeared decades ago, so I sent away for another one and read it in two days. There were many details I had forgotten, but I quickly got caught up in the story and started to remember. Now, I don't know if I cried at the end of the book when I was seventeen. At seventy-five, I did. Walking alongside Joe Buck once again, from Texas to New York City, and riding with him on that bus going to Florida, I shared his alienation and loneliness, and it broke my heart all over again.
After finishing the book, I rewatched the film. While I still like the film for so many reasons, my gut feeling is that James Leo Herlihy's novel has yet to be adapted to the screen, as there is so much that has been left out. The novel begins where the film begins, with Joe getting himself ready to say goodbye to his life in Texas and get on that bus to New York City. But then it looks backwards into Joe's past, telling us about his childhood and young adulthood. We learn quite a bit about his life in Albuquerque with his grandmother, Sally Buck, and what kind of woman she was, how she gave him a home and provided for his basic needs. We also learn that she was never really there for Joe emotionally and wasn't terribly interested in his education or his development as a young man. When Joe drifted away from going to school at a very young age, she didn't think it was important enough for her to be bothered with. She gave him no proper guidance, allowing him to spend his days alone just watching television. She would periodically go off with some new boyfriend, leaving young Joe alone to fend for himself. We learn something about his sexual awakening, mainly with a troubled girl named Annie, and how that relationship led to tragedy. In the film, these crucial chapters of Joe's life are only alluded to in brief flashbacks.
We also learn about Joe being drafted into the Army, his profound reaction to the death of his grandmother, and his decision to start a new life in Houston. This is where Joe meets and befriends a young male hustler named Perry. While Joe is happy to have a friend to talk to, Perry wants something more. When Joe doesn't return Perry's interest, it leads to a dark, violent encounter that changes Joe's life. It is also during this encounter that we find out where Joe got the idea of going to New York to hustle rich, frustrated women, a fact that isn't mentioned in the film. This is where the first half of the book comes to a close.
Joe is described in the novel as a well-built, blonde, boyish young guy with a toothy smile, almost bucktoothed. This vision fits Jon Voight fairly well, I have to admit. Voight is certainly a talented actor with a considerable emotional range, an actor whose feelings show on his face, especially in his eyes. My frustration with the film is not so much about Voight's casting, but rather with how the character of Joe Buck is written and presented on the screen.
In the novel, Joe moves through the world with a cocky strut and the outward attitude that goes with it, reflections of both his natural self and the image he tries to present. Voight brings this aspect of the character to the screen perfectly. But even though the script allows us to see Joe's sensitive, vulnerable side, there is little attempt to reveal the desperate loneliness and disconnection he has felt throughout his life:
He had gone about always, even in the most familiar places of his life, with a slight frown of uneasiness, his head cocked for some clue to the mystery of the language he heard spoken, but which was clearly not his own, walking softly as if unsure of the very ground of this peculiar planet. And now, thinking it all over carefully but inexpertly, there seemed to him to have been from the very beginning a campaign afoot to make him aware always and always and always of his own alien status. And the awful conclusion he reached was that nearly everyone he knew or had ever know was part of this conspiracy. Even the many persons with whom he had enjoyed a certain sexual popularity--especially these persons--had refused any contact with his other aspects. They took their pleasure and they ran like the wind, no doubt laughing about the earnestness with which he had gone about gratifying them.
...there was an awareness entering him too momentous to acknowledge: he was a nothing person, a person of no time and no place and no worth to anyone at all.
Maybe it would be impossible to express this kind of sadness and alienation in any film. I'm not even sure if screenwriter Waldo Salt and director John Schlesinger wanted to dig this deep into Joe Buck's interior life. Their expansion of the story, which is marvelously creative, made New York City another important character in the film, and it was from this character, this chaotic, overwhelming environment, that Joe felt profound alienation.
With the introduction of Dustin Hoffman as Rico "Ratso" Rizzo, the streetwise con man who insinuates himself into Joe's life, the film gives us the most colorful character, and, arguably, the dominant character, in the screen adaptation. While Hoffman is older than the Rico in the novel, who is in his early twenties, his portrayal is so incredible, so singular, that I find no fault in it whatsoever. The novel gives us some background of Rico's life, but I'm not sure such exposition would have added anything important to the film. Rico's energetic presence helps to move the film along from one situation to the next while the relationship between these two unlikely co-conspirators grows into friendship. Both novel and film end the same way, with Rico's death, leaving Joe alone on that bus.
I guess my vision for a film version of this novel would be much more fatalistic. Black & White. Very little music. It would have to use as much of the first half of the book as possible, making it a longer film. But, as I said earlier, maybe it couldn't be done. Maybe it shouldn't be done. It's possible that James Leo Herlihy's vision of the tragic Joe Buck would be too much to bear if faithfully adapted for the screen, for the author wasn't just describing the desperate loneliness of one character in a novel. He was trying to make us see the loneliness felt by most men. Perhaps all men:
At first glance these young men may appear to loiter in packs, for often they occupy one table or group around a single parking meter, but chances are they are as unconnected to one another as they are to the prairies and cities and rivers of their homeland. You will find in the eyes and demeanor of these persons a kind of restless sadness that is probably incurable; they seem to be suffering some nameless common loss, as if something of worth had been snatched from them with such shocking irrevocability that they have forgotten even what it was.
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