ONCE IS NOT ENOUGH 1975

The short-lived Jacqueline Susann #1 bestseller book-to-film trilogy train ground to a wheezy and sluggish halt with 1975’s Once is Not Enough. The film adaptions of Valley of the Dolls (1967), The Love Machine (1971), and Once is Not Enough may not have been perfect (or even good), but to me, they’re a fairly accurate visual representation (perhaps too much so) of the author’s chief obsessions and preoccupations: sex, drugs, and the seamy lifestyles of the rich & famous—while simultaneously serving as a clear-cut example of the law of diminishing returns.

The first author to have three consecutive novels reach the #1 spot on the New York Times bestseller list, Susann wrote only six books in her brief but prolific career (two published after her death in 1974) but left a controversially indelible mark, if not on the world of literature, then certainly on pop culture and the book publishing industry. And while her novels sparked endless debate about the cultural folly of mistaking “popular” for “good”; the quality of the films adapted from her books was never in question: Susann herself thought they were all pretty lousy.

So disgusted by what 20th Century Fox did to her “Dolls” baby, Susann excused herself from the film’s seaborne press junket (Valley of the Dolls was promoted with an ocean liner scuttling cast members to premiers at various ports) vowing to have more control over the screen adaptation of her next book. This she was able to accomplish, but in spite of her best efforts and those of executive-producer husband Irving Mansfield, the film version of The Love Machine actually turned out to be worse. And, unlike, Valley of the Dolls, it was a boxoffice flop, to boot.

Susann’s fourth novel Once is Not Enough was published in 1973 and is the third and last of her books to be made into a film. Although too ill with cancer to make her usual onscreen cameo or be involved in its adaptation to the degree she would have liked, Susann nevertheless unofficially collaborated on the film's screenplay with 65-year-old Casablanca (!) screenwriter Julius J. Epstein. Susann died in September of 1974, Once is Not Enough was released nine months later on June 20, 1975. In an interview with Variety and the New York Times, Epstein stated that Susann was displeased with his screenplay, upset most by how little screen time he devoted to the character of Karla (the most sympathetic and fleshed-out personality in the book) and accusing him of mishandling the big lesbian scene.

Gloria Steinem once wrote, "Compared to Jacqueline Susann, Harold Robbins writes like Proust." So perhaps it's homage that inspired Once is Not Enough's use of a "kneeling lovers" graphic similar to that used for the poster art for Harold Robbins' The Adventurers (1970)

Valley of the Dolls was a boxoffice hit, The Love Machine flopped, and Once is Not Enough was an out-and-out dud. None of the films are what anyone would call exemplary examples of the cinematic art, but only Valley of the Dolls made money and stood the test of trash film time. It’s common for authors uninvolved in the screen adaptations of their books to decry that had they been allowed to write a more faithful adaptation, the films would have turned out better. Beyond a lot of ego-based, after-the-fact, shoulda/woulda/coulda speculation, there’s very little evidence of this ever truly being the case. 

I’m fairly certain Jacqueline Susann would not have been happy with the completed film of Once is Not Enough, a book that was popular enough to become the 2^nd largest selling novel of 1973 (behind Richard Bach’s Jonathan Livingston Seagull, of all things). But I’ve always found it ironic that Susann, an author whose typical defense to criticism of her writing ability was to point to her book sales and declare she’s crying all the way to the bank; could not grant a similar avenue of escape to the critically-maligned but very successful film made from her first bestseller. Susann may not have liked Valley of the Dolls, but by her own questionable standards, wasn’t popular success a valid measure of merit? 

Kirk Douglas as Mike Wayne
Bought for $3 Million, he earned every penny of it

Deborah Raffin as January Wayne
Still a virgin at 19, but eager to make up for lost time

David Janssen as Tom Colt 
Mr. Virility couldn't live the fantasies he wrote about

Alexis Smith as Deidre Milford Granger
She married many men, but her real love was a woman

George Hamilton as David Milford
The Swinging Set's most wanted "escort"

Brenda Vaccaro as Linda Riggs
Silicone in her chest, ice water in her veins. High-fashion editor with low desires

Melina Mercouri as Karla
The ugly rumors about her love life were true

Gary Conway as Hugh Robertson
To the world, he was a hero, to his wife he was something else

While I can’t attest to Susann’s novel having any literary value, I can certainly confirm that the film adaptation is steeped in Ancient Myth and Fantasy. Which is to say Once is Not Enough is a film made by a bunch of very old men about a young girl with an Electra complex who lives in a fantasy, wish-fulfillment world populated by beautiful young women who can’t get enough of the saggy, crepey flesh of men twice their age, and where male impotence is regarded as the stuff of Greek Tragedy.

Mike Wayne (Douglas), onetime hotshot Hollywood producer, has fallen on hard times. Wayne (much like this film) is a bit of a dinosaur; a victim of a youth-centric shift in public tastes. Unable to get a film off the ground, the fortunes of the two-time Oscar-winner dwindle as his 19-year-old daughter January (Raffin) rakes up hefty medical bills relearning how to walk and talk in a Swiss rehab facility. You see, when she was 16, January was involved in a nasty motorcycle accident triggered by a jealous response to learning that dear old dad was boinking one of his leading ladies.

Now, three years later, January is ready for release and Mike is determined to keep her in a fool’s paradise of borrowed luxury. What’s a fella to do? In this case, make the moves on one of the 5^th wealthiest women in the world, that’s what. A task which proves to be surprisingly easy, by the way.

The Things We Do For Love
Mike puts in a little overtime in his effort to secure his daughter's financial future

Those Swiss doctors must be worth their weight in gold, for January emerges from her ordeal (five operations in three years) looking none the worse for wear. Indeed, she looks as though she’s just returned from an extended stay at La Costa.

But alas, January’s whirlwind New York welcome of champagne, caviar, Plaza Hotel, Goodyear blimp, and lots of pseudo incestual canoodling, comes to an abrupt halt once she meets Daddy’s new wife and keeper (and her rival): the classy but mannish Deirdre Milford Granger (Smith).

I suppose one doesn’t get to be the 5^th richest woman in the world without mastering the art of multitasking, so while keeping her husband’s wrinkled gonads in a vice and trying to foist her virginal stepdaughter on her rather oily, Reggie Mantle-ish cousin David (Hamilton); Deirdre still manages to find time to go hallway to hallway with fading movie goddess (“She’s a bigger recluse than Garbo or Howard Hughes!”) Karla (Mercouri). Karla, who remains as much an enigma to us viewers as she does to her fans in the film, rounds out Once Is Not Enough's bedroom roundelays by carrying on a side affair with the much-younger David.

Girl Talk
Generations from now, film scholars will still be discussing
the significance of that big hunk of bologna 

Meanwhile, January visits old school chum Linda Riggs (Vaccaro), who’s now the potty-mouthed, man-crazy editor of a women’s magazine. Although their friendship begs credibility (January is barely 20, Linda is 28. What the hell kind of school did they go to?) it’s nothing compared to the speed with which Linda offers January both a job and an apartment.

Enter Tom Colt (that name!), a hard-drinkin’ he-man writer (Janssen) who also happens to be the sworn enemy of Mike Wayne. So, of course, January, unable to get daddy for herself, falls for this daddy surrogate. On the periphery of all this, serving no real purpose save that he was a character in the book, is astronaut Hugh Robertson (Conway). His scandalous problem is that his wife divorced him. In a story already cluttered with characters the film barely has time for, Conway’s presence in the film is bafflingly irrelevant. Did someone owe him a favor?

With all the characters assembled and in place, the plot, such as it is, pretty much boils down to whether or not our star-crossed lovers (make that DNA-crossed lovers) can find happiness in the arms of substitutes, when propriety, decency, and a squeamish Oscar-winning screenwriter in his 60s (“I’ve got lesbianism, but I draw the line at incest!”) demand their love remain forbidden. 

Jacqueline Susann described Once is Not Enough as being about “mental incest,” not the real deal. Just the love a doting father has for his only daughter, and a young girl’s lifelong infatuation with the first important man in her life.

Whatever you call it, I call it inert. Once is Not Enough is two hours of sizzle and no steak. Characters talk a lot, but outside of Brenda Vaccaro’s one-note raunch act (which seemed a lot funnier back in 1975 before Kim Cattrall gave us six seasons and two movies worth of it in Sex and the City) the film is sorely lacking in Valley of the Dolls-level hooty dialog. And for a film based on a Susann novel, the sleaze factor is surprisingly low. I mean, what is Jacqueline Susanne but the Pucci'd paperback purveyor of glossy sex and drugs?

And speaking of drugs, where are the dolls? Vacarro smokes a joint for mainstream shock effect, but alcohol is the sole drug of choice in Once is Not Enough. Like an episode of Bewitched, every room in this film comes with a well-stocked bar, and characters are forever hoisting a glass. Even January’s drug addiction problem from the novel (a dependency on speed-like vitamin shots) is reduced to a single line of dialogue. And as for the sex, there's precious little. Precious little you'd want to see, anyway. There's Deborah Raffin clutching a sheet to her bosom, Gary Conway in short shorts, and hints of middle-aged lesbian action; but (My eyes! My eyes!) David Janssen is granted the film’s only nude scene.

Melina Mercouri clutches while George Hamilton narrowly escapes having
his hair (or face) move in this production still of a scene cut from the film. 

WHAT I LOVE ABOUT THIS FILM

It seems to be the natural course of events in the entertainment business that once someone makes a killing by appealing to lowbrow popular tastes; the one thing they next most aspire to is to be taken seriously. The film version of Valley of the Dolls brilliantly rose (or sunk) to the precise level of Susann’s trashy-but-readable novel, and, of course, she hated it. Thus, with each successive film, we got Susann desperately trying to turn her sow’s ear material into silk purses. The result: drained of all their fun and sleaze, The Love Machine and Once is Not Enough both emerged as nothing but trite melodrama. Worse, they were dull, dull, dull.

When Old Coots Meet
Limp as a noodle yet always ready to prove he still has the ol' poop, the ever-inebriated Tom Colt accuses Mike Wayne of turning one of his novels into a lousy movie. Reading this scene, Jacqueline Susann must have thought "Pot, meet kettle!"

Once is Not Enough needed the punch of a vulgar director, hack writer, and actors ill-equipped to modulate the pitch of their performances. The last thing it needed was restraint. What it got was a director of “serious dramas” (Guy Green of A Patch of Blue & Light in the Piazza), an Oscar-winning screenwriter, the cinematographer of Chinatown (John A. Alonzo), and a cast underplaying to the point of somnambulism (Vaccaro & Mercouri, notwithstanding). Once is Not Enough commits the fatal mistake of taking itself and its preposterous plot seriously. Sound the death knell.

If I have any fondness for this movie at all (Lord knows why, but I do) it's because: 1. It's part of the Jackie Susann screen trilogy and you just can't break up a set. 2. There's just enough "good-bad" to keep your interest between naps. 3. It opened at the Alhambra Theater in San Francisco when I was still working there as an usher, so in addition to having seen it more times than I can count, I have nice memories of the steady stream of middle-aged ladies who poured into the theater on Sunday matinees to see this piece of...cinema history.

Veteran character actress Lillian Randolph as Mabel
"I've worked for your father for 12 years. And it was one long parade of poontang."

PERFORMANCES

A quick look and you’d swear January is played by a time-traveling Gwyneth Paltrow, but of course, the bland role is blandly assayed by the late Deborah Raffin. And although only her third film, it’s Raffin’s second time portraying a girl with a fetish for old dudes (the first was 1973’s 40 Carats). Were Once is Not Enough the TV movie it feels like, Raffin’s performance would be perfectly serviceable (see: George Hamilton), but on the big screen, her mono-expression only emphasizes the degree to which she’s hamstrung by a script that can’t discern the subtle difference between naïve and dim-witted.

Jacqueline Susann was a huge Dionne Warwick fan
Warwick is the only person to "appear" in all three of Jacqueline Susann's films. She sang the themes for VOD & The Love Machine, and here she peers over Raffin's shoulder from a window display

Making a welcome return to the screen after a 14-year-absence, Alexis Smith, then enjoying a career resurgence thanks to her Tony Award-winning turn in the Broadway musical Follies, is saddled with a Dina Merrill role with a gimmick. Photographed and dressed unflatteringly by designer Moss Mabry who must have been channeling Vera Charles in Mame (the Lucy one), Smith’s rather good performance never has the chance to emerge from under the weight of the stunt-like publicity surrounding her character’s bisexuality. 

With no exploitable "wig down the toilet" scene (Valley of the Dolls) or "Hollywood party brawl" (Love Machine), Once Is Not Enough's sole marketing hook was to promote the film's lesbian relationship as though it were a circus act

With Kirk Douglas acting with his chin dimple and David Janssen doing his usual sleepwalking growl and grumble bit (I was stunned to discover the actor was only 43 when he made this. He easily looks ten years older), small wonder that Brenda Vaccaro (on the last legs of a six-year relationship with Kirk's son, Michael) garnered so much attention. In a role that in later decades became the "sassy black girlfriend" trope, Vaccaro is easily the best thing in the film, but I don't really see how she got a Best Supporting Actress Oscar nomination and Golden Globe win out of it. Not in a year that saw the release of Shampoo, (Goldie Hawn!),  Nashville (Geraldine Chaplin!), The Stepford Wives (Paula Prentiss!), Tommy (Tina Turner!), Night Moves (Jennifer Warren!), and Funny Lady (Roddy McDowall!).

The ever-vulgar Linda: "Listen, if you don't appreciate rock, I've got plenty of others. Mood stuff. How's this... 'Music To Get It Up By.'" The album in question was a hit for Vikki Carr in 1967

THE STUFF OF FANTASY

Movies like this make me understand why so many writers and directors freak out when their ages are revealed on IMDB. Everything about Once Is Not Enough is a testament to the median age of its creative team (which hovers somewhere around the 55-65 mark). Sure, one of the film’s themes is how quickly the world is changing, but honestly, this film looks like it was made in 1967.

Nowhere is this more evident than in the jaw-dropping scene where David takes January to his bachelor pad and tries to seduce her. The apartment is one a garish, patently soundstage-bound creation that wouldn't be out of place in one of those tedious Tony Curtis sex romps of the '60s. In fact, it looks like it's a sublease from Dean Martin during his Matt Helm phase.
Although the film is set smack in the middle of the cocaine-and-amyl fueled '70's, David doesn't bring out the drugs and crank up the rock music. No, he plies 20-year-old January with champagne and tries to get her in the mood with ersatz Frank Sinatra-style elevator music. The entire scene is so "off" and out-of-time it feels like a reenactment of a deleted scene from Hamilton's 1960 flick Where the Boys Are, with Raffin standing in for Dolores Hart.

Once Is Not Enough preserves the "ubiquitous blue robe"
motif established in Susann's  The Love Machine

THE STUFF OF DREAMS

So the cliché goes: after money and fame, they all want respect. Given that the film Jacqueline Susann’s disliked the most has ultimately turned out to be the best and most enduring of the lot, maybe there’s something to be said for ambition keeping in step with perspective. The fact that Valley of the Dolls has gained a cult status hasn’t changed it from being a bad film into a good one; it merely illustrates that under certain circumstances, subjective qualifiers like “good” and “bad” do well to take a back seat to words like "entertaining" and "campy fun."  As my blog list of favorite films proves, when it comes to the movies that bring us back again and again, goodness often has nothing to do with it.

For all the hype, this kiss never even appears in the completed film. Karla & Deidre kiss later on in the scene, but the camera can't scurry away fast enough. Production notes and stills reveal two differently-scripted love scenes between Smith & Mercouri were filmed, the Susann-penned scene being the one jettisoned. Along those same lines, two different endings were filmed and tested on audiences. Given how flat the selected one is (those Henry Mancini Singers!) I don't even want to imagine what failed the test screenings

BONUS MATERIAL

Brenda Vaccaro's inhale-heavy tampon commercials
provided plenty of comedy fodder for '70s late-nite TV hosts

TV star David Janssen was the Excedrin spokesman for as long as I can remember

My earliest memory of the underutilized Gary Conway is of him straining his T-shirt in I Was A Teenage Frankenstein (1957). Before embarking on an acting career and gaining notoriety on the sci-fi TV program Land of the Giants, Conway was a teen "physique" model. No longer a teen, in 1973 he nevertheless reverted back to type and memorably appeared au naturale in the August issue of Playgirl magazine (a copy of which I stole from a local supermarket at the time). Too bad Once Is Not Enough saw fit to keep Conway clothed while Flabby McHairycheeks  (David Janssen, to you) is the one to shoot us a moon.

The ever-coy Playgirl magazine never lets us find out if
Land of the Giants was more than just the title of Gary Conway's 1968 TV series 

Daddy Dearest

Copyright © Ken Anderson  2009 - 2016

MIDNIGHT COWBOY 1969

I’m sometimes asked if I only like movies about women, or if a film has to have a female protagonist in order for me to enjoy it. Granted, even a cursory look at the films I list amongst my favorites would lean toward the answer being, yes; but the truth is, I’m not drawn specifically to movies about women so much as I have a strong aversion to what passes for manhood in a great many motion pictures. Preoccupied as most films are with perpetuating a narrow, outmoded, and distinctly white, hetero-normative vision of manhood, often consisting of oversimplified macho/hero stereotypes and care-worn heroism tropes, I have merely grown weary of outsized masculine totems standing in for fleshed-out, human-scale men.

Never being one to find plot-driven action and adventure to be a preferable alternative to the intensity of simple emotional conflict, I gravitate instead to movies about flawed characters grappling with the human condition. That these have largely been movies about women says more about our culture’s rigidity in its onscreen depiction of masculinity than it does any gender preferences I may hold in the way of  narrative central characters. 

Joe Buck sees the cowboy as the epitome of hetero-masculinity

Hollywood has never lost a dime trafficking in gender stereotypes. In the standard Hollywood film, men “do” while women “feel”; men propel the action, women do all the emotional heavy-lifting. The prototypical American male movie hero is a stoic, unemotional, lantern-jawed man of action, rarely given to moments of self-doubt, diffidence, or introspection. He’s the strong, silent type, indigenous to westerns, war movies, crime dramas, espionage thrillers, sports films, sci-fi, or any testosterone-leaden genre requiring things being “blowed up real good,” or cars raced fast and furiously. Few things are more boring to me than films about men fearful of losing their "masculinity." I really have no idea what that means, and I suspect if I did, I'd have a hard time being convinced of it being anything of value to lose.

Happily, a great deal of this changed (albeit briefly) in the late-'60s with the emergence of the movie anti-hero. The New Hollywood, in its youthful repudiation of America's cinematic status-quo, challenged the old-fashioned concept of masculinity and reimagined the traditional Hollywood leading man as an individual of unprepossessing countenance (Elliott Gould, Richard Benjamin, Malcolm McDowell, et. al.) capable of uncertainty, and more apt to be at war with some inner aspect of his character than to be found pointing a .44 Magnum at some punk and asking, “Do you feel lucky?”

Urban Cowboy
Archaic notions of masculinity collide with the modern world 

A perfect example of the American male redefined can be found in one of the films I consider to be a true, genuine-article, movie classic: John Schlesinger’s Midnight Cowboy. A buddy film for a new generation which in every way embodies the kind of perceptive, complex characterizations I love to see in movies. When a film is this textured in exploring emotional isolation, vulnerability, loneliness, and (a favored theme of mine) the human need to connect—from the relatively rare perspective of the male—it only emphasizes how much time has been wasted and how many rich stories we've missed out on due to Hollywood's persistence in depicting men in terms of masculine archetypes rather than authentic, recognizably flawed individuals.

Jon Voight as Joe Buck

Dustin Hoffman as Enrico Salvatore Rizzo

Sylvia Miles as Cass Trehune

Brenda Vaccaro as Shirley

Midnight Cowboy is the story of Joe Buck (Voight), a naïve Texas dishwasher with a sad, abandoned past who, possessed of little beyond an elemental self-awareness—“The one thing I ever been good for is lovin’”—seizes upon the tin-pot ambition of going to New York and making it big as a sought-after gigolo, servicing the sexual needs of neglected, Park Avenue socialites. Unfortunately, a string of bad breaks (not the least of them being Joe’s ignorance of the largely homosexual implications drawn from his beloved cowboy attire in a Metropolitan setting) results in a drastic reversal of fortunes for Joe, leading to his forging an unlikely friendship/bond with a tubercular, disabled grifter and pickpocket: one Enrico Salvatore Rizzo (Hoffman), or, as he's loath to be called, Ratso.

In detailing the tentative alliance between these two wounded misfits, director John Schlesinger (Darling, The Day of the Locust) and screenwriter Waldo Salt (from the James Leo Herlihy novel), have not only fashioned one of the screen’s great (platonic) love stories, but in the bargain create a terribly moving and heartrending essay on isolation and the need to be needed.

"Joe sees how profusely Ratso is sweating and untucks his shirt to pat down his friend's hair. Ratso, not used to such tenderness, holds onto him, his eyes closed in a stolen moment of bliss."

                        - Dustin Hoffman commenting on one of the film's most poignant scenes

The kind of mature-themed major motion picture unimaginable in today’s teen-driven multiplex marketplace, the then X-rated Midnight Cowboy fairly knocked me for a loop when I saw it in 1969 (I was fairly shaken by it, finding some parts absolutely harrowing, later feeling heartbroken and bawling my eyes out at the end...then staying to watch it all again). I was just 12-years-old at the time, and in my film fan fervor, Midnight Cowboy looked to me like the future of American movies. Strange to think of it now in the age of Iron Man and The Avengers, but try to imagine: I was only an adolescent movie enthusiast, but already I'd had the good fortune to have been exposed to the brilliance that was Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, Rosemary’s Baby, Secret Ceremony, and Bonnie and Clyde…and They Shoot Horses, Don’t They? was just around the corner.

Like an unspoken promise, the quality of these movies led me to the optimistic (naïve?) belief that American films were headed in an entirely new direction. I thought that motion pictures, freed from the constraints of censorship by the dissolution of the Production Code and recently-relaxed definitions of obscenity, could at last take their place as the emergent pop-cultural art form of the 20th century. Alas, conservatism and consumerism ultimately won out, but for a brief time there, Hollywood was turning out the most AMAZINGLY offbeat and thought-provoking movies.  Small wonder that the '60s and '70s still linger in my memory as my absolute favorite era in American film. I see now that it's because we were both growing up at the same time.

X-Rated
Bernard Hughes appears as Townsend "Towny" P. Locke in one of Midnight Cowboy's most  controversial scenes

WHAT I LOVE ABOUT THIS FILM

Putting aside for a moment Waldo Salt’s absolutely incredible screenplay (and if you've read Herlihy's novel you know what a splendid adaptation it is), as far as I’m concerned, cinematographer Adam Holender (Puzzle of a Downfall Child) and composer John Barry (and all sundry music contributors) are as much the stars of Midnight Cowboy as Voight and Hoffman.
Displaying the kind of seamless collaboration which served to both feed and mislead auteur theorists critics back in the day,  Holender and Barry create a look and sound for Midnight Cowboy so cinematically well-suited to its themes of fractured dreams and abandoned hopes (the use of disorienting flashbacks and subjective audio were considered innovative for its time), that the mode of storytelling becomes as important as the story itself. And, of course, who can listen to Fred Neil's Everybody's Talkin' (sung by Harry Nilsson) without visualizing Joe Buck strutting like a peacock down the crowded Manhattan streets, the diminutive Ratso Rizzo at his side, struggling to keep up.

Repeat viewings reveal the incredible amount of backstory and character exposition that's relayed through the film's economic and artful use of flashbacks and dream sequences. Everything you need to know about Joe Buck's troubled past is revealed in jarring flashes, like memories he's trying to repress. But I find the true richness of this device in that it reveals so much without explaining anything. It's both refreshing and challenging when a film asks you do some of the work yourself.

Shown in flashback, Joe is sexually assaulted by town rowdies jealous of the attention paid to him by the town goodtime-girl, Anastasia Pratt, aka Crazy Annie (Jennifer Salt, daughter of screenwriter Waldo Salt). 

PERFORMANCES

Midnight Cowboy is so chock full of amazing performances that it becomes an exercise in futility to extol the virtues of any one particular actor. Still, each time I watch it, I find I'm left with lingering impressions of newly-discovered bits of brilliance in performances I thought I was long-familiar with.

Making his film debut, long-time favorite Bob Balaban is appealingly vulnerable as the young student who, even in his naif outing as a sexual outlaw, has it over Joe Buck in the street-smarts department

"I got a strange feelin' somebody's bein' hustled!" - Doris Day in Calamity Jane
Oscar-nominee Sylvia Miles makes more out of 6 minutes-worth of screen time than any actress I've ever seen. As the Park Avenue "socialite" with the braying voice and whiplash temper, Miles creates a vividly dimensional character out of little more than a sketch. I could go on about what I adore about her performance, but I couldn't put it any better (or more hilariously) than a fellow blogger does HERE

Sylvia Miles had the showier part, but I have a soft spot for Brenda Vaccaro and what she does with her thoroughly unique role as the emancipated woman who gets a kinky kick out of paying for sex with, as she puts it, a "cowboy-whore" she meets at a party. Like almost every supporting role in Midnight Cowboy, hers is a character one can easily imagine having a life beyond the frame of the screen (judging by her apartment, possibly a pretty fascinating one).   

Midnight Cowboy was my first exposure to both Jon Voight and Dustin Hoffman, both of whom give the kind of performances that make stars. Some of the actors considered for the role of Joe Buck include: James Caan, Don Stroud, Alan Alda (!), Michael Sarrazin, Lee Majors, Alex Cord, Gary Lockwood, Robert Forester, and Michael Parks.

Hoffman is, of course, a revelation, especially in light of the extreme departure Ratso Rizzo is from his work in The Graduate; but it's the sad-eyed Jon Voight who ratchets up the film's pathos by way of achieving, in his portrayal of the hapless hustler Joe Buck, what I've always admired in the work of Julie Christie: the ability to instill in shallow, not-very-bright characters, a considerable amount of inarticulate depth.

Haunted
If it's disappointment and sadness that leads Joe to willingly accept sexual objectification as a viable means of existence, then Midnight Cowboy qualifies as the male perspective of a tragic real-life circumstance we tend to see played out in public most often by women. Consider the doomed fates of sexualized small-town girls, Dorothy Stratten and Anna Nicole Smith.

THE STUFF OF FANTASY

Fantasy isn't perhaps the best word to describe what I mean, but I adore the seedy, grimy look of late '60s New York captured in Midnight Cowboy. It's an Alice Through the Looking Glass view of Manhattan inspired, one can't help but assume, by Brit director John Schlesinger's unfamiliarity with the city, and his fascination with its sordid contrast to the cheery image of America presented in advertising and TV commercials. As would be the case in later years in films like Klute (1971) and Taxi Driver (1976), Midnight Cowboy uses New York as though it were another character in the story.

THE STUFF OF DREAMS
As it is rare for a director to even turn out ONE classic film in the entirety of their careers, I find it sometimes a little baffling how easily John Schlesinger's name—the man who gave us Midnight Cowboy, Darling, and The Day of The Locust...three genuine classics, in my book—is so often bypassed in discussions of great directors. Even the gay community rarely gives it up for this director (to my knowledge, the only "out" director working in mainstream film at the time) whose body of work is decidedly uneven, but nonetheless yields several impressive efforts. Happily, Schlesinger won the best directing Oscar for Midnight Cowboy, and the film won Best Picture that year (Salt also won for his screenplay).

There’s no telling what, if any, impact Schlesinger’s sexuality had on the way Midnight Cowboy turned out (after all, the original novel was written by a gay man, but adapted by a straight). But even by today’s standards, what still impresses me about Midnight Cowboy is how strongly it stands as one of mainstream cinema’s most persuasive examples of the purposeful deconstruction of the masculine myth.

Joe Buck embraces a traditional concept of masculinity no longer considered relevant or even valid in an urban (modern) environment. In fact, Joe is rather stunned to learn that everything he once thought represented masculinity and manhood (macho posturing, sexual pursuit, and dressing like a cowboy) has, somehow, become perversely feminized ("You're gonna tell me John Wayne's a fag?!"). Manliness of the sort he admired as a boy in the movies, or copied from the rodeo cowboys that populated his grandmother’s bed, had transmogrified into the macho “drag” adopted by homosexual prostitutes plying their trade on New York's Forty-Second Street.

Joe discovers he's but one of many Midnight Urban Cowboys

Like a great many men who haven't a clue as to how to view themselves without clinging to an antiquated hunter-gatherer/alpha-male paradigm; Joe, without a defined code of “masculinity” to follow, is at a loss. Ironic, because, as revealed in the novel and an early draft of the screenplay, what inspires Joe to come to New York in the first place is his learning that the urban phenomenon of the overworked businessman has resulted in a surplus of sexually frustrated city women. In short, Joe believes there is a shortage of "real men" in New York, and his goal is to step in and fill the void, so to speak.

Even within the sex trade where he hoped to make his fortune, Joe finds himself unwittingly cast in the feminine role of being the one pursued by males rather than in the (equally passive) part of easygoing stud sought after by women. Yet, in his inarticulated longing to love and be loved (his only familiarity with it is as a purely physical act) Joe finds the closest thing he has ever known of it in the deep friendship he develops with another male. One every bit the misfit he is. 

Scenes of Domesticity

Over the course of the film, as Joe and Ratso come to need and depend on one another, Joe’s deep-rooted masculinity anxiety shows signs of being replaced by both a fragile sense of self-worth, and a broader concept of what it means for him to be a man. Joe even tables his dreams and awakens to the reality that he's not cut out for hustling. He places the needs of someone else before his own, and though he commits a violent act out of desperation, it's one born of a genuine concern for the only person that has come to mean anything to him (the only person he has, in fact). Rico drops his tough-guy front and reveals his vulnerability (who could call a man in a Hawaiian shirt Ratso?) forcing Joe to abandon his own false macho attitudinizing, resulting in two individuals at last becoming defined (in our eyes and their own) by their humanity; not the empty labels of masculinity.

And for a rather bleak and somber film, I think that's a really lovely, bittersweet  message to end with.

THE AUTOGRAPH FILES

Bernard Hughes - 1980

Copyright © Ken Anderson