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#383 Midnight Cowboy

Watched: May 10 2026

Director: John Schlesinger

Starring: Dustin Hoffman, Jon Voight, Sylvia Miles, John McGiver, Brenda Vaccaro, Barnard Hughes, Ruth White, Jennifer Salt

Year: 1969

Runtime: 1h 53min

Joe Buck (Voight) is coming east to be a prostitute! The naive (and a bit simple) cowboy tries to establish a career as a “hustler” but is ridiculously bad at the business side of things. Then he meets Ratso/Rizzo (Hoffman) who offers to set him up with a pimp for a cut of the proceeds. What could possibly go wrong?

“Oh my God! I’m GORGEOUS!” (IYKYK)

This could be the setup for either a comedy or a tragedy. Fortunately for the movie, but unfortunately for our mental states, it definitely lands in the latter category. Finding rich women willing to pay for sex is a harder job than Joe imagined. but at least he develops an unlikely but kind of beautiful relationship with the equally weird and lonely outsider Rizzo, who dreams of going to sunny Florida.

But for now, he’s busy walkin’ here

Joe’s past seems a Cimmerian cocktail of childhood abuse, religious trauma, sexual trauma and isolation. Homeless Rizzo is a tragic character as well, squatting in squalor (that’s fun to say ten times fast!) and trying to survive by any means necessary in an inhospitable city.

“So, I see a suave cowboy hustler.” “No, no, this is definitely a bachelor. Confirmed.”

We loved their relationship, the flashbacks and mysteries of Joe’s past, the dream sequences and the fantasies. Hansel and Gretel’s party seemed to us the quintessential ’60s New York party, and that whole sequence was exciting. Also, there’s a not-so-secret homosexual subtext here that’s really great. But we loved a lot of that in the worst way possible – this movie is just incredibly sad. That being said – it’s a classic for very good reasons and we would recommend it to everyone.

“Well Deborah, I’m not gonna pay him to lick my FACE!”

Again though Edgar, why do you make us watch these emotionally devastating movies? There have been three in a row that have gradually chipped away at our will to live. Reality is bad enough right now – we don’t need our entertainment to make things even worse…

Oh, all right, we forgive you. Mostly because these heartbreaking and depressing movies have all been very good. But also partly because you’re not actually forcing us to do this and we kind of brought it on ourselves…

What we learned: We need Jesus! More specifically, we each need a flashing Jesus statue in our bathroom.

MVP: Repression? Imagination? Friendship?

Next time: Sweet Charity (1969)

Posted on by 1000filmsblog

#382 Last Summer

Watched: August 9 2026

Director: Frank Perry

Starring: Barbara Hershey, Catherine Burns, Richard Thomas, Bruce Davison

Year: 1969

Runtime: 1h 35min

We continue our streak of feelbad movies with this horrible gem from Frank Perry. Teenagers Sandy (Hershey), Dan (Davison) and Peter (Thomas) meet on Fire Island one summer and bond over a dying seagull. After some improvised veterinary (ornithological?) surgery, Peter becomes Sandy’s new hero and the three of them become inseperable for the season. Both boys are smitten with the fairly uninhibited Sandy, and as they nurse the seagull back to health, get up to drunken shenanigans and laugh together about sexual assault (WTF Sandy’s stepdad???), they develop an unhealthy us-against-the-world mentality.

Fortunately, nothing has ever gone wrong when you mix horned up teenagers, drugs and alcohol, and no adult supervision with summer, sun and rivalry.

Sandy keeps the gull as a pet, but when it does what wild animals do and bites her, she takes it into the woods and brutally murders it. This is what we in the business refers to as “Chekov’s Seagull™” (ok, so it’s not really that, just your run-of-the-mill foreshadowing, but the phrase is just too good to pass up).

“Hot girls keep literary devices as pets”

The trio gradually start hanging out with Rhoda (Burns) who, despite seeming younger, or at least less worldly than them, is not initially intimidated by Sandy and her two minions. They follow the mean girl playbook of adopting her and including her just enough for her to crave their approval, but not enough to actually become part of the crew. More of a pet, really… The only exception is Peter, who seems to genuine like the new girl, at least most of the time.

When he isn’t busy liking Sandy and Dan’s approval more, that is.

We went into this blind, and were intrigued from the start. There are a lot of WTF-moments, such as the normalization of sexually assaulting young girls (both girls have stories about their parents’ friends that are NOT ok). Also, the three guys chasing after them after they’ve been to the cinema (to watch Bergman, it seems – our old dog would have loved it!) – they really decided to go after a girl flanked by two men in order to rape and/or rob her? Seems a bit much, even for rapists. Then there’s Sandy’s psychopathic tendencies and the seagull…

“I may or may not be sleeping with your mother, little girl, but that doesn’t mean a guy can’t shoot his shot?”

Last Summer is a very tense movie and it made us extremely worried, stressed and scared. Rhoda (and Catherine Burns!) was amazing though – despite her insecurities she was the only one who would stand up to Sandy and even in the end, she challenged her “superiority.” Sandy and Dan were just bullies, but we ended up hating Peter the most. He followed along with everything the other two decided to do but then felt really bad afterwards, ok? Like, he’s actually a really nice guy, you see. He didn’t really mean the things he did, he swears. In fact, he didn’t even reeeeally do any of it, he just sort of… participated. But not actively. So you can’t exactly blame him, all right? The other two initiated everything, so they’re the bad guys, really. Honestly, he’s a victim too! Really!

“Besides, if (other) people don’t want to be victims, they should stop putting themselves in vulnerable positions. Such as hanging out with their friends. Or trying to find love through dating ads.”

What we learned: If you keep doing horrible things but then feel bad about them afterwards, it actually changes nothing. You are the literal worst.

MVP: Rhoda. And #Chekovsseagull.

Next time: Midnight Cowboy (1969)