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Rated: X; DVD Release Date: Feb 21, 2006; Genre: Drama; With: Dustin Hoffman and Jon Voight; Distributor: United Artists (MGM)
B+
By Ken Tucker
Ken Tucker
Ken Tucker
Ken Tucker is critic-at-large for EW

Jon Voight was the original brokeback cowboy: a drawling hayseed with fancy boots who journeys to Manhattan to make his fortune but finds work only as a hustler to Park Avenue harridans like Sylvia Miles and a lonely gay kid played by Bob Balaban. His Joe Buck forms an unlikely friendship with a classic New York City bum: Dustin Hoffman's Ratso ''I'm walkin' heah!'' Rizzo. Midnight Cowboy's daring sexual content — it received both an X rating and Oscars for Best Picture, Director, and Screenplay — now comes across as less provocative than its street scenes set in a pre-Disney Times Square. Voight conveys innocence and hurt with subtlety; Hoffman conveys the wounded pride behind Ratso's lowly status and ungainly limp. EXTRAS The actors make brief comments in three featurettes, but they should have been doing a commentary. Instead — and because neither director John Schlesinger nor screenwriter Waldo Salt is alive — we get the dull musings of producer Jerome Hellman, who discusses how difficult it was to set up certain shotz-z-z-z...


Posted Feb 17, 2006
 

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