Desperate Souls, Dark City, and The Legend of Midnight Cowboy (2023)

I loved this. I think It really helps to have seen Midnight Cowboy before you watch this, because it was such a special movie. Midnight Cowboy is about loneliness. It is about dreams, sunny and yet broken. It was about gay male sexuality and seeing it, for the first time, in a major motion picture. It was about the crush and alienation of New York City: the godless concrete carnival wasteland. The movie is also about the larger sexual revolution. It is about money and poverty and class and how they could tear you apart. It is about how the war in Vietnam was tearing the soul of America apart. A half century after its release, Midnight Cowboy remains one of the most original and groundbreaking movies of the modern era. With beguiling performances from Jon Voight and Dustin Hoffman as two loners who join forces out of desperation, blacklist survivor Waldo Salt's brilliant screenplay, and John Schlesinger's fearless direction, the 1969 film became the only X- rated film to ever win the Academy Award for Best Picture. Its vivid and compassionate depiction of a more realistic New York City and its inhabitants paved the way for a generation’s worth of gritty movies with complex characters and adult themes. But this is not a documentary about the making of Midnight Cowboy: it is about the deeply gifted and flawed people behind a dark and difficult masterpiece; New York City in a troubled time of cultural ferment; and the era that made a movie and the movie that made an era. Featuring extensive archival material and compelling new interviews, director illuminates how one film captured the essence of a time and a place, reflecting a rapidly changing society with striking clarity.