The blurb on the back:

A Cowboy Commercial
Here comes Joe Buck, six-foot-one of eager erotic muscle and rarin' for action ...
Midnight cowboy, midnight son of three blonde tarts, white midnight stud. Slow talking, slow walking Joe. Big boy moving in on midnight city, nightmare New York. Midnight salesman, selling wares to whores, love to the unlovable, sex to the sexless, eternal youth to the old. Shedding his lifeblood light on all the darkened world ...

'The compulsive appeal of a rattlesnake' - Sunday Times

In its day, of course, Midnight Cowboy was big stuff: the first X-rated movie to get a Best Picture Oscar, the launch-pad of Jon Voight's career, the film that took British kitchen-sink director John Schlesinger to America, and so on and so forth. In retrospect, the story of a Texan stud trying to make his way in the permissive amorality of New York and meeting an equally unattractive con man (played by Dustin Hoffman) doesn't really cut the mustard. Still it does have John Barry's fantastic score to recommend it, complete with the classic song 'Everybody's Talking'.

Naturally, you don't get that from the novel on which Waldo Salt's Oscar-winning screenplay was based. And you don't get much else either, to be honest. It's not that it's badly written - just a bit on the dull side, and too much an embodiment of its era to be worth spending your time with now. Your best bet is to put Faith No More's cover of the theme tune on your CD and enjoy the period charm of the sleeve.

Messrs Hoffman & Voight

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ARTISTIC MERIT: 2/5
ENTERTAINMENT VALUE: 2/5
HIPNESS QUOTIENT: 2/5

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