To some, John Schlesinger's Oscar-winning 1969 street-hustler drama Midnight Cowboy stands beside Easy Rider and Bonnie And Clyde as one of the edgy '60s movies that proved how an American New Wave could be financially viable. To others, it's one of the final, fatal examples of how '60s Hollywood tried to co-opt youth culture. Granted, the story—which has Jon Voight as a Texas stud who comes to New York to seduce rich women, and ends up in a condemned building with a diseased Dustin Hoffman—is seamier than anything the studios had previously cooked up. But from the pop soundtrack to the psychedelic montages, Midnight Cowboy puts a modernist gloss on the legitimately daring work being done in the cinematic underground. The movie has too much in common with the groovy '60s comedies that Hollywood pumped out in the wake of the British Invasion, and even Schlesinger's every-shot-a-masterpiece style recalls The Graduate in the way it seems oppressively overdetermined.
