Midnight Cowboy – Criterion Collection – Blu-Ray

One of the British New Wave’s most versatile directors, JOHN SCHLESINGER (Billy Liar) came to New York in the late 1960s to make Midnight Cowboy, a picaresque story of friendship that captured a city in crisis and sparked a new era of Hollywood movies. Jon Voight delivers a career-making performance as Joe Buck, a wide-eyed hustler from Texas hoping to score big with wealthy city women; he finds a companion in Enrico “Ratso” Rizzo, an ailing swindler with a bum leg and a quixotic fantasy of escaping to Florida, played by Dustin Hoffman in a radical departure from his breakthrough in The Graduate. A critical and commercial success despite controversy over what the MPAA termed its “homosexual frame of reference,” Midnight Cowboy became the first X-rated film to receive the best picture Oscar, and decades on, its influence still reverberates through cinema.

Special Features
New 4K Digital Restoration, Approved By Cinematographer Adam Holender, With Uncompressed Monaural Soundtrack, Alternate 5.1 Surround DTS-HD Master Audio Soundtrack, Audio Commentary From 1991 Featuring Director John Schlesinger And Producer Jerome Hellman, New Video Essay With Commentary By Holender, New Photo Gallery With Commentary By Photographer Michael Childers, The Crowd Around The Cowboy A 1969 Short Film Made On Location For Midnight Cowboy, Waldo Salt: A Screenwriter's Journey, An Academy Award–Nominated Documentary From 1990 By Eugene Corr And Robert Hillmann, Two Short Documentaries From 2004 On The Making And Release Of Midnight Cowboy, Interview With Actor Jon Voight On The David Frost Show From 1970, Voight's Original Screen Test, Interview From 2000 With Schlesinger For Bafta Los Angeles, Excerpts From The 2002 Bafta Los Angeles Tribute To Schlesinger, Trailer, Plus: An Essay By Critic Mark Harris