For today's Hippie Hotties, I want to highlight one of the most famous movies of the hippie era. We are talking about the 1969 John Schlesinger, X-rated, buddy drama Midnight Cowboy. Let's talk about the film, its cultural impact, and the women who really help that X-rating!
While Midnight Cowboy has the distinction of being the first X-rated movie to win an Oscar (and to this day the only one!), it's also often thought of more for the relationship between its male leads. So much so that you might forget that because our leading man is a gigolo, we do get to see some 60s sexpots nude.
Dustin Hoffman plays "Ratso" and Jon Voight plays Joe Buck, a Texan playboy who heads to New York where he assumes he can make big money. His job as a male escort allows us to see some sexy scenes in which he is either naked with a lady like Sylvia Miles, an older and wealthy lady who is a happy paying customer. We're happy to see her ass when she lures him to the bedroom!
Ratso and Joe Buck form a partnership where Ratso agrees to let him stay at his apartment. Joe Buck doesn't realize that Ratso is clearly very sick. As the movie progresses, his condition only gets worse.
In one of the most hippie scenes in the movie, the boys attend a party hosted by a filmmaker who is clearly based on Andy Warhol. The party actually uses some real Warhol people in the scene like Via, Joe Dallesandro, and Paul Morrissey. Ratso and Joe Buck go to the party, despite Ratso's failing health, and Joe takes a cigarette that he doesn't realize is clearly laced with something.
He trips and goes off to bang Brenda Vaccaro for $20. He and Brenda have an interesting sex sequence that even bares Brenda's boob. Brenda's character is loosely based on Warhol's one and only Edie Sedgwick!
This scene takes a turn when he can't actually perform sexually - well, yeah, he's on drugs for the first time! Instead, the pair play Scribbage and she suggests that maybe he's gay. This suggestion suddenly puts life back into Joe Buck who becomes determined to perform - and perform he does!
There is indeed a very rough scene featuring Jennifer Salt. She gets attacked in the car in which we see her naked body before some awful things happen to her. A lot of Jennifer's scenes happen in flashback, so we see her naked several times as Joe Buck remembers the horrific incident the two of them endured back in Texas. As the movie goes on, a narrative forms from these flashbacks which lets us in on Joe Buck's psyche and why he became a hustler.
While it is definitely hard to watch, these still images of Jen's jugs look skintastic. She also looks hot in a closeup love-making scene with Joe Buck and when she runs naked to an old house. That juicy booty probably helped the movie's rating!
In truth, the X-rating was given to this movie primarily because of the homosexual undertones in the film. Ratso and Joe Buck seem to get, um, really close. In a modern lens, this doesn't seem controversial at all! In fact, now that we have a bevy of bromance movies, you might just think these guys are just super codependent best friends. Whether or not they were in love, seems irrelevant!
I think that writer Owen Glievernman summed it up best in his 1994 retrospective piece on the film: "Midnight Cowboy's peep-show vision of Manhattan lowlife may no longer be shocking, but what is shocking, in 1994, is to see a major studio film linger this lovingly on characters who have nothing to offer the audience but their own lost souls."
That's really what the film is about at the end of the day: two very lost, lowdown people finding hope and comfort in one another. It's the ultimate 'treat others as you want to be treated' movie that promotes caring for your fellow man (however closely you want to care is up to you!). That's why it remains a true classic and it currently holds the 36th spot on the AFI Top 100 list. If you've never seen Midnight Cowboy, I can't recommend it enough!
And where do the hippies come in? Well, that lesson is pretty peace-and-love, if you ask me. There is also that hippie party where leading man trips for the first time.
You can watch that trippy sex scene here:
