#jon voight

Dustin Hoffman & Jon Voight in 'Midnight Cowboy' 1969.

I can see why James Dickey grew so angry at director John Boorman’s revisions on his screenplay version of the book. The film never quite decides what it wants to be: an adventure story, an environmental fable, or a story about a clash between cultures. It works best as an adventure story, which is in the nature of film, and somewhat as a clash of cultures. The four suburban hotshots who arrive in the backwoods of northern George for a weekend adventure are from the outset rude and condescending to the people who live there year-round, and of course they get their comeuppance in extreme ways. Only one man in their company sympathizes with the locals: Drew (Ronny Cox) brought along a guitar, not the bows and arrows that Ed (Jon Voight) and Lewis (Burt Reynolds) bring with them, and he interacts musically with one of the supposedly “inbred hillbillies” in the celebrated “Dueling Banjos” sequence. Drew is also the only one who tries to hold out for facing justice after Lewis kills one of the mountain men who attack them. Better backgrounding on the four adventurers might have given more substance to their characters and their ideas, and the mountain men are monsters out of nightmares rather than actual human beings, so the debate over justice seems a little out of focus. But it’s mostly the environmental issue that falls by the way: The suburbanites show little sympathy shown for the people who face seeing their homes flooded by the proposed dam – one of them even says it’s the “best thing that ever happened to this town” – and almost no feeling for the wilderness that will be sunk beneath the man-made lake. Boorman would later make The Emerald Forest (1985), a more environmentally conscious film also about the construction of a dam, set in the Brazilian rain forest.

🦖🦖🦖

dir. John Schlesinger / w. Dustin Hoffman, Jon Voight

Midnight Cowboy (1969) dir. John Schlesinger

Attempting to cartoonify the Midnight Cowboy guys but I actually don't know how to draw