PARTISAN REVIEW
117
that Paradise may not be so far away, that at least some are not cynical
of attaining it.
Midnight Cowboy
is flawed by the obverse of the casting mistake
in
Alic.e.
Whereas Arlo Guthrie's relaxation made his Hollywood col–
leagues look phoney, Dustin Hoffman's performance, coughing, limping,
Ratso, a fever-wracked highschool dropout of the Italian Greenwich
Village slums, is such overwhelming bravura that it jars my belief in
events. Again, the strength of the film lies in documentary, the long
bus ride from a little southwestern town, the gorgeous panoply of a
Hippie party in New York City, occasional glimmers of the sex life in
home-town America. There is cowardice in the writing of
Midnight
Cowboy.
A story
is
set up but never explored. John Voight, musky with
virility, comes to the City, secretly traumatized but ready
to
offer his
services as a male stud. We watch his inevitable comic attempts to get
started in business, then at last, his first success. Now, the story is
really interesting; we are in the world of Andy Warhol, a vampish lady
and a country yokel. Can it work, what will he learn, where will it end;
dang, Dustin Hoffman shows up again with his depressing cold and we
are whisked away on a melodramatic voyage to death
in
Miami.
Boo! Boo!
Midnight Cowboy
shares with
Alice's Restaurant
and
Easy
Rider
a
subliminal text. Its antihero, John Voight, is the victim of a repressive
Puritan society; the flashbacks indicate that he
has
been caught with
his high school sweetheart
in
the act of intercourse and punished brutal–
ly. (Frankly John Schlesinger could have made a much better film if
he'd just stayed in the world of the flashbacks.) Again, a subtle preach–
ing, which brings up an advertisement for
Hail Hero.
The generation gap is more
than
just long hair, loud music, or a
nruunderstanding of ideals between father and son. It is a void
from which a new force must emerge, a new hero.
The picture of its long-haired, bland, "swinging" male lead is a clear
indication of the "blowing in the wind." And this
is
the kind of movie
earmarked for Radio City Music Hall.
Politics
in
Eden, that seems
to
be
the persistent metaphor haunting
the films today; the Blue Meanies despoil and threaten, for children,
the fairy-tale land to which the
Yellow Submarine
ventures, for adults,
the sexual gardens of
Alice
and
Easy
Rider.
We are now asked to iden–
tify the sensualities of Spenser's
Bower of Bliss
with the chaste innocence
before the Fall. Right or wrong, the reawakening awareness of the noble
savage means that the sex movie now carries a revolutionary message,
personal and political. So it is no accident that two films differing so
