Midnight Cowboy – Blu-ray

Directed by John Schlesinger

One of the British New Wave’s most versatile directors, John Schlesinger 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.

Key Features

• New 4K digital restoration 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 selected-scene commentary by cinematographer Adam Holender
• The Crowd Around the Cowboy, 1969 short film made on location
• Waldo Salt: A Screenwriter’s Journey, 1990 Academy Award–nominated documentary
• Two short 2004 documentaries on the making and release of the film
• Interviews with Jon Voight and John Schlesinger, including BAFTA LA Tribute excerpts
• Trailer included
• PLUS: An essay by critic Mark Harris

Special Features