He and Ridley Scott were both Brits who really examined and MRI’d America in their movies.”
#Ratso rizzo full#
Everything was new, exciting and crass, full of energy. But, yeah, he loved the strangeness of America. He did over 30 documentaries, one of which won the Berlin Film Festival, called Terminus, which helped start his career. “John was a documentary filmmaker in the Fifties. “Well, it’s like a documentary of America, warts and all,” smiles Childers, who was the director’s significant other for 30 years. Of course, Schlesinger doesn’t miss a trick in using Joe’s alienation to scrutinise New York City and its every more. Neon, skyscrapers, homeless winos and cross-dressers, it is at once fascinating and intimidating for our youthful cowpoke who strolls the streets head and shoulders above the crowds dressed in his cowboy boots, hat, shirt and buckskin fringed jacket. Suddenly, Joe is in this crazy conurbation that, home to millions, is as barking as the Deep South.
Ergo, Midnight Cowboy is the ultimate “buddy movie”. If we are lucky enough we can empathise with that. They are simply friends who would do anything for each other no holds barred. Luckily, they find each other, not in a sexual respect, but in a way that can touch us all. The story’s starving protagonists have lost everything – their dignity, their masculinity, their self-worth – and as such are struggling to remain on the lowest rung of the social ladder. Midnight Cowboy, however, as a piece of gut-wrenching social realism, is on another level. His first two features – A Kind Of Loving (1962) and Billy Liar (1963) – are jewels in the genre’s crown. No surprise, then, that Hampstead-born Schlesinger was a pioneer of the latter.
#Ratso rizzo movie#
If the movie were French it would have been described as new wave, if Italian it would be neorealism and if British a kitchen sink drama. It’s thrilling to see the audience’s reaction to it today after half a century. It was a really extraordinary time and I think the film in many ways reflects that.
The streets were falling apart there were garbage strikes everywhere. It was bankrupt bother, morally and financially.
People were taking to the streets millions of people demonstrating. “When we were there in New York filming, Robert Kennedy and Martin Luther King were assassinated, Nixon was president and the Vietnam War was in full swing.
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