A Texan arrives in New York with nothing but a dream
In Midnight Cowboy, released in 1969 and directed by John Schlesinger, Jon Voight plays Joe Buck, a young Texan dishwasher who quits his job, puts on a cowboy outfit, and rides a bus to New York City convinced that wealthy women will pay for his company. The premise sounds like a joke, and in lesser hands it would have been one. Voight, however, plays Joe without a trace of knowing comedy. He believes in his fantasy completely, and that belief is both touching and terrifying. When he steps off the bus in Times Square, dressed as if he has walked out of a Western, he looks less like a hero than like a boy playing dress-up in a city that has no patience for boys.
Voight’s performance is built from small, unguarded details: the way Joe checks his reflection, the way he rehearses a smile, the way his confidence collapses when a stranger cheats him or ignores him. He does not play Joe as stupid. He plays him as sheltered, as someone whose ideas about manhood, sex, and success were formed by movies, songs, and small-town talk rather than by experience. The gap between what Joe imagines and what New York actually offers is the film’s subject, and Voight lives inside that gap for the whole running time.
Joe Buck and the myth of the cowboy
The cowboy costume is the film’s most important visual idea, and Voight understands exactly what it means. In the Western, the cowboy is free, competent, and desired. In New York, Joe’s outfit makes him a curiosity, a mark, and eventually a figure of pity. Schlesinger films him against neon signs, crowded sidewalks, and cheap hotel rooms, and the contrast is brutal. Voight never lets Joe notice the irony. He keeps adjusting his hat, polishing his boots, and telling himself that his luck is about to change. That refusal to see the truth is not played for laughs. It is played as a kind of innocence, the last thing Joe owns.
This is why the performance mattered so much in 1969. American cinema was turning away from clean heroes and toward characters who were lost, compromised, or out of place. Joe Buck was an early, fully realized example. He was not a rebel or a criminal mastermind. He was an ordinary young man who had been sold a story about himself and discovered, too late, that the story was false. Voight’s face, open and handsome and frequently bewildered, made that discovery painful to watch.
The friendship with Ratso Rizzo
Midnight Cowboy is also, at its heart, a friendship film. Joe meets Enrico Salvatore Rizzo, known as Ratso, played by Dustin Hoffman, a limping, coughing con man who first cheats Joe and then becomes his only real companion in the city. The relationship between the two men is prickly, funny, and eventually tender. Ratso dreams of Florida, of warmth and clean air, while Joe dreams of money and admiration. Neither dream is realistic, but they sustain each other through hunger, cold, and humiliation.
Voight’s scenes with Hoffman are a study in contrasting acting styles that somehow fit perfectly. Hoffman is wiry, fast-talking, and streetwise. Voight is slower, more physical, and more exposed. When Joe cares for Ratso as his health fails, Voight does not turn the scenes into a grand speech about loyalty. He simply shows a man learning, for the first time, to put someone else’s needs before his own fantasy. The final bus journey to Florida, with Joe holding the dying Ratso and finally understanding what he has lost, is one of the great endings in American film, and it works because Voight has earned every moment of Joe’s grief.
A city that does not forgive naivety
Schlesinger’s New York is not a glamorous backdrop. It is crowded, noisy, transactional, and often cruel. Joe tries to sell himself in bars, parties, and hotel rooms, and each encounter strips away another layer of his confidence. Voight plays these scenes without self-pity. He lets Joe be embarrassed, used, and frightened, but he never lets him become a mere victim. There is a stubborn decency in Joe, a refusal to become as cynical as the people who exploit him, and Voight protects that decency carefully. It is what makes the audience stay with a character who might otherwise be impossible to like.
The film’s famous X rating, later changed to R, and its Best Picture Oscar win both point to its cultural shock value in 1969. It was an adult film in every sense: sexually frank, morally ambiguous, and unwilling to offer easy comfort. Voight, in his first major screen role, carried that adult seriousness without ever seeming like a seasoned star performing seriousness. He seemed, instead, like a young actor discovering his own power in real time.
Why Joe Buck endures
Joe Buck endures as a signature Jon Voight role because it contains, in embryo, so much of what Voight would do best for the next fifty years: the earnest American man, the moral confusion, the willingness to look foolish in pursuit of something true. Later roles would give him war, prison, and the wilderness. Midnight Cowboy gave him the city, and a character who arrived there believing in a myth and left having learned what love and loss actually cost.
Watch Midnight Cowboy for Voight’s eyes first, and then for his walk. Notice how Joe’s swagger fades across the film, how his cowboy costume gradually looks less like armor and more like a costume, and how his tenderness toward Ratso grows in direct proportion to the collapse of his dream. That arc, from fantasy to feeling, is the performance. It made Jon Voight a star, and it remains one of the most humane portraits of American naivety ever put on screen.