Midnight Cowboy: The Criterion Collection (1969)
Monday 28th May 2018
One of the British New Wave's most versatile directors, John Schlesinger (Billy Liar) 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 (Coming Home) 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.
Midnight Cowboy is released on Blu-ray in a new 4K restoration 28th May 2018 by Sony Pictures Home Entertainment as part of the Criterion Collection.
- New 4K digital restoration, with uncompressed monaural soundtrack
- Alternate 5.1 surround soundtrack, presented in DTS-HD Master Audio
- 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, a 1969 short film made on location for Midnight Cowboy
- Waldo Salt: A Screenwriter's Journey, an Academy Award-nominated documentary from 1990 by Eugene Corr and Robert Hillmann
- Two short 2004 documentaries on the making and release of Midnight Cowboy
- Interview with actor Jon Voight on The David Frost Show from 1970
- Interview from 2000 with Schlesinger for BAFTA Los Angeles
- Excerpts from the 2002 BAFTA LA Tribute to Schlesinger, featuring Voight and actor Dustin Hoffman
- PLUS: An essay by critic Mark Harris
Please note - Disc special features are subject to change, may differ from format to format and/or may differ from region to region.
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