#fred neil

[clownes-van-zandt]

from left to right Bob Dylan, Karen Dalton, and Fred Neil playing at Cafe Wha?

1961

[dreaminginthedeepsouth]

So great to hear this song again. It always makes me think of my dad. We shared this album at a time in life when we were sharing music, ideas, and laughter. He loved this song and played the album I gave him again and again. He made a tape and played it in his car. We would talk about the songs on the album. Does anyone do that any more? Long discussions about record albums. When the names of great songwriters are mentioned, many leave out Fred Neil. Wrote great hits for quite a few and if you listen to this version a few times you hear some magic...I love Nilsson's version but this one is very cool. A friend of a friend told me that Fred was notorious for taking his royalty checks and throwing parties for his friends until it was gone then he'd be broke till the next round of checks came in. I first heard this song from my boyfriend at the time, David. David had an entirely different musical taste from me. I was into Classical music, show tunes, and top 40 on the radio. I wasn't so interested in the acid rock and other genres that were evolving in the 60s. David knew of artists and musical styles I'd never been exposed to. The Youngbloods, Blues, Dylan, Cohen - and, of course, Fred Neil. David and I had a long relationship that was part magic, part lies and fairy dust and the other dusty heartbreaks that were part of life in the 60s and 70s. I wish him well, as I'm sure he does me, as we gave each others so many gifts in the course of our path together. One of the gifts is this song.

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"You have to go on and be crazy. Craziness is like heaven." Jimi Hendrix

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"To understand the world, you must first understand a place like Mississippi." William Faulkner +

[From my blog "Quidnunc" which is mostly a record of why I am the way I am]

[atelieroblique]

[dweemeister]

Midnight Cowboy (1969)

From 1934-1968, the major Hollywood studios used the Hays Code to self-censor each other’s works. Prior to 1934, film came under fire during the silent era from various civic and religious organizations, all demanding that Hollywood uphold moral values. The Hays Code was replaced in 1968 by the Motion Picture Association of America’s (MPAA) ratings system, still in use today.

American cinema’s push towards darkness coincided with this change, as the studios gradually stopped enforcing the Code so stringently. By the late 1960s, American filmmakers were operating in both Old Hollywood and New Hollywood modes – and the difference in cinemas was stark. On the darker side of this dynamic in 1969 was John Schlesinger’s Midnight Cowboy, tackling subject matter impossible in an American movie a few years’ prior, testing the boundaries left in the wreckage of the old Studio System. A pioneer of queer cinema (though it is not a queer film itself), Midnight Cowboy’s power rests on its depiction of New York City’s decaying underbelly, the difficulty of its characters’ poverty, even when certain storytelling and aesthetic choices threaten to derail those ideas.

Quitting his dishwashing job with little warning, a young Texan man named Joe Buck (Jon Voight) leaves his small hometown for New York City. There, he has designs on being a high-end prostitute, prioritizing upper-middle and upper class women. The sex work business begins with more cold shoulders and hostility than Joe anticipates. In Joe’s early days in the Big Apple, he also encounters an Italian American con man named Rico “Ratso” Rizzo (Dustin Hoffman). Joe falls for one of Rico’s cons on their first meeting, but the two eventually settle upon a business relationship – Rico will facilitate clients for Joe. Across the film, in Hugh A. Robertson’s (1971’s Shaft) editing and oftentimes close-up first-person cinematography, we learn of Joe’s backstory: his turbulent relationship with his parents, the tragic death of his late girlfriend, Annie (Jennifer Salt).

The remainder of Midnight Cowboy’s cast lasts, at most, only a few scenes. Sylvia Miles, John McGiver, and Barnard Hughes dot the narrative; Bob Balaban makes his feature film debut in an emotionally and sexually fraught moment.

As an adaptation of James Leo Herlihy’s novel of the same name, Midnight Cowboy and its content would send shivers down the spine of any American movie studio executive in the late 1960s. Who would want to adapt such challenging material and invariably attract heavy criticism from anti-Hollywood moralists? That Midnight Cowboy found a home at United Artists – the one major Hollywood studio that was most like an independent studio – seems a natural fit. But the material still concerned UA’s executives. So in order to proceed with production, Schlesinger and his crew accepted pay cuts for a small percentage of the film’s profits; Jon Voight took pay at “scale” (in layman’s terms, minimum wage for a Screen Actors Guild member).

Screenwriter Waldo Salt worked at the height of the Hollywood Studio System and its collapse in the late 1960s. Without a credit, he contributed writing to The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1939) and The Philadelphia Story (1940). And despite his blacklisting after refusing to testify to the House Committee on Un-American Activities (HUAC), Salt staged a triumphant comeback in his late-career work to Midnight Cowboy, Serpico (1973), and Coming Home (1978). For Midnight Cowboy, he discards the novel’s opening third (set in Texas), taking Joe straight to New York City. Most importantly, Salt centralizes the tense friendship between Joe and Rico – in the book, their relationship closes out the final act.

The two men would, in most other narratives, be narrative foils. Joe is the slick-talking, outwardly polite, and tall dreamer who sees New York City as the place where he will make his fortune. Rico is the unkempt, poorly-mannered, and grizzled cynic who would rather be somewhere sunnier and warmer. Conducting illicit business in late 1960s New York – despite such business being rampant across the 42nd Street area then – has taken a physical and psychological toll on Rico, whose hotheadedness is symptomatic of just getting by day-to-day. Naturally, the lights and skyscrapers of New York appeal to a rural, wide-eyed Texan who, the film implies, has never set foot outside of his home state. He sees America’s largest city as the answer to his boredom back home, a near-fantastical place where the city’s sheer size will provide, regardless of occupation or life station.

Joe learns, gradually, that his imagined New York City never was, is not, or may ever be. His ideals of easy sex with attractive women and a steady income brush against the economic demands of late twentieth century lower Manhattan. Voight’s Joe grows steadily disillusioned with his daily grind, and softens his opinions on the grifter friend he now shares a residence with. His character’s outspokenness, vocal homophobia, and self-assuredness contrasts against his private moments: fatigue etched across his face, emotional and, yes, physical tenderness towards Rico.

Though Hoffman’s character is a longtime resident of the city, he nevertheless seems an outsider. Hoffman’s Rico regularly seems as if he is (metaphorically) looking over his shoulder, as if anticipating someone he has crossed to confront him. His lack of hygiene, gait, and general sleaziness could not be any further than Hoffman’s breakout role in The Graduate (1967), two years’ prior.

It is a credit to both Voight and Hoffman as to how both their characters exercise a performative masculinity to attract clients, fend off criticism, and intimidate others. Beyond those façades, their vulnerabilities – emotional, financial, as humans – creep into their public lives. By the film’s bleak ending, all those masks Voight and Hoffman have had to wear are tossed aside.

Midnight Cowboy ushered in a decade of films depicting New York City as an inhospitable place – in both contemporary and historical settings – ripe for character studies and sprawling epics. The city's then-blighted, grimy, impersonable, and unsafe atmosphere would help mold New York City as a "character" for the next decade of American filmmaking. Two Godfather movies (1972 and 1974), The Taking of Pelham One Two Three (1974), Taxi Driver (1976), unapologetically used the city’s landscape and its people as a character. Yet few of those movies comment on the dehumanizing cycle of poverty as much as Midnight Cowboy does (Taxi Driver indeed touches on poverty, but it is foremost a movie about male loneliness, purposelessness, and mental illness).

The oft-repeated axiom in filmmaking is to “show, not tell”. Generally, this is true, but one has to be strategic on when to tell. Midnight Cowboy shows and tells the audience about that cycle of poverty. On the telling side, look at how Joe’s first client, Cass (Sylvia Miles), reacts when he asks for payment. That moment sets the film’s tone, as almost the entire final two-thirds of the movie are conversations about money. On the showing side, Joe’s flashbacks (which let the viewer know that Joe’s problems with emotional repression stem from personal hardship and tragedy) in quieter moments and both actors’ non-verbal performances let viewers understand the increasing desperation of Joe and Rico’s situation. When financial insecurity transforms into medical precarity, the film delves into something it has been dancing around.

That something is the queer subtext clearly running through a vast majority of Midnight Cowboy. It first appears when Joe and Rico meet for the first time, and reaches its apex as Joe tends to a clearly ill Rico in the film’s final stages. Director John Schlesinger (1967’s Far from the Madding Crowd, 1976’s Marathon Man) was one of the few openly gay figures in Hollywood in the late 1960s, and would be no stranger to tackling queer themes before and after Midnight Cowboy. But even with the Hays Code’s dissolution, Schlesinger and Salt could only take any queer depictions so far.

Yet, look and listen closely enough, and one can find queer influences and numerous moments: the repressed sexuality among various characters even with Joe, Joe’s vocal homophobia contradicts his sexual interactions with men (a precursor to transgender actress Candy Darling’s self-loathing performance in 1971’s Some of My Best Friends Are…), the non-sexual intimacy with Rico later in the film that clearly indicates an inkling of romance, and the overlong Warhol-esque psychedelic party that disrupts the film’s pacing (and a moment that it never recovers from). Midnight Cowboy, frustratingly, never truly interrogates or confronts its implicit queerness. Whether by design or by the limitations of time, this is an unexplored avenue that could have deepened not only the film’s central relationship, but its depiction of urban poverty and how it manifested in late 1960s New York City.

Schlesinger does not ask composer John Barry (eleven James Bond movies, 1990’s Dances with Wolves) to do much with his score. What little there is – led by strings and harmonica – makes me wonder how Barry might have scored an American Western movie at the genre’s height. It is journeyman work for a composer whose best work was ahead, with the score used only to relate Joe’s Western roots. For various reasons more appropriate for another piece, the late 1960s were a time where the orchestral scores of Hollywood’s Golden Age seemed to be on their way out. Despite the limited score, Barry’s versatility and sense of orchestration is apparent whenever his score appears.

Instead, the film’s musical interest comes from Harry Nilsson’s rendition of “Everybody’s Talkin’”, which first plays over the opening credits. The folk rock song, with country influences, uses its propulsive guitar harmonies and legato strings to suggest Joe’s wandering ways, the expansiveness of his northeast trip from Texas. Its lyrics, interspersed throughout the film’s opening half (the full song does not play over the opening credits), embody Joe’s optimism. It is no coincidence the song, used in the opening half’s montages and scenic transitions, disappears during the film’s concluding passages.

Shortly before its release, the MPAA* handed Midnight Cowboy an X rating – labeling it for adults only. Later replaced by the NC-17 rating, the X rating (and it successor) was a financial and marketing headache for any movie studio looking to recoup its budgets. Curiously, the X rating was self-inflicted by the studio. Then-United Artists CEO, Arthur B. Krim, asked for the X rating after consulting with his homophobic psychiatrist who thought Midnight Cowboy’s themes might turn audiences gay. With an X rating in tow, UA’s marketing department leaned into the controversy and the sensational rating. Their efforts worked, despite their boss’ interference: Midnight Cowboy became the third-highest grossing film of 1969 and won the Academy Award for Best Picture (the only X or NC-17-rated movie to do so, and one year after the most recent G-rated movie to do so in 1968’s Oliver!).

As a portrait of New York City near the start of its late twentieth century decay, Midnight Cowboy is one of the finest snapshots of its setting. For storytelling and opportunistic political purposes, those images of dirt and debauchery have continued to define the city long after that era has passed. Benefitting from two wonderful central performances from Voight and Hoffman, Midnight Cowboy lives in those conceptions of urban desperation and decline.

There, amid sleazy streets lined with adult theaters and mansions built decades ago, it finds the basic architecture of American queer cinema and the New York-set dramas of the 1970s and ‘80s. John Schlesinger and his crew crafted what they could. It would be up to later films and filmmakers to the test the boundaries the American studios had just begun to break.

My rating: 8/10

^ Based on my personal imdb rating. My interpretation of that ratings system can be found in the “Ratings system” page on my blog. Half-points are always rounded down.

* The MPAA’s – now MPA – is a self-governing trade association. Its membership solely consists of the major American movie studios.

For more of my reviews tagged “My Movie Odyssey”, check out the tag of the same name on my blog.

[musickickztoo]

Fred Neil 

March 16, 1936 – July 7, 2001

[kdo-three]

Nilsson - Everybody's Talkin' (1968) Fred Neil from: "Everybody's Talkin'" / "Don't Leave Me" (Single) "Aerial Ballet" (LP) "Midnight Cowboy" (OST)

Pop | Soft Rock | Fred Neil Cover

@Archive (left click = play) (320kbps)

Personnel: Nilsson: Vocals Al Casey: Acoustic Guitars Randy Cierley Sterling: Banjo Mike Melvoin: Piano Larry Knechtel: Bass Jim Gordon: Drums

Strings | Violins: Alfred Lustgarten Jerome Reisler Wilbert Nuttycombe Leonard Atkins Darrel Terwilliger Arnold Belnick

Produced by Rick Jarrard

Recorded: @ RCA Victor Music Center of the World in Hollywood, California USA on November 13, 1967

Single Released: July, 1968 RCA Victor Records

[musicwithoutborders]

Fred Neil, The Dolphins I Fred Neil, 1966

[leonardcohenofficial]