Midnight Cowboy - 1969

Midnight Cowboy Framed Art Print
16 in. x 22 in.
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Midnight Cowboy (1969) is an ultra-realistic, adult film (shot on location) with sordid, downbeat and serious content, from British director John Schlesinger, who had previously directed the widely-acclaimed Darling (1965) - with a Best Actress win for Julie Christie.

This film portrays the unlikely companionship and poignant tragic drama of two homeless, down-and-out, anti-hero drifters who are powerfully bonded together in a tale resembling Steinbeck's Of Mice and Men. With a misleading title for the morality tale about the venomous American class system, some viewers thought it was a western; in fact, the film's title expresses the code name for a "male hustler" - the self-professed occupation of one of the characters, a slow-witted, fringe-jacketed Texan dishwasher transplanted to the big, apathetic city of New York to hopefully become a high-paid street gigolo. The flip-side of this dark and serious buddy picture was its major competitor of the year, the M-rated, humorous revisionistic western/comedy Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid (1969) with its heroes Butch Cassidy (Paul Newman) and the Sundance Kid (Robert Redford).

It was notable for being the first and only X-rated film (its nude scenes and bold content - sex and drugs - were shocking for its time, but its X-rating for its initial release was later downgraded to R when the film was re-released in late 1970) to receive the Best Picture Oscar from the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences. It garnered seven nominations, including Best Actor (Dustin Hoffman and Jon Voight), Best Supporting Actress (Sylvia Miles in an extremely brief on-screen role), and Best Film Editing (Hugh A. Robertson), and ended up with three Oscars - Best Picture, Best Director, and Best Adapted Screenplay (by Waldo Salt from James Leo Herlihy's 1965 novel). It was an archetypal film for the "New Hollywood" of the 70s, with its adult themes of alienation, sex and drugs, anti-authoritarianism, and a quest for freedom.

The Graduate - 1967

Dustin Hoffman Framed Art Print
17 in. x 14 in.
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This is Benjamin. He's a little worried about his future.

The Graduate (1967) is one of the key, ground-breaking films of the late 1960s, and helped to set in motion a new era of film-making. The influential film is a biting satire/comedy about a recent nebbish, East Coast college graduate who finds himself alienated and adrift in the shifting, social and sexual mores of the 1960s, and questioning the values of society (with its keyword "plastics"). The themes of the film also mirrored the changes occurring in Hollywood, as a new vanguard of younger directors were coming to the forefront. Avant-garde director Mike Nichols, following his debut success of Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? (1966) with this second film, instantly became a major new talent in American film after winning an Academy Award for his directorship.

The theme of an innocent and confused youth who is exploited, mis-directed, seduced (literally and figuratively) and betrayed by a corrupt, decadent, and discredited older generation (that finds its stability in "plastics") was well understood by film audiences and captured the spirit of the times. One of the film's posters proclaimed the difficult coming-of-age for the recent, aimless college graduate:

The two different generations are also reflected in other dualities: the two rival women (young innocent doe-eyed daughter Elaine and the older seductress Mrs. Robinson), the two California settings (Los Angeles and Berkeley) and S. and N. California cultures (materialistic vs. intellectual), and the division in Benjamin's character (morally drifting and indecisive vs. committed).