Midnight Cowboy, starring
Jon Voight and
Dustin Hoffman, is a
1969 John Schlesinger[?] film in which a naive young
Texas cowboy named Joe Buck (Jon Voight) comes to
New York City to be a male hustler (a "midnight cowboy"). There he meets the scraggly Rico Salvatore "Ratso" Rizzo (Dustin Hoffman). Over the course of the film Buck slowly comes to terms with his sexuality and the closeness of his relationship with Rizzo. The film is the only
X-Rated film to win the
Academy Award for Best Picture (as of
2002, the only other X-rated picture that had been nominated was
A Clockwork Orange, which lost in
1972 to
The French Connection).
The film has been deemed "culturally significant" by the Library of Congress and selected for preservation in the United States National Film Registry.
The film also featured the song 'Everybody's Talking', sung by Harry Nilsson.
The Muppets character Rizzo Ratso is a street-wise but pesky rat modeled after Hoffman's character.