Midnight Cowboy

The events of Buck's life are told in mostly chronological order, interspersed by flashbacks or daydream sequences which hint at Buck's back-story. Joe Pesci received the Academy Award for Best Supporting Actor for his portrayal of Tommy DeVito in 1990. They form a friendship, none too soon for Rizzo, who becomes increasingly dependent upon Buck as health problems make it increasingly harder for Rizzo to cope with his situation. In 2000 the United States Library of Congress deemed the film "culturally significant" and selected it for preservation in the National Film Registry. Over the course of the rest of the film the two deal with the realities of all-but-homeless street life, suspended briefly by a foray into a Warhol-like party scene (with some of the Warhol superstars in cameo appearances). The film is #94 on the American Film Institute's list of 100 Years, 100 Movies and is consistently in the top 30 on the Internet Movie Database's list of top 250 films. He meets the lame, scraggly Rico "Ratso" Rizzo (Dustin Hoffman), who first cons him out of $20, but after they cross paths a second time, they begin a partnership, with Rizzo working as Buck's "manager". Now he is a "nobody"; as he laments in the film's closing lines, "I get to live the rest of my life like a schnook.".

He is soon forced to hustle for a meager living as a "midnight cowboy" with a clientele that's the opposite (in gender and affluence) of what he originally set out to attract. He and his family enter the federal Witness Protection Program, disappearing into anonymity to save their lives. His naïveté becomes evident as quickly as his cash disappears. Convinced he and his family are marked for death, Henry acts swiftly and decisively, spilling the beans on his former criminal cohorts to the FBI, sending them away for long prison terms. He heads to New York City in the hope of leading the life of a kept man. After Henry's drug arrest, Cicero abandons him, and the rest of his mob cohorts fast follow suit. The film follows the story of a young Texan named Joe Buck (Jon Voight) who dresses like a rodeo cowboy. (The rest of the film also uses the same sort of scoring strategy, where the music provides not only an emotional backdrop but a sense of historical context.).

The song "He Quit Me" was also on the soundtrack; it was written by Warren Zevon, who also included it (as "She Quit Me") on his debut album Wanted Dead or Alive. The editing and scoring of the sequence have been acclaimed as some of Scorsese's best work, with a montage of popular songs such as The Who's "Magic Bus" and Harry Nilsson's "Jump Into the Fire" forming the soundtrack. The film featured the song "Everybody's Talkin'", sung by Harry Nilsson, which won a Grammy Award for Best Male Pop Vocal Performance; Schlesinger chose that song over "I Guess The Lord Must Be In New York City", which Nilsson had written specifically for the film. He must coordinate a major cocaine shipment, cook a meal for his wife, children and paraplegic younger brother, placate his drug-addled, emotionally unstable mistress, cope with his clueless, superstitious babysitter/drug courier, avoid federal authorities who, unknown to him, have had him under surveillance for several months, and satisfy his sleazy customers, all the while a nervous wreck from getting too little sleep and snorting too much cocaine. John Barry, who supervised the music for the film, won a Grammy for Best Instrumental Theme. In an extended, virtuoso sequence named "Sunday, May 11th, 1980," all of the different paths of Henry's complicated criminal career catastrophically collide. The film has been deemed "culturally significant" by the Library of Congress and selected for preservation in the United States National Film Registry. Worse, after promising to welcome DeVito into the Lucchese family as a "made man," the elder members of the family instead kill him as retaliation for Batts's death.

The re-released version of the film was identical to the original. At the same time, in December 1978, Jimmy Conway and friends plan and carry out a record six million dollar heist from the Lufthansa cargo terminal at JFK airport, but Jimmy soon grows disgusted and paranoid when his associates foolishly flaunt their gains in plain sight, threatening to draw police attention, and begins having them gradually eliminated. This time the board granted it an "R" rating. Although Paul Cicero tolerated Henry's prison drug deals, he has sternly warned him not to deal drugs on the outside and to inform him of those who do, but Henry ignores Paul and gets Tommy and Jimmy (as well as his wife, and new mistress (Debi Mazar), and babysitter) involved in an elaborate smuggling operation. In 1971 the film was re-submitted to the MPAA ratings board in anticipation of a re-release. There, Henry deals drugs to keep afloat, and by the time he returns to his family he has a lucrative drug connection in Pittsburgh, one which he had established while still in prison. For Hoffman, the role enabled him to avoid any typecasting due to his previous role in The Graduate and began his reputation as a actor of considerable dramatic range. After beating up a debt-ridden Florida gambler whose sister works as an FBI typist, Henry and Jimmy are caught and sent to prison for six years.

Both Hoffman and Voight were nominated for the Academy Award for Best Actor, a situation which split the vote for fans of the film and helped John Wayne receive his only Oscar for his role in True Grit. (This scene serves as an example of the movie's black humor.) During this time, Henry's marriage deteriorates when Karen finds he has a mistress; Karen threatens the other woman so violently that even Cicero has to mediate. The film is the only X-rated film to win the Academy Awards for Best Picture and Best Director. Henry, Conway and DeVito place Batts's bloody corpse in the trunk of their car, stop by DeVito's mother's house to pick up a shovel and a knife, finish killing Batts upstate, bury him in an abandoned plot of rural land – and then discover six months later that the land has been sold to a real estate developer and the (badly decomposed) body has to be re-excavated, moved and reburied. An assortment of much smaller roles are filled by Sylvia Miles, John McGiver, Brenda Vaccaro, Barnard Hughes, Ruth White, Jennifer Salt (the screenwriter's daughter), and Bob Balaban. DeVito's violent streak reaches a crest in June 1970 when he bludgeons to death one Billy Batts (Frank Vincent), a "made man" in the competing Gambino crime family, a major offense that could get them all killed by the Gambinos if discovered. It stars Dustin Hoffman and newcomer Jon Voight in the title role. In one of the film's most controversial scenes, DeVito thoughtlessly shoots dead an innocent and unarmed young man (Michael Imperioli), first for not bringing him his drinks fast enough, and then for talking back to him.

Midnight Cowboy is a 1969 film written by Waldo Salt based on the novel by James Leo Herlihy, and directed by John Schlesinger. As the years go by and Henry earns Cicero's trust, his compadres become more daring (and therefore dangerous)--Conway's excessive love of truck hijacking and grand theft is bad enough, but DeVito is nearly psychotic in his need to prove himself through violence. Rizzo the Rat, a street-wise but pesky Muppet, was named by Frank Oz after Hoffman's character (according to Steve Whitmire the puppeteer behind his performances). Henry also meets and falls in love with Karen (Bracco), although there is conflict between families since Karen's parents are prosperous and Jewish and Hill is himself poor and half-Irish and half-Italian. (Because of his and Jimmy Conway's own mixed ancestry, they can never be actual "made men" – full members of an Italian crime family.) When Karen learns firsthand about what Henry actually does for a living, she is fascinated instead of repelled; it impresses her that Henry has the nerve to steal instead of just "sitting around, waiting for a handout.". They help out in a key moneymaking heist, in 1967 stealing over half a million dollars from the Air France cargo terminal paying Cicero his percentage of the take as per the mafia's code of tribute. As an adult, Henry and his friend Tommy DeVito (Pesci) conspire along with Conway to steal much of the billions of dollars in cargo passing through Idlewild Airport (later JFK).

When Henry is arrested for selling stolen cigarettes, he wisely tells the police nothing and is lauded by his superiors for "being a standup guy.". The local Lucchese mob captain, Paul Cicero (Paul Sorvino), and Cicero's associate Jimmy Conway (De Niro), help cultivate the boy's developing criminal career. As a boy, Henry idolized the Lucchese crime family gangsters in his blue-collar New York City neighborhood, and in 1955 quit school and went to work for them at a local cab stand, much to the dismay of his working-class parents. In the film, Henry Hill, played by Ray Liotta, becomes involved in the mafia at a young age: as he says in the film, "As far back as I can remember, I always wanted to be a gangster.".

The film stars Robert De Niro as Jimmy Conway, Ray Liotta as Henry Hill, Lorraine Bracco as Hill's wife, Karen Hill, and Joe Pesci as the irascible Tommy DeVito (based on Tommy DeSimone). It is based on the novel Wiseguy by Nicholas Pileggi, which is itself based on a true story. Goodfellas is a 1990 film about the mafia directed by Martin Scorsese.