Blu-ray, DVD Release: Midnight Cowboy

Blu-ray & DVD Release Date: May 29, 2018
Price: DVD $13.72, Blu-ray $27.37
Studio: Criterion

One of the British New Wave’s most versatile directors, John Schlesinger (Sunday Bloody Sunday) 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 (Runaway Train) 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 (Ishtar) 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,” 1969’s Midnight Cowboy became the first X-rated film to receive the best picture Oscar, and decades on, its influence still reverberates through cinema.

Criterion’s new Blu-ray and DVD editions of the movie include the following:

* New 4K digital restoration, with uncompressed monaural soundtrack on the Blu-ray
* Alternate 5.1 surround soundtrack, presented in DTS-HD Master Audio on the Blu-ray
* 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
* Trailer
* An essay by critic Mark Harris