Details

One of the British New Wave's most versatile directors, John Schlesinger 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 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 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", Midnight Cowboy became the first X-rated film to receive the Best Picture Oscar, and decades on, its influence still reverberates through cinema.

With a 4K digital restoration, supervised and approved by cinematographer Adam Holender, Midnight Cowboy is given the Criterion treatment and released on 4K UHD 18th January 2027 from Spirit Entertainment.

Special Features

  • 4K digital restoration, supervised and approved by cinematographer Adam Holender, with uncompressed monaural soundtrack
  • Alternate 5.1 surround DTS-HD Master Audio soundtrack
  • One 4K UHD disc of the film presented in HDR and one Blu-ray with the special features
  • Audio commentary from 1991 featuring director John Schlesinger and producer Jerome Hellman
  • Desperate Souls, Dark City and the Legend of "Midnight Cowboy" (2022), a documentary by Nancy Buirski
  • Video essay with commentary by Holender
  • Photo gallery with commentary by photographer Michael Childers
  • The Crowd Around the Cowboy, a 1969 short film made on location for Midnight Cowboy
  • Waldo Salt: A Screenwriter's Journey (1990), a documentary by Eugene Corr and Robert Hillmann
  • Two short documentaries on the making and release of the film
  • Interview from 1970 with actor Jon Voight on The David Frost Show
  • Voight's original screen test
  • Interview from 2000 with Schlesinger for BAFTA Los Angeles
  • Excerpts from the 2002 BAFTA Los Angeles tribute to Schlesinger
  • Trailer
  • English subtitles for the deaf and hard of hearing
  • An essay by critic Mark Harris
  • Cover by Jay Shaw