Midnight Cowboy (1969).
Courtesy of United Artists Corporation
The film begins in a small town in Texas, where a young man, Joe Buck (played by Jon Voight), is dressing himself as a cowboy with a fringed jacket. He quits his job as a dishwasher and boards a bus, heading for New York City, where he imagines that he will be able to make a living selling his sexual services to rich sex-starved women. A series of flashbacks on the bus trip reveal that he was often cared for by his grandmother, Sally Buck (Ruth White), and that his mother and grandmother may have been prostitutes and also that he once had a girlfriend, Annie (Jennifer Salt). In New York, he takes a room in a fleabag hotel and heads out to cruise the streets, seeking customers. He meets Cass (Sylvia Miles), who takes him to her penthouse apartment for sex, but she is herself a call girl, and Joe ends up giving her money. Joe goes to a bar, where he meets the seedy and tubercular Ratso Rizzo (Dustin Hoffman). Ratso offers