Dustin Hoffman was an actor we first came across during the 1960s section of this blog. Back then he had just made his first breakthrough, as Benjamin Braddock in The Graduate, and this role catapulted him into the big time. Throughout the 1970s, Hoffman starred in three Oscar-nominated films and was nominated for Best Actor in two of them.
The first of these films was in fact the first Best Picture winner of the decade, John Schlesinger's Midnight Cowboy. Though Hoffman was nominated for Best Actor, he lost to his co-star Jon Voight who gave a career-defining performance as hustler Joe Buck. The naive and emotionally-scarred Joe, starts the film as a Texan dishwasher who feels his only success is in pleasuring women. He decides to journey to New York in order to become a male prostitute but finds it tough to seek out clients and even finds himself paying out money to one of the women he has liaison with. He is later duped by Hoffman's conman 'Ratso' Rizzo who introduces him to what he believes to be a pimp, but is in fact an extreme Bible basher. Joe later seeks out Rizzo but the latter offers an olive branch when he invites Joe to live in the squat he calls home. The rest of the film sees the pair build up a friendship of sorts as they navigate their way through New York and attempt to survive on what they can find. Towards the end of the film, Rizzo's health begins to deteriorate just as Joe is beginning to build up somewhat of a client base. Instead of keeping an appointment with a wealthy woman, Joe decides to help his friend by buying them both bus tickets to Florida. The final scenes are rather emotional as the simple Joe, who has up to now worn nothing but a cowboy outfit, changes his look just as his friend loses his life.
Earning the honour of being the only X-Rated film ever to win the Best Picture award, Midnight Cowboy is a work of pure genius. The film is hard to watch at times but it is always brilliantly executed and contains some wonderful pieces of visual flair. John Schlesinger seems keen not to make Midnight Cowboy just a standard film and so the editing is great throughout as he inserts flashbacks and fantasy sequences into the narrative. The flashback scenes are particularly harrowing as we witness Joe and his girlfriend being raped and her later being carted off to an institution. I do feel that Midnight Cowboy was the film that ushered in a change to the Best Picture category, especially considering the previous year's winner was Oliver! Another of Midnight Cowboy's distinguishing features is its use of music with both John Barry's score and Harry Nilsson's 'Everybody's Talking' both sticking in the mind long after the film has finished. But to me the film belonged to two men - Jon Voight and Dustin Hoffman, whose partnership makes Midnight Cowboy the masterpiece that it is. Voight brings an innocence to Joe Buck that is incredibly endearing but also makes it clear that this is a man who has gone through an enormous amount of suffering in his life. Voight's wide-eyed innocence is perfectly counter-balanced by Hoffman's quick-talking as the charismatic 'Ratso' Rizzo. Hoffman is absolutely outstanding at making us sympathise with a man who could easily have come off as incredibly unlikeable in the hands of a lesser actor. Voight and Hoffman really make you care about Joe and Rizzo and I was really emotional when the final credits rolled.
Whilst Hoffman may have been overshadowed by Voight in Midnight Cowboy, the next Oscar-nominated film he appeared in was almost a showcase for his supreme talent. The film was Lenny, in which Hoffman starred as controversial stand-up comedian Lenny Bruce. The narrative structure of the movie sees the film begin with one of Bruce's later stand-up routines, as we see he has become a burned-out performer, before flashing back to where it all began. The film spends a lot of time concentrating on the relationship between Lenny and his stripper wife Honey, who hadn't been together long before tying the knot. However, it's a destructive relationship which falls apart due to his philandering and her problems with addiction. But their relationship does provide a child, who Lenny is forced to care for and so considers becoming a more family-friendly comic. Ultimately he finds that this is something he's unable to do as he delights in his controversial routine which is laden with profanities throughout. It is Lenny's mouth that later gets him in trouble when he is arrested for use of foul language and decides to defend himself. The final act of the film basically depicts Lenny's fall from grace and his ultimate untimely death from an overdose.
Lenny is an incredibly different film from a lot of what I have watched so far, in that it feels incredibly intimate and at the same time tells an incredibly broad story. As it's shot in black-and-white Lenny looks different from any other film released that year while in addition it employs several unique narrative devices. In addition to the non-linear nature of the plot, a lot of the film is made up of interviews with the characters who are giving their accounts of Lenny's life following his death. This way of telling the story allows screenwriter Julian Barry to let all of the characters get their perspectives across. Obviously the only character who isn't featured in these interviews is Lenny himself however the character looms large over every single scene. The dark nature of the film is intensified through the brilliant direction of Bob Fosse, whose attempts at editing the film are covered in a later entry to this blog. I feel that a lot of the stand-up scenes in Lenny are incredibly similar to the scenes in the club in Cabaret. The only difference is Lenny is performing a comedy routine rather than as a big musical number. Just like with Ratso, Lenny is another character that is hard to like but somehow Dustin Hoffman gives you reason to care about him. Hoffman is incredible during the stand-up scenes and proves what a magnetic screen presence he is when it is just him and a microphone on stage. Similarly great is Valerie Perrine, as Bruce's wife Honey, who gives a sympathetic performance as the stripper with an addictive personality. While Lenny is quite a self-indulgent film at times, there's no denying its a gripping biopic with a tour-de-force central performance. To me it signified that Hoffman was an actor who could turn his hand to anything and was one who wasn't afraid to shy away from more offbeat projects.
However, the final film in this triple bill is definitely the most traditional of the three. All the President's Men is an incredibly wordy biopic of how two Washington Post reporters ended up exposing serious corruption in Richard Nixon's government. Based on the book written by Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein, the film stars Robert Redford and Hoffman as the two reluctant partners on a case that appears initially low-key. The beginning point of the film sees new recruit Woodward being tasked with reporting on a courtroom story about five men who broke into the Watergate Offices. But soon this small story grows legs when Woodward discovers connections with the CIA and he feels that there is more to the tale than meets the eye. Though Woodward is portrayed as quite an intelligent young man, he still has a lot to learn about story layout and so is paired with the more experience Bernstein. Whereas Woodward is fairly level-headed, Bernstein is a lot more off-the-wall and this clash in personalities occasionally causes arguments. But eventually the men gain mutual respect for one another as they uncover some shocking secrets while at the same time struggling with the fact that most of their reports are based on unknown sources. Although some of the senior workers at the paper are not fans of the pair's procedures, they have the blessing of executive editor Ben Bradlee, who vows to stick with them even when the paper finds itself criticised. Though their story led to the resignation of Nixon, the film really doesn't hammer this point home and instead shows us a collection of headlines as its closing scene.
I feel one of the best things a biographical film can do is make you wonder what's going to happen next, when you already know the answer. That's what I felt throughout All the President's Men and I feel a lot of that can be attributed to William Goldman's Oscar-winning script. The film itself was a pet project of Redford who bought the rights to Woodward and Bernstein's book and had Goldman write a draft of the script. Though the script when through several drafts, the final product was incredibly outstanding and I feel that its dialogue-heavy nature influenced a lot of young screenwriters at the time. Indeed both this film and Network, which was released in the same year, had lots of scenes with men sitting around in rooms talking but somehow made them incredibly thrilling to watch. Though certainly the most dynamic member of the cast, Hoffman delivered his most toned down performance of this triple-bill. Hoffman's Bernstein is portrayed as being intrepid, if a little over-eager, and somebody who was always on the lookout for the next story. He is perfectly counter-balanced by the much cooler Redford and I feel the two make a great double act. At the time of the film's release, Redford was the biggest draw at the Box Office but here shared top billing with co-star Hoffman. However, neither was even nominated for Best Actor and the only acting award the film received was for Jason Robards for his compelling supporting turn as Ben Bradlee. Though All the President's Men isn't as dark as either Lenny or Midnight Cowboy, it was gripping throughout and was bolstered by two incredibly frantic performances. In addition I think its script has influenced a lot of the film and television that I love today and for that it deserves a large amount of praise.
Next time we take a trip back in time and head to Russia.
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