COMMENTARY : Why Joe Buck and Ratso Live On : Twenty-five years after it became the first major X-rated release, ‘Midnight Cowboy’ retains its power, if not its scarlet letter, a reminder of the adventurous films that might have been

Though it’s dead and buried, declared obsolete by the people who classify Hollywood’s films, the ominous X rating is hardly forgotten. It did too much damage to ever go quietly into the night.

All by itself, this unassuming letter struck dread in the hearts of moralistic video chains, timid theaters and concerned family newspapers, all of whom refused to have anything to do with films that earned that awful rating. An X came to signify pornography and worse, films that trafficked with the devil and deserved to die.

Yet there was a brief moment 25 years ago when X stood not for degradation but for hope. A moment before the rating became a moral football, kicked back and forth between zealots on both sides of the hard-core issue, when it seemed that Hollywood could deliver thoughtful adult entertainment without the world coming to an end. A moment defined by “Midnight Cowboy.”

Though it doesn’t seem possible, it has been a quarter of a century since Jon Voight’s Joe Buck and Dustin Hoffman’s Ratso Rizzo first shivered in Times Square doorways, and to commemorate that event, “Midnight Cowboy” will reopen this Friday at the Bruin in Westwood, the same theater it played in for more than a year during its initial release.

And though this rebirth is accompanied by the usual hoopla about a newly restored print and an original mono soundtrack remixed especially for Dolby, there is more to think about this time than the familiar questions of filmmaking aesthetics and memorable performances.

For “Midnight Cowboy” did more than win a trio of top-drawer Oscars (best picture, best director for John Schlesinger, best screenplay adaptation for Waldo Salt). It was the first and only X-rated film to accomplish all that. In fact, it was the first major studio film to be so much as rated X, and its importance will always be linked to what that rating meant both then and now.

When James Leo Herlihy’s novel of hustlers and the hustled was published in 1965, its frankness made it an unlikely movie topic. In fact, a reader for United Artists, the studio that eventually made the film, reported that the book’s action “goes steadily downhill” and recommended against it.

Producer Jerome Hellman, however, believed in the project and persuaded first director Schlesinger, whose “Darling” had intrigued American audiences, and then UA President David Picker to sign on to what eventually became a $3-million movie.

An Off Broadway actor named Dustin Hoffman, who had yet to make “The Graduate,” was everyone’s choice for one lead, but director Schlesinger had Michael Sarrazin in mind for the other. When Sarrazin ended up in “They Shoot Horses, Don’t They?” the job went to a 30-year-old actor making his major-studio debut, Jon Voight.

Voight was Joe Buck, a Texas dishwasher with a dream, a Candide in cowboy boots. Believing in nothing so much as his own talents as a lover, Joe hops a bus for New York City. “There’re a lot rich women back there,” runs his mantra, “begging for it, paying for it, and all the men are tutti-frutti.”

But despite his elaborate hopes to be a stud for hire, Joe Buck in his black hat, fringed buckskin jacket and cowhide suitcase is the kind of innocent Manhattan eats for lunch. His bravado is a thin veneer and can’t disguise a vulnerable soft touch who couldn’t hustle himself out of a paper bag.

A mark, in short, which is what Enrico Salvatore Rizzo, Ratso to his confederates, sees at once. A grown-up Artful Dodger, Ratso with his horrid teeth, ragged cough and awkward limp is everything Joe Buck is not, an angry bedbug whose native street smarts haven’t managed to get him any further along in life than the make-believe cowboy’s naivete.

Naturally Ratso rips Joe Buck off--it’s his nature--but a chance meeting later on reunites them. And what develops from an uneasy rapprochement is a chaste love story with the pathos of “Camille,” a brief on loneliness and the need for human companionship from characters who gain our sympathy by angrily refusing to have anything to do with it.

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Obviously, 25 years makes a difference in how a film is perceived, and to see “Midnight Cowboy” now is to notice on the one hand how dated its attitudes toward promiscuity and homosexuality seem and on the other how much more immediate the subtext of homelessness appears in the light of the 1980s and ‘90s.

Yet much about “Midnight Cowboy” remains the same. The things that reviewers complained about in 1969--the overdone and confusing flashbacks, the too-fancy camera work that one critic groused turned the movie into “a kind of 8th Avenue and 42nd Street ‘Dr. Caligari’ ’--are still annoying. And what knocked people out 25 years ago, the parallel performances of Voight and Hoffman, still have the power today.

Though both were nominated, neither Voight nor Hoffman won the best actor Oscar; it went to the unstoppable John Wayne for his “True Grit” apotheosis. And both Voight and Hoffman have gone on to impressive careers, gathering in a total of nine Oscar nominations and three victories between them. But seeing the two of them again in “Midnight Cowboy” leads inevitably to the conclusion that neither one ever did better work.

Experienced stage actors but still young and relatively new to film, both Voight and Hoffman threw themselves into their parts, bringing in addition to their energy the confidence that comes with knowing just how rich these roles were. Rooted in sympathy for and understanding of the characters and completely free of condescension, these performances have only gotten more impressive with the passage of time.

But as well as “Midnight Cowboy” plays today, those who see it now for the first time will only understand half of the fuss it caused. Though no one today would call the film “generally sordid,” as Variety did, or agree with Rex Reed, who described it as “a collage of screaming, crawling, vomiting humanity,” the sense that it was made by adults for adults still exists and that was key to all the excitement.

For no matter how tamely the now R-rated “Midnight Cowboy” may currently play, it is important to remember that its candid treatment of the world of Times Square hustlers was definitely one step over the line in 1969, and when the film agreed to go out with an X, it seemed not a mark of shame but a badge of honor.

After years of films constrained by the outmoded Production Code, which made even married couples sleep in twin beds, “Midnight Cowboy” made it seem that Hollywood was now willing to talk to an adult audience on its own terms, willing to be as candid as the best literature in dealing with reality as its audience knew it.

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But instead of a brave new world, the X rating proved the beginning of the end for adventurous films. Its original purpose, as a sign to let mature audiences know they were being addressed, was overrun in the rush of pornographers eager to label their films with the forbidden letter and the equally fervid response of groups for whom pornography equaled death.

What got lost, as it always does, was the middle ground, the great mass of Americans who yearn to see films like “Midnight Cowboy” that had the nerve to overrun moralistic boundaries but did it with grace and sensitivity and skill.

While a functioning ratings system would allow filmmakers to dare while protecting those who didn’t care for daring fare, the breakdown of the current arrangement stigmatized the taboo breakers and meant that audiences were being denied the modern equivalents of “Midnight Cowboy,” robbed of the kinds of bold films that will look as good in 25 years as this film does today.*

* “Midnight Cowboy” opens Friday at the Bruin Theatre in Westwood. The film will also open Friday in New York and next month in 10 to 12 other cities across the country.