Classic film, mediocre DVD treatment

John Schlesinger's "Midnight Cowboy" was the first modern film to win Oscar's Best Picture prize. Before 1969, Oscar was still honoring musicals and old world celebrations like "Oliver!," "The Sound of Music," "My Fair Lady" and "West Side Story." After "Midnight," films like "The French Connection," the first two "Godfather" films, "One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest" and "The Deer Hunter" became prime Oscar bait. If Schlesinger's tale of awestruck Texan Joe Buck and his common trials and minor triumphs in New York City boasts one major accomplishment, it's that it goaded popular cinema into wising up and joining the real world, ushering in a decade of brutally honest films before the '80s hit us like a candy-coated hurricane.\n"Midnight Cowboy" pre-dates "Brokeback Mountain" by 36 years in terms of demystifying the American cowboy mystique, but while "Brokeback" employs a sexual lifestyle choice as its focus, "Midnight" centers on Joe Buck as a traditional man forced to literally whore himself out to make ends meet. \nJon Voight offers a wonderfully understated performance (not unlike Heath Ledger's in "Brokeback") as the naïve Buck and Dustin Hoffman stuns as his physically handicapped and impoverished friend Enrico "Ratso" Rizzo, who's line "I'm walkin' here" has since entered the realm of famous cinematic quotations. The film's ending is among cinema's most somberly heartbreaking and offers a sort of cautionary coda to the entire decade of the 1960s, the same way David and Albert Maysles' "Gimme Shelter" did to Michael Wadleigh's "Woodstock."\nExtras on this two-disc set include a feature-length audio commentary by producer Jerome Hellman, two retrospective docs ("After Midnight - Reflections on the Classic" and "Controversy and Acclaim") and "Celebrating Schlesinger," a tribute to the film's late director. Hellman's commentary leaves much to be desired, as it's mostly technical jargon and tossed-off personal musings. The documentaries are rather standard, with most of the cast and others involved sharing their experiences with the film, but the featurette honoring Schlesinger borders on poignancy, making it all the more regrettable that he was not alive to contribute to this DVD edition.\nDespite some occasionally pesky color problems and the obvious lack of Schlesinger's presence and involvement (both of which bring this DVD's grade down from a solid A to an A-), this new edition of "Midnight Cowboy" not only has the potential to expose a classic film to a new audience, but to remind us all that taking cinematic risks pays off in ways more vital than raking in box office dollars.