For my part I recognize the importance of Midnight Cowboy and I think it's a worthwhile picture of the year. When compared to its co-nominees, Anne of the Thousand Days, Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, Hello, Dolly! and Z, it's the one taking the biggest creative risk, especially when given the safety net of the period drama, the conventional reassurance of a Redford-Newman vehicle, the optimism of a big screen musical and the intrigue of Costa Gavras's political thriller. I can also see how Midnight Cowboy is a courageous affront to unnecessarily restrictive censorship practices at a moment in time when the question of free expression was particularly vexing to industry officials and audience members alike.

What remains difficult for me to believe is that Midnight Cowboy really is the best film of 1969 when given the totality of retrospect. Not when Samuel Peckinpah's The Wild Bunch, Dennis Hopper's Easy Rider and Sergio Leone's Once Upon a Time in the West were released for awards consideration in the same 12-month period. Not when I find myself more entertained by any of these three titles than John Schelsinger's movie. Not when I can't help but be carried away by the possibility Midnight Cowboy was the prime beneficiary of Dustin Hoffman hysteria post-The Graduate as multiplied against a late '60s fascination with British filmmakers, just as would be true in the late '70s, along with the prestige of a strong literary pedigree in James Leo Herlihy's novel of the same name.

Still, I'm not knocking Midnight Cowboy and calling it a hack production. Instead I'm saying it's a good, possibly even great, movie because of what it symbolized about the changing directions of American cinema in 1969 rather than what it may actually be as a film separate from such circumstances.

Famously it's the only movie ever rated X to win the Academy Award for Best Picture. Despite this scandalous distinction it's no more or less overtly sexual or graphically violent than any other film of its moment. It is, however, a quirky character study that boils down to a tragic love story between two men living along Manhattan's margins, inhabiting 42nd Street's charnel houses and working as homeless hustlers.

Cowboy Joe Buck (John Voight) picks up on the idea of making easy money with his handsome physique and moves from Texas, where he's a dishwasher, to New York City where he intends to hustle Park Avenue socialites. Unfortunately his plan is as common as dirt although he learns of that fact after seeing how his cowboy attire is usually the calling card for homosexual gigolos. Then he loses $20 to a crippled street urchin named Ratzo Rizzo (Dustin Hoffman) but instead of becoming his enemy, the pair forms a fast friendship to survive the city's hard edges by looking out for each other.

Living together in a condemned building, Ratzo teaches Joe how to succeed in New York City's underground economy even while pining for Joe's attention with silent and seemingly unrequited affection. They earn and steal just enough to get by but Ratzo's health falters after he's beaten up one night on a hustle.

Between bouts of battling the winter's cold they cook up an elaborate fantasy about journeying to the promised land of Florida where they'll start a new life under plenty of sunshine and with oranges everywhere to eat. Just as their plan comes to fruition, however, Ratzo dies from his various maladies seated next to Joe while on the bus to Florida.

Budgeted at $3.6 million Midnight Cowboy created a stir at the box office and earned some $20 million in domestic rentals. A hit by any stretch of the imagination Schlesinger's movie was also a totally unconventional and tragic story without many of the characteristics typical of top award winners and box office champs.

It lacks conventionally appealing stars even though Hoffman's fame was on the rise and Voight's auspicious debut went a long way towards making him a pin-up star and actor. It's based on meandering episodes in Joe's life that are interrupted by brief, nightmarish sequences depicting his rape somewhere in the recesses of memory and it perpetually demonstrates his inability to succeed in the harsh midnight world of Manhattan. It's also a basically realistic and gritty depiction of Times Square in the late '60s with its strip clubs, peep shows, drug dens, condemned buildings and all-night cafes. Plus it ends on a tragic note where the movie's emotional center, Ratzo, is killed off at the moment that could very well have been his most meaningful triumph.

Not to be forgotten, Midnight Cowboy is also the unrealized love story of two men who start out as competitors but end up the best of friends. In this journey through Manhattan's seedier locales, many of which were real-life backdrops, Ratzo is realized as a broken man in more ways than the simply physical. Likewise Joe is a vulnerable soul holding fast to old fashioned ideas about masculine identity that keep him perpetually, and sometimes comically, out of date with current circumstances.

Together Joe and Ratzo form a unique partnership more powerful than its individual constituents. They provide mutual self-protection, affection, companionship and admiration for one another and it's shown that away from the comforts of this bond each of them lacks the focus and strength to be successful. While not altogether a homosexual love affair, Joe's characterization as an overdetermined sexual animal and Ratzo's decidedly feminine physical person adds urgency to interpreting their homosocial relationship.

From the movie's very beginning Joe is a made out to be a man's man with a 10-gallon hat, tight jeans, fringe jacket and leather boots. His professional ambition of hustler further anchors his livelihood to having sex with rich socialites although his skill in this area is repeatedly put into question. Of course the fragmentary flashbacks involving his rape and view of his girlfriend's similar violation fuel a need to become a gigolo because in Joe's view real men aren't ever raped. Instead they do the raping.

Ratzo is also a broken man. His hunched form, pronounced limp, stuttering speech and slight build make him less than a full strength man. That his professional energy is spent conning hustlers like Joe who are down on their luck makes him a bottom feeder in the lowest sense of the term. Even so Ratzo is devoted to Joe and this attachment to the man he once swindled is readable through the signposts of the movie's emotional landscape as being a closeted and unrequited, homosexual love.

Emotionally complex, long on shots of street corners and intent to linger on unusual settings like the auditorium of a peep show, Midnight Cowboy is a remarkable experiment along the borders of what moviemakers and movie audiences were willing to see in their screen entertainments. While it's the story of two men who become friends it also demonstrates an overarching theme about masculinity in crisis that holds an obvious resonance when remembering the tumultuous times of the '60s and '70s. There is also something remarkable about seeing bygone times, not least because it's a pleasure to watch Hoffman and Voight as young men learning their craft.

Midnight Cowboy may have two human leads but Manhattan is the third unnamed star pressing down on the film's wide-eyed dystopia in every frame. This documentary quality and sense of setting, though potentially compromised by the picture's fictional story, is an important index of reality for the latent historian in all of us. Just seeing taxicabs, advertisements, styles and the price of things is somehow worth seeing the movie even for all its pessimism, black humor and decay.

Then there's the fact it won an Academy Award as Best Picture. Perhaps it's not the greatest standard for promoting a film, this title included, but Midnight Cowboy is a movie award winner worthy of its reputation and your attention.