re: Midnight Cowboy

Controversy

The sex scenes in this movie were considered shocking in 1969. There were only bare breasts and buttocks shown, though there are brief gang rape scenes of both "Crazy Annie" and Joe. While the MPAA was prepared to give the film an R rating upon their initial viewing, the co-chairman of United Artists, Arthur Krim, insisted upon self-applying an X rating on the advice of psychiatrist Aaron Stern, later to become an official MPAA ratings board consultant. It soon became the first X-rated film to win an Academy Award. At the time, X ratings had not yet become associated with the pornography industry.

Late in 1970 United Artists had the film re-submitted to the ratings board in order to change the rating to R, increasing the number of screens it could play on in re-release, since many theaters would not play X-rated films, and many newspapers would not accept advertising for them.

Some modern critics assume an unstated homosexual relationship between the main characters, and at the 78th Academy Awards, host Jon Stewart joked about Brokeback Mountain being an Oscar contender despite its subject matter, saying "It's been more than 35 years when people would watch Midnight Cowboy and say 'What the hell was that all about?' Well, now we have fully accepted this new genre of cinema: gay westerns!"

Breasts and buttocks??? That's it?