Midnight Cowboy / YMMV

Adaptation Displacement: James Leo Herlihy's novel got good reviews in 1965 but didn't sell too well and was largely forgotten when the film came out.
Award Snub:
- The film received seven Academy Award nominations and won three - Best Picture, Director, and Adapted Screenplay. Neither John Barry's score, nor the song "Everybody's Talkin'" were nominated.
- Both Dustin Hoffman and Jon Voight received nominations for Best Actor, only to lose to John Wayne (True Grit). The film still won Best Picture, Best Director, and Best Adapted Screenplay, though. And Sylvia Miles was nominated for Best Supporting Actress.
- In the film, there's a scene where Voight speaks admiringly of John Wayne. Oh, the irony...
Awesome Music: John Barry, at the top of his game, contributed a memorable score. The instrumental title theme, featuring the melancholy harmonica of Toots Thielemans, is touching all by itself.
- And, of course, Harry Nilsson's "Everybody's Talkin'".
Big-Lipped Alligator Moment: About a minute of screen time is devoted to Joe watching a woman in a diner whose son runs a toy rubber mouse all over her arms and head.
Hilarious in Hindsight:
- An in-universe example is the scene where Ratso walks over to an older woman and younger man sitting at a table and greets the man with a familiar playful tone, telling Joe that the young man is another male prostitute who works for O'Daniel. When we later find out that O'Daniel is a crazy street preacher and not a pimp, it's obvious that Ratso didn't know the young man at the table at all and that the whole thing was just a ridiculous ruse to trick Joe.
- After this film's harsh portrayal of the homophobic society of the 1960s, John Schlesinger's next film was Sunday Bloody Sunday, which got a ton of attention for its matter-of-fact portrayal of a gay character who's perfectly content with his life, something hardly ever seen at the time. And decades later, his final film The Next Best Thing features a highly sympathetic portrayal of a gay man trying to get custody of his son. Schlesinger himself was also gay.
- Baseball and football fans may get a kick out of watching a character named Joe Buck who's not very good at his chosen profession, considering the degree to which a same-named real-life figure has proven to garner extremely divisive reactions at best.
- In the original novel, when Rizzo and Joe imagine life in Florida, Joe imagines that fishing will be so easy that all they'll need to do is call "Here fishy-fishy" and the fish will jump into their arms. This was written almost twenty years before Ernie and Bert's classic "Fish Call" sketch aired on Sesame Street.
- Several decades after playing "Ratso" Rizzo, Dustin Hoffman voiced an animated rat, Roscuro, in The Tale of Despereaux.
Ho Yay: Rizzo and Joe Buck.
Memetic Mutation: "I'm walkin' here!"
One-Scene Wonder:
- Sylvia Miles as Cass. She's only got five minutes or so of screen time but made enough of an impression to snag an Academy Award nomination for Best Supporting Actress.
- Also: Jennifer Salt (screenwriter Waldo's daughter) as Crazy Annie, John McGiver as O'Daniel, Brenda Vaccaro as Shirley, Barnard Hughes as Towny.
- Not to mention Bob Balaban as the young man who fellates Joe in the movie theater.
Parody Displacement: "I'm walkin' here!" has become such a staple of the English-speaking vernacular that it's become accepted as typical New Yorkese rather than a line from a movie.
Retroactive Recognition: M. Emmet Walsh and Bob Balaban make their film debuts. Most of Walsh's scene was deleted in the final cut, so he just appears very briefly as one of the drunken, singing bus passengers on the way to New York.
Squick: Joe sharing a bed with his grandmother and one of her lovers when he was a child. Even if Joe didn't engage in sexual activity with either bedmate, it's still repulsive.
Tough Act to Follow: It became this for its director John Schlesinger, according to writer Glenn Frankel:
Midnight Cowboy cast a large shadow over the rest of John Schlesinger's film career. He was always looking for another big hit […]. Having reached the pinnacle of success with Midnight Cowboy, he refused to believe he couldn’t do it again. He never quite got there.
The Woobie: The two lead characters and several of the supporting characters.
- Ratso is an impoverished, tuberculotic disabled man who ekes out a pathetic existence as a petty con man and lives in a cold, condemned building without electricity. He has no close personal connections of any kind except Joe and eventually dies of his illness.
- Joe is a Manchild intellectually and emotionally who was raped by a gang in his youth, abandoned by his parents, and was implied to have been sexually abused by his grandmother and her lover as a child. Like Ratso, he has no close friends or family connections and is utterly lost in New York and in life.
- Towny is a self-loathing, aging closeted gay man who winds up getting badly beaten or possibly killed when he picks Joe up for sex.

YMMV / Midnight Cowboy

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