‘We thought Midnight Cowboy might end everyone’s career’: John Schlesinger’s diverse, devastating, Oscar-winning cinema | film

MMichael Childers was a 22-year-old student in Los Angeles when a friend set him up on an appointment with John Schlesinger, a visiting British director about two decades his senior. The respected director was licking his wounds: his latest film, Far from Disturbance, which imbued its 19th-century rural characters with an outdated and subtly King’s Road style, had flopped in the States.

Childers approached the appointment with mixed emotions. He loved Schlesinger’s previous film, The Jazzy Darling, starring Julie Christie as a model, and saw it three times. But he heard the director described as “mercurial.” His solution was to take a friend with him to the bar at the Beverly Wilshire Hotel for support. “I thought this guy might be complete bullshit,” Childers, now 81, recalled by phone from Palm Springs. “Two kicks under the table means we’re out of here,” I said to my friend. And one kick means.” You From here.”

It didn’t take long for that solitary kick to come. “John was charming and intelligent, with those sparkling eyes. I knew I could handle it.” Once Childers’ friend was gone, the two men were not alone for long. “Actor Lee Remick came over to talk to John. And with her was Frank Sinatra. ‘Nice to meet you, Mr. Sinatra…’ I thought: This could really be a wonderful life. And it was: the couple were together until the director’s death in 2003 at the age of 77. To mark the 100th anniversary of Schlesinger’s birth this month, Childers is hosting a program of the director’s work in Palm Springs, called My Husband Makes Movies. Meanwhile, the UK is getting a special touring season With it, titled The Consummate Professional: John Schlesinger at 100, it aims to revive interest in the man behind the films.

The most famous of them all, although not the best, is Midnight Cowboy. It was this adaptation of James Leo Herlihy’s novel that Schlesinger was preparing to direct when he and Childers met. Since that first month together in 1967, any division between their personal and professional lives has been minimal; If Schlesinger was making a movie, Childers was part of its fabric. The director took his new girlfriend with him to New York while working on the movie Midnight Cowboy. I said: Is this a John Wayne Western? He said: It’s okay, my dear. “Read it.” When Childers reached the last page of Waldo Salt’s script about a naive Texas con man trying to make it in corrupt, seedy New York, he was eager. “It was the wildest thing I’ve ever read. So raunchy and X-rated.”

Childers helped make it even more brutal. For a sequence in the script that simply reads “Party in Greenwich Village,” he suggested staging the whole thing “like Andy Warhol’s party in the loft.” Childers engaged Warhol’s group – Viva, Joe D’Alessandro, Paul Morrissey and others – in a three-day shoot that was more debauched than ever. “Andy wanted to be in it too, but he just got shot,” he says casually.

Schlesinger’s early trilogy – his 1962 kitchen sink debut, A Kind of Loving, followed by Billy Liar and Darling – helped facilitate and crystallize the advances in British cinema in the first half of the 1960s. As the decade ended, Midnight Cowboy became one of Hollywood’s burgeoning agents of radicalism and libertarianism. Dustin Hoffman, who played Ratso Rizzo, Joe Buck’s eccentric friend, was at a preview screening where “people came out in droves” at the sight of a male student (played by a lovably goofy Bob Balaban) descending on Joe in Times Square. “We thought this might end everyone’s career,” Hoffman said.

Instead, Midnight Cowboy won Schlesinger the Best Director Oscar and became the first X-rated film to receive the Best Picture award. Its success paved the way for Bloody Sunday, Schlesinger’s 1971 masterpiece about a love triangle between middle-class Londoners, with a bisexual artist (Murray Head) dividing his feelings between a gay doctor (Peter Finch) and a divorcee (Glinda Jackson). “Midnight Cowboy” is a conflicted study of repressed homosexuality that turns violent — it could be a homophobic film, a homophobic film, or both — while its follow-up was more poignant and more complex. A kiss between Finch and Head near the beginning of the film is shown in stark, brightly lit close-up: no soothing music, no cuts, no shame. “That kiss was going to be close-up or not at all,” Schlesinger said. “I wanted it to be as big and natural as any on-screen kiss.”

He went on to enjoy almost as big commercial successes as Midnight Cowboy, as did the 1976 thriller Marathon Man, with its infamous scene showing Hoffman being tortured in a dentist’s chair by Nazi fugitive Laurence Olivier. Schlesinger even made two films written by Alan Bennett concerning British traitors, films that rival the eloquence of Sunday Bloody Sunday: An Englishman Abroad, with Alan Bates as Guy Burgess, and A Question of Attribution, starring James Fox as Anthony Blunt. However, while his early films are widely known and highly regarded (“Midnight Cowboy” was recently turned into a musical), the man himself is another matter. “The films are familiar, but the name doesn’t grab people’s attention,” says Claire Nicola, one of the season’s UK producers.

The reasons are varied. Selectivity may be partly responsible. A director whose resume includes a harrowing study of Hollywood decadence and debauchery ( Day of the Locust ), a gentle wartime love story ( Yanks ), and a vulgar big-budget comedy featuring car crashes and a water-skiing elephant ( Honky Tonk Highway ) is always going to challenge categorization or commodification. “I think it had very few audiences,” says Mark David Jacobs, Nicholas’s co-curator. “Luca Guadagnino is a great modern counterpart. He’s another director who makes very different films, some of which click and some of which don’t. Without Sunday Bloody Sunday, you wouldn’t have a film like Challengers.”

It is easy to identify the distinguishing features of individual films, but it is more difficult to define what constitutes a typical Schlesinger film. They don’t have the distinct visual or rhythmic imprint of Nicolas Roeg, who shot Far from the Madding Crowd before becoming a director himself. Schlesinger had a certain ad-agency penchant for bombastic symbolism: the contrast between the hardships of the developing world and the casual extravagance of the Western world was subtly highlighted in random images in Darling and Sunday Bloody Sunday, while the idea of ​​characters as helpless goldfish swimming in a bowl first appeared in Darling and again in the 1984 spy thriller The Falcon and the Snowman, starring Sean Penn.

However, efforts to capture the essence of the director tend toward diffusion. “He was always in tune with life,” Glenda Jackson said. Julia Prewitt Brown, author of The Films of John Schlesinger, believes his films are concerned with “the importance of survival, of getting through the day and trying to make the most of what one has.” Then again, you could say the same thing about the Texas Chain Saw Massacre.

Some of the claims made in the press release for the UK season are debatable: although Schlesinger fully engages with his Jewishness through the character of Finch in Sunday Bloody Sunday, it’s hard to agree that he holds the title of Britain’s greatest Jewish film director in a world where Mike Leigh exists. What’s even more relatable is the way in which Schlesinger’s groundbreaking representation of the LGBTQ+ community becomes a unifying thread in the appreciation of his work, beginning with Malcolm (Roland Coram), Darling’s easy-going photographer, who picks up a bartender and is later whisked away on the back of his scooter.

Even when the characters are barely more than extras, like the muscles that sporadically appear throughout Honky Tonk Highway, they’re at least legible. Childers takes a ruthless approach toward anyone who disrespects his late husband’s place in the queer scene. “Sunday Bloody Sunday is one of the top five gay tracks in the world,” he says. “I get angry when young gay people don’t see that. It’s part of their culture!”

The director has been comfortable and open about his sexuality. In his memoirs, Bennett tells the story of Schlesinger obtaining the CBE from Queen Elizabeth II, who had a brief struggle fitting the ribbon around his neck. “Now, Mr. Schlesinger, we have to try to get this straightshe said — a note he chose to see, Bennett said, “as a coded acknowledgment and seal of royal approval.”

This runs counter to the nine-minute film he made in 1991, known informally as John Major: The Movie, to promote the Conservative Party and thus do its bit to help it achieve a shock victory in the following year’s general election (in which Schlesinger himself admitted to voting Tory). This mission came just three years after the implementation of Section 28, which banned the so-called “promotion” of homosexuality in schools, and followed Margaret Thatcher’s complaint that children were being taught that they had an “inalienable right to be gay”.

Jacobs attributes this in part to inconsistency. “He grew up in a very left-wing film-making atmosphere in Britain, and he had some resentment about that. Also, 1992 was not a great year for Schlesinger’s career. This was a paycheck, after all.” In fact: while Chariots of Fire director Hugh Hudson provided his similar services to the Labor Party gratis, Schlesinger was paid handsomely. This may be the reason not only for his hypocrisy in supporting conservatives, but also for his late-career drift into hacktivism. Few directors with such sustained early acclaim have gone on to produce a similar abundance of bad films.

Schlesinger was famous for his temper. “No one had a shorter fuse,” Bennett said, while an unnamed crew member likened him to “Zeus, throwing bolts of lightning.” How did he deal with his many failures? “Manic depression,” Childers says. “That was it no Hazar.”

The director suffered his biggest bruise on Honky Tonk Highway, a costly debacle in 1981 that set him back forever in Hollywood. Later low points include the 1987 ritual horror film The Believers and its 2000 swansong, The Next Best Thing, starring Madonna and Rupert Everett, but they are eerily bereft of either rom or com. “I begged John not to do this movie,” Childers sighs. “I thought it was a load of bullshit. And it is. When Madonna tries to act, oh, it’s terrible.”

Sean Penn believes Schlesinger’s talents have been waning since The Falcon and the Snowman – a photo shoot so fraught that the actor and director turned to communicating through an intermediary even when standing just a few feet apart. “I don’t think John was at his best at that moment: I think he was safe,” Ben said.

After Schlesinger’s death, Bennett noted that he “was not by nature a journeyman filmmaker, taking whatever came, but he was forced into this way of working by having three houses to keep up with, one of them in Hollywood, and always living an expensive life.” It could almost be the end of Darling, with Christie as a supermodel tempted by fame, money and sex, but ultimately imprisoned and defeated by the luxurious life she has woven around herself.

However, Nicola argues that it is precisely these conflicts and disappointments that make Schlesinger’s story so compelling and revealing. “He made these wonderful, award-winning classics, but he also made some questionable works,” she says. “Understanding any director means understanding the entire career, the entire context, and what failure says about them as much as success. This season, we ask cinemas: ‘Don’t just book award winners. Look at other movies too. Otherwise what’s the point?