Didn't realize Walsh was in "Midnight Cowboy".

BRYAN STYBLE//Froidia
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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/M._Emmet_Walsh

On Thu, 21 Mar 2024 05:25:40 +0000, bryan_styble wrote:

> Didn't realize Walsh was in "Midnight Cowboy".

IMDB says he's an uncredited character on the bus at the end of the flick.

Blink and you'd have missed him I'm guessing... MC was 55 years ago, so
I'm not sure a 33 year old Walsh would be readily recognizable to the
modern eye

Thanks a heap for that, Mongo.

Yeah, I too saw the bus-rider reference, but (1) there were TWO long bus rides in the film, the final one of course, but that one that Buck takes to NYC from Texas, and (2) it had been a couple years or so since I last watched "Midnight Cowboy", and I couldn't decide in my mind which one to sort through my memory for. And like you, I assumed the late Walsh looked a lot different in 1968 (when it was filmed) so figured it was pointless mental exercise anyway. (Hey, I just thought of somethin'--could it have been Walsh playing the bus DRIVER on the by-then-in-Greater-Miami bus ride, the guy who comes back and confirms to Buck that Ratso is dead? If I recall correctly, he DID look a bit like a much younger, thinner Walsh!)

Anyway, MC is one of those films I've seen at least a dozen times...including sneaking into it in March 1969 and sidestepping its then-X rating while I was still a 15-year-old freshman in high school, riding my bicycle nearly 20 miles across town to see it on a Sunday afternoon (when I figured, correctly, that the skeleton staff wouldn't be so stringently enforcing the no-under-17 rule)--to watch it at the now-razed Brentwood Theatre, which for several months had an exclusive-exhibitor deal for the much-talked-about film for all of Greater St. Louis.

My fascination with the film--which I'd read a lot about long before my Sunday afternoon bike excursion--was rooted in my comparatively-sheltered, suburban Midwest upbringing. You see, to this young hayseed [meaning me, not Joe Buck], MC wasn't merely the Big City, but hey, it was NEW YORK CITY! Being a naive hick from Missouri, I wanted to see close up what NYC was like, as my sole NYC visit (a family car trip east for the first year of the 1964-5 World's Fair) took me, my brother and my folks merely to Manhattan's theatre district and the Fair site out in Queens, but NUTTIN' else. (And we all know how very much ELSE there is to see in what Mayor Lindsay used to call Fun City!)

NYC on film (with my tour guides being Joe Buck and Ratso Rizzo) so dazzled me that for years hence, my media career goal always was to ride the commercial newstalk radio horse all the way to the New York skyline someday...but by radio career's end in 2013, the closest I'd gotten to my would-be NYC media-guy experience was the nearly-as-tall skyscrapers of Los Angeles, Chicago, Detroit and Seattle. Well, that's showbiz.

What's weird is, though I loved (though hardly UNDERSTOOD, really) "Midnight Cowboy" from that first, biked-to Brentwood Theatre screening, EVERY SINGLE TIME I've watched it since, I've been it a little bit less impressed!

And that's in sharp contrast to "In the Heat of the Night", which I've seen even MORE repeatedly than "Midnight Cowboy"--and oddly enough, watched yet again this very evening on TCM--but which seems to impress me MORE with each subsequent screening. Point is, I don't think MC wears over the decades as well as ITHOTN.

Meanwhile, while I've visited NYC many times over my adulthood, I've STILL yet (on any of my occasional visits back to St. Louis) ever gotten around to making the 90 minute-or-so drive across the Mississippi River to finally tour in person Sparta, Illinois...the actual Land of Lincoln town which served as the fictive Sparta, Mississippi in ITHOTN. Bet that broken hand-gate inside the Sparta police station which annoyed Rod Steiger's Chief Bill Gillespee is still out of repair.

BRYAN STYBLE/Florida

DISC JOCKEY ERROR:

Upon reflection, that Sunday afternoon bicycle ride to see "Midnight Cowboy" my first time must have been in March 1970, not March 1969. (But I indeed was 15 then.)

STYBLE/Florida

Yawn......more overwritten rot from Mr.BS. If you weren't permitted to use commas or hyphens, would you still be able to write your "clever" posts? Truly a schizophrenic way of writing. Don't you have any friends?