Official PoCo Muse Film Critic Jeff Schultz revisits Joe for his February 2021 Review.
My guess is you don’t know “Joe” which played at the Premier Theater in Valparaiso in early February 1971. It’s not as widely seen as other movies of its time like “Fiddler on the Roof” or “Dirty Harry”, but “Joe” did significant business at the box office with critical buzz around Peter Boyle’s appealing performance. It’s Boyle’s first leading role and opened his career to other opportunities like playing the creature in Mel Brooks’ “Young Frankenstein.”
Playing opposite of Boyle in “Joe” is Dennis Patrick, a regular guest star on a raft of TV shows and, in her movie debut, actress Susan Sarandon. The director, John Avildsen, would score an Oscar win six years later with another hit you’re sure to know, “Rocky.” Unlike “Rocky” and Avildsen’s other directing work with the “Karate Kid” series, “Joe” is noted in the Premier’s ad as being “very adult.” That might sound to you like it’s the kind of film shown late at night on a premium cable channel, but it’s not as lascivious as that.
Audiences at the time were still getting used to new freedoms filmmakers had of presenting content geared toward mature audiences with the new rating system (G, PG, R, and X) implemented by the Motion Picture Association of America in 1968. As the old studio system crumbled throughout the 1960s, movies grew up. There had always been films underground that featured violence or sex, but it finally became part of the mainstream after films like “Bonnie and Clyde” were released in 1967. It’s very likely that three years earlier you couldn’t see a movie like “Joe” in theaters and what’s still shocking to see today is the graphic depiction of drug use when we are introduced Sarandon’s character Melissa and her dope fiend boyfriend.
About twenty minutes later, we meet Joe. He’s the loud drunk sitting at the bar who spouts rants with unchecked facts about minorities, people on welfare, and those darn hippies who are “screwin’ up the country.” He doesn’t give a hoot about what you think about what he thinks, much less for political correctness. His current diatribe is so laced with bigotry that he makes Archie Bunker look like Mr. Rogers in comparison. Meanwhile, a man in a suit stumbles in and hearing Joe, he unwittingly states in a daze that he’s just killed a hippie who hooked his daughter on drugs. Joe is so pleased to hear it, he buys the guy a drink.
Later hearing on the news that police are searching for a suspect involved in the killing, Joe realizes he has his new friend Bill on a string and calls him up at his high-rise office to blackmail him most implicitly by saying they should hang out together. The worlds of blue-collar and white-collar collide as the two men get together for dinner with their wives. While the women talk about their home décor, Joe shows off his gun collection. Learning her father has killed her boyfriend, Melissa runs away and Joe goes with Bill to trail her to a psychedelic party, the kind Joe has so often railed against. “This is one of them ‘or-gees,’ isn’t it?” Joe asks Bill in his thick, working class accent.
Released during the Nixon-era, “Joe” proved to be palpable satire, although its aim isn’t as obvious as other satirical films at the time like “M*A*S*H” and “Catch-22.” Those were anti-war but it’s not clear what brand “Joe” is. It arguably had some agenda by the fact its screenwriter Norman Wexler was arrested by the FBI in 1972 for making threats against Nixon. The most poignant aspects of satire are Joe’s contrast to the other characters and how they interact with him despite a gap in social class. He’s the fish out of water who is gasping for a beer.
Although the Premier’s ad hails “Joe” as a “4 star” comedy triumph, I would grade it down to 2½ out of 4.
I’ve dished out my share of spoiling details about the plot so I won’t give away the ending but it didn’t have enough resolve to make the film satisfying for me, not as much as Boyle’s excellent performance anyways. Boyle didn’t win the Oscar as the Premier ad wages, that went went to George C. Scott in “Patton,” but the movie did receive a nomination for Wexler’s screenplay. Perhaps why Boyle seems so good in this is because the character would fit in naturally with the politics of today. I doubt though he’d identify with the Joe in the White House.
Joe is available for on-demand viewing at no cost through Tubi TV. We have no affiliation with Tubi, but it’s neat you can watch it for free from home.