Joe

If you like nasty, dirty, 70's cinema that's 'about' something then Joe will be right up your street. Peter Boyle, the scumbag's scumbag is spot on as an incoherent mess of frustration, violence and anger. Whether you're for the hippies or the squares no one gets to the end of Joe without seeing everything they claim to believe in being fatally compromised.

Class, culture and age all mix in a painfully well observed mush of jealousy, insecurity and a very well balanced gun collection.

I enjoyed this film; I am not sure what I would have made of it if I'd been around in 1970, but its very interesting watching it now.

The gritty urban New York setting is very similar to 'The panic in needle park' and shows a city, perhaps a country, in moral decline (Vietnam, drugs, Nixon).

The film portrays everyone equally horrendoulsly, the hippies are drug addled, sex crazed and without principal. Blue collar Joe is bigoted, ignorant and slobbish and the middle class parents, sleazy, snobbish, and willing to cover up a terrible crime.

The film is massively reactionary, and, as noted by other reviewers, the nihilistic ending brings to mind Easy Rider, and perhaps The Wild Bunch.

I had a chuckle at the conservative country/folk song 'Joe'. Brings to mind the excellent Bob Roberts- why are right wing songs so inherrently funny!

Well worth checking out if you are interested in this time period and American films- they don't make them like this no more.

wasnt that bad ... expected it to be much better .

Joe was first released in the US in the summer of 1970. Despite respectable notices, reasonable box office and an Oscar nom, it vanished shortly afterwards and remained forgotten about throughout the 1980's, before being enthusiastically reappraised, somewhat unjustly, in the US in the late 90's. Thanks to this lengthy unavailability, its reputation has gone on to see it placed (inexplicably) alongside the likes of Michael Winner's original Death Wish. Although revenge is a theme, a film about vigilantism this most definitely is not.

The plot isn't worth synopsizing. Its a flabby, hammy and bizarrely stagey ramble about an accidental murder and the unlikely relationship that blossoms out of it. That relationship and the largely class-based quirks of its two leads are exaggerated into ridiculous caricature; these two, and their situation, bear absolutely no relation to reality.

Almost everything about the film is cantankerous and begrudgingly antiquated, which makes the whole thing completely fascinating. Hippies are depicted as snide and exclusive misanthropes, hard drugs either make you sleep or dance around maniacally with lipstick on your face, and most young women are prepared to have sex with strangers in exchange for marijuana at the drop of a fly. Its very much a film of the 60's rather than the 70's, so why some industry luminaries have begun to include it in retrospective conversations about the beginnings of the Hollywood New Wave is a complete mystery. Martin Scorcese of all people even got involved, though probably only to give a nod to the dank, lavatorial hues of the grim urban cinematography, which almost certainly influenced Taxi Driver four years later. But Joe seems very much like a furious tirade against the likes of Easy Rider and Bonnie And Clyde, rather than a continuation of that same insurgent cinematic ethos.

It isn't a film of any real artistic significance - despite Joe's incontinent fury at everything in his world, it remains a story about absolutely nothing - but its value as a cultural museum piece is unprecedented. Shot on and around the streets of New York City during the darkest hours of the Vietnam war, and at a time when America (and, significantly, its cinema) was being revolutionized to the horror of the old guard, the film ends up, in its own completely oblivious and accidental way, saying more about that period of history than numerous infinitely superior movies that directly endeavored to capture it.

But as a film? Despite a really surprising and effective shock ending, this is basically a Michael Winner film, but not as well made. How does that tickle your fancy?

** Incidentally, if you are, like me, a fan of spotting arbitrary background lookalikes, then check out Harold Steptoe at 1:22:11 in the hippy art gallery.

Joe tells the story of a well-to-do advertising exec who, after murdering his daughter's drug dealer boyfriend, gets caught up in the company of the eponymous blue collar racist welder.

Compulsive watching and pessimistic in the extreme, the film is set among the culture wars of the US as the sixties are ending. Flower power still exists, but GIs are dying in Vietnam and Nixon is, or soon will be, President. Bummer ending reminded me most of Henry Fonda's 'we blew it' from Easy Rider.