Mark Turner I can remember when the movie JOE came out. I was 13 at the time and fueled by the counter culture movement that all of us in our pre-teens and teens were involved in. We all though the clothing and choices we made were our own and not part of some systemic norm we would be forced to take part in. Little did everyone realize that by assuming the same clothing, same attitudes and same quotes we were doing little more than every generation before us by revolting against our elders. It wasn't something new and it wasn't something individual. It was just something different.JOE take those differences and adds the twist of violence to the story. It opens with a young couple Frank (Patrick McDermott) is a drug dealer in the seedier side of New York City. Melissa (Susan Sarandon) is a spoiled daughter of a successful white collar couple who has fallen from Frank. The two feed off of one another, Frank the attention he gets and Melissa the love she thinks she has for him. After Frank gives Melissa some pills while they're out before heading off to sell drugs, she trips out in a drugstore whose owner calls the EMS to take her to a hospital.Melissa's parents Bill (Dennis Patrick) and Joan (Audrey Caire) show up and plan on taking her home once she's released. Bill goes to her apartment to pick up her things when he runs into Frank. His disdain for Frank is on full display and Frank goads him on insulting him and his family. In response Bill attacks him and in the process accidentally kills him. Leaving behind a few of his drugs and taking the rest to dispose of he leaves the building and heads to the nearest bar for a drink.It is at the bar he chooses that he runs into Joe (Peter Boyle). Joe is a blue collar worker and stereotypical of those at the time. He hates taxes, his kids, blacks, foreigners and hippies equally. He talks non-stop about all of them and how much he hates them to the chagrin of the bar owner. When he says he wishes he could kill a hippie Bill responds with "I just did". Joe looks at him to see how serious he was and then the two laugh thinking it was all a joke.The next night Joe sees the news talking about the death of Frank and the search for the killer. Realizing Bill was telling the truth he calls him and wants to meet. Joe has no intention of blackmailing Bill. Instead he thinks of them as kindred spirits, brothers in arms and a friend, something we get the impression he has none of. The pair drink and talk and Bill loosens up deciding he likes this breath of fresh air unlike the backstabbing suck ups he works with in advertising.Joe invites Bill and his wife to dinner and Bill accepts. It goes smoothly but the man on edge at all times is Joe. He seems ready to jump at any moment. When they finish eating he takes Bill downstairs to show him his gun collection. He calls Joan down and attempts to calm her down and tell her she has nothing to worry about.But worry she will when Melissa escapes from the hospital after finding out Frank is dead. Overhearing a conversation between her parents when they return home from their dinner, she now knows who killed Frank and runs away.Joe contacts Bill to ask where he's been to find that Bill has been combing the streets searching for Melissa. Offering to help the pair take to the seedier side of NYC and begin their search. Their journey through the coffee houses and macrobiotic restaurants where they're ridiculed by the hippies leads them to a group that makes fun of them. Learning Bill has drugs their attitude changes.The unlikely group parties and gets wasted, has sex and then part of them take off with the drugs. Joe forces one of the remaining girls to tell them where they went and she lets them know. Guns in his trunk he and Bill head out to find them and get back the drugs and discover what happened to Melissa.This may seem like a lengthy synopsis filled with potential spoilers but not really. It provides the bare bones but not the meat that is wrapped around them. The story itself holds your attention and the performances on hand, especially by that of Boyle (a breakout performance it turns out) make this movie one that holds your attention, even if he doesn't show until 30 minutes or so in.Made in 1970 what makes the movie even more interesting is looking back on the story and the culture war going on at the time. The movie depicts three separate categories of people here who all seem more alike than different. Bill and Joan represent the white collar workers, Joe the blue collar and Melissa and her friends the hippy generation. Where the hippies claim individuality and independence they show none of it, all dressing alike, using the same comments and buying products to make be part of the group. It's the same thing that people like Bill are hired to promote and make money from. Looking back we can see that now and realize it better than at the time the movie was released.All three feel trapped in their own environments. Bill by the boring mundane life he must work to live the lifestyle he's chosen, Joe in the daily grind working at the steel mill and feeling trapped by people who have more while doing less and Melissa and her friends who work just as hard selling drugs in order to pay for the things they want. None of the three groups realizes they are the same as each claims only theirs is the real thing.When the movie was released it was considered quite controversial. It drew a lot of attention and discussion among movie goers. Some saw Joe as a hero and others as a villain. In truth he is both. But he is also us, the everyman out there. The movie was also a pivotal film for its director John G. Avildsen who three years later directed the critically acclaimed SAVE THE TIGER which won Jack Lemmon an Oscar for best actor and who six years later directed a small film called ROCKY.The film is being released on blu-ray by Olive Films so fans can now have the cleanest looking copy of it they've ever had the chance to own. Extras are limited to the trailer but it's the movie itself that is worth picking a copy of this up for. By the time the screen credits roll you'll be stunned, you'll be thinking about what group you fit in and you'll realize how talented an actor Boyle actually was.

jadavix "Joe" is the kind of film that Hollywood certainly doesn't make anymore. It's bleak and challenging, with an ending that comes as a slap in the face. If you want to see a movie like this these days, you have to try hard to find one.It's about two men who have nothing in common except for hatred. They take that hatred to its logical conclusion. It is likely that the screenwriters had seen "Easy Rider"; the bleakness of both pictures' endings is similar. In "Joe", however, you're not with the hippies: you're watching them from the outside in, through the eyes of two people who would never be accepted as one of their kind: a rabidly racist working stiff and a stuffy executive.The movie is worth watching for Peter Boyle in the title role. This is a disturbing role, but I am not surprised that some audience members cheered his performance back in the day. Boyle is a natural in roles like this, and watching this movie, I couldn't help but think that if Joe were around today, he'd be voting for a certain billionaire in the next election.

hankysmom57 I was thrilled to find JOE on DVD as it's one of the first movies I saw in a theater after I became a teenager. I was stunned at the violence of this film having grown up quite sheltered. Joe was in some ways my own father--his attitude towards 'dirty hippies' being quite familiar to me. I totally saw my own family in Joe's and his wife's home life. The scene with Joe and his wife 'socializing' with the Comptons was pathetic. I had never realized being a hippie could be so dangerous--at 14 what did I know? In that sense this movie taught me valuable lessons about who you can trust.Like many of my generation I truly believed you could tell 'good' people from 'bad' people by the way they dressed, talked, or acted, but the thievery of 'the hippies' bothered me. From that point on the tension, the knowing something really bad is coming, gripped my heart. Comparisons to the Mai Lai Massacre are inevitable. The ending still haunts me after 43 years.

jzappa Known for crowd-pleasing stories with definite heroes, underdogs overcoming odds and surrogate fathers, it's ironic that John G. Avildsen's breakthrough came with a film that asks the kind of questions that mainstream film wouldn't ask for awhile yet about the impartial portrayal of racists, junkies and gritty urban living. And it does only ask these questions. It doesn't answer much. Its over-the-top climax is a taut little shocker that eschews winding down for a gaping stunned gaze on your face, but as much as it leaves you pondering where the characters all went wrong, the scenes leading up to it don't quite seem to have led there without major, sudden contrivance.The death of an insignificant, drug-dealing junkie loser would be less than probable to be headlined on an NYC TV news program, let alone front page news in an NYC newspaper. Yet because these implausible things implicitly happen, Joe (played stunningly by Peter Boyle), while ranting in a bar, overhears and somehow recalls the name of another customer who fleetingly and facetiously says he's killed a hippie. Days later, Joe not only remembers the man's very general name but is able to track him down, apparently since he's the only person of the name Bill Compton listed in the whole phonebook for a city of several million people. Nevertheless, this movie wants you to think about the implications of its dialogue, the contrast between two men of different classes, and mainly the war between generational values. It's the kind of movie that gets articles written about its perceived commentary on its time, and works as a time capsule for audiences of my generation, forty years later.The film's credited with birthing the "vigilante film," wherein characters violate the law to exact justice, rooted in 1970s anxiety toward government corruption, failure in Vietnam, increased crime. These movies point toward the climbing political orientation of neo-conservatism, men who believe good and evil to be cut-and-dried and legal bureaucracy to be elite nutlessness, so they play judge, jury and executioner. Joe and Bill are two of these sorts, but their crusade is not by any means lionized. Their holy war against the counterculture scene catches them off-guard, such as when they make love with some hippie girls, where we see body shame equated with older, more purist generations and upper classes, and the other extreme of exhibitionism seen as social equality. Yet no young character trusts or even likes any older character, and vice versa.The American flag on the poster art of this film indeed deserves higher billing than the main cast, because more than a portrait of Joe or Bill, the movie's a bleak silhouette of the country, at odds with itself, its famous Dream turned sour. This is an inherently fascinating concept. Avildsen would return to it just a few years later in his masterpiece Save the Tiger, which would swing for the bleachers. Here, however, he and writer Norman Wexler seem more concerned with their heavy dependence on sensationalist advertising and broad, lurid overstatement of theme, despite the intrinsic quality of their film. There's so much more about the '60s, '70s generational gap that goes untapped here---Molotov cocktails and sniper fire in response to multicultural textbook curriculums, racial integration in its infancy, homosexuality still considered a mental illness---instead merely concerning older traditional fuddy-duds and younger radical stoners with their dispositions towards sex, drugs and violence.I thought I'd appreciate this movie immensely. Save the Tiger firmly grasped the perceived moral dilemmas of the era, punctured stereotypes that clenched many into angles where they couldn't---still can't---comprehend the people with whom they share their society, or truly grasp the dichotomies that make up the layers of daily life. Joe seems to be even more about such things than that film. Instead, I found its moments of violence, at the beginning and end, to be done with a mawkishly exploitative edge with superfluous percussion-driven music and repetitive editing undercutting the impact. I found myself admiring the occasional scene of dialogue but finding most of them hard to buy, especially those where Bill takes Joe through his upper-crust world to show him how fake his peers are.Nevertheless, resulting from the national media coverage of the Stonehead Manor murders that inspired its climax, Joe snagged a Straight From The Headlines asset upon release. Without the murders, it's unlikely that this low-budget exploitation film would've found a wide audience, which instead it did, earning millions in domestic receipts. Furthermore, it's likely that the similarities between the real-life murders and the movie's dog-eared premise inspired the Academy to nominate Wexler's passable screenplay for an Oscar. It's also likely that the wider audiences helped launch newcomers Avildsen, Boyle and Sarandon. And that's not such a bad thing.