JOE

Joe is not merely an extraordinary film, it is a small artistic miracle. Only rarely in the turmoil of human events does a work of fiction speak so clearly, with such brutal directness to the core truths of the condition of life that no matter what one's beliefs, there is no denying its validity. Zola's "J'Accuse" was such a work, Harriet Beecher Stowe's Uncle Tom's Cabin was another. In film, in recent memory, Joe is approached for sheer impact and importance only by Z, Paths of Glory and the final scenes of Easy Rider. No one conceiving this film, a year ago, could have known how loudly it would speak today. It is a one-in-a-million success, a story so simple and so terrifyingly on-target for our times, that the luckiest Vegas bookies, with all the vigerish in the universe, would lose their shorts trying to predict odds on its happening again.

Already the film is a legend. I saw it in New York (for the first time) early in July, the day after it opened at the Murray Hill on 3rd Avenue. By that time Judith Crist had come out strongly for it. Still, it was an unknown quantity to me, and though I was urged into seeing it by a film director friend of mine, I was reluctant: you can only see so many Strawberry Statements, so many Getting Straights, so many Revolutionarys without getting fed to the teeth by the exploitation of the dissent movement by the fat and cynical. But I allowed myself to be dragooned. (It is interesting to note that I had just come off a lecture tour through Middle America, two days prior to my trip to the Murray Hill. I had been through hardhat country.)

I was not disposed to be impressed.

I had had my guts twisted by Z and Easy Rider and I did not think they could do it to me again.

At the end of the film, it took my director friend, Max Katz, and his lady, Karen, to help me up the aisle. I could not focus. I was trembling like a man with malaria. There was a large potted tree on the sidewalk outside the theater. I managed to get to it, and sat there, unable to communicate, for twenty minutes. I was no good for two days thereafter.

Phone calls to the Cannon Group, the releasing corporation responsible for getting the film into circulation, brought me photo stills, production information and background on the story. I knew, even then, I would want to write some words about Joe.

Seeing it again last night, here in Los Angeles, I was afraid my first impressions would be blunted by all the foofaraw the film has generated, by reevaluations, by seeing it in company with a less-hip crowd than the Manhattan audience.

Though it became my turn to help someone up the aisle—my lady Cindy, who was (politely put) stunned—the film held as much significance and torment the second time around.

The film buff inclined toward Cahiers du Cinema analyses of motion pictures may find this review somewhat wanting in phrases like mobility, color-sense, directorial thrust, cinematographic purity, characterization . . . the full sack of technical terminology that proves the critic knows whereof he speaks. The filmgoer whose exposure to cinema criticism rests on the high school book report level of getting a line-by-line retelling of the plot, may also be frustrated.

I choose not to tell the story of Joe. Too many clowns have already spoiled the experience (on television and in newspapers) by categorizing it as a story about a hardhat who kills hippies, as a study of the generation gap, as a modern terror tale, as any number of other literary flummeries. And it is all of these, and none of these. What it is, fellow travelers, is a visceral experience on a par with going black-belting with Bruce Lee. Joe will kick the shit out of you. It will set the blood slamming against your cranial walls. It will make you as cold as Ultima Thule.

So those who want informed and esoteric précis can look elsewhere. The sole and blatant purpose of this review is not only to get you to go see the film, but to buy a ticket for a needy hardhat.

Because that is who should see this movie.

I drove down Ventura Boulevard this morning. Just a few blocks past Sepulveda, they're building another of those filing cabinets for people—a massive office building. The thing rises eight or ten storeys already. They have one of those giant centerpost cranes on top, literally pulling the structure up by its bootstraps. And on the rigger's platform of the crane is a flagstaff, and flying proudly from that staff is Old Glory.

Across the street from the construction is a men's shop I occasionally patronize. When I park in front of the construction and walk across to the men's shop, the hardhats come out on the railings up there and they start doing Joe. I'm thinking of buying a hundred tickets and passing them out to the fellahs. Let them go and see Joe Curran, the prototypical hardhat, the middle-class homeowner, the guy with the knotty pine rec room and the "well-balanced gun collection." Joe, the guy who refers to Bud as the King of Beers, the guy who hates welfare deadbeats and niggers and kids who've fucked up the music and shit on the flag. Let them go and see Joe, and then let them try and reconcile it in their baboon brains. If they can.

Assaulted as you are, moment by moment, with urgings to read this and see that, to touch this and taste that, how do I summon the words that will impel you to the Four Star Theater, to see this film, now? How do I get you to do it, so you can get your parents and your friends and total strangers with short hair and a psychotic glaze over their eyes, to see it also? How do I do it . . . ?

Perhaps I do it by analyzing the film in terms of the great cinematic moments. Perhaps by telling you the chilling and wholly logical story so you'll want to see how it all comes out. And perhaps I just do what I've done—advise you that the only person who could walk away from Joe without a new awareness of the treadmill to tragedy on which America is running is the kind of person who is Joe Curran.

And maybe I just suggest, in a soft whisper, that the beast who is Joe lives in all of us, longhair or hardhat. And then, friends, we drop to our knees and pray.

Los Angeles Free Press/September 25, 1970