Joe (John G. Avildsen, 1970).
Movie-lovers!
Welcome back to The Deuce Notebook, a collaboration between MUBI's Notebook and The Deuce Film Series, our monthly event at Nitehawk Williamsburg that excavates the facts and fantasies of cinema's most infamous block in the world: 42nd Street between 7th and 8th Avenues. For each screening, my co-hosts and I pick a title that we think embodies the era of 24-hour moviegoing, and present the venue at which it premiered…
This month, we welcome yet another guest writer, Jason Bailey. Jason is a film critic, historian, and author. His most recent book, “Fun City Cinema: New York City and the Movies That Made It,” tracks the intersections between New York movies and the city’s history. That is also the subject of his “Fun City Cinema” podcast, and the following essay was adapted from the episode “Keep America Great.”
Special thanks to co-host Mike Hull and guests Jefferson Cowie, Larry Karaszewski, Derek Nystrom, Kristy Puchko, and Zach Vasquez for their insights. Enjoy!
Joe (Avildsen, 1970).
From a structural standpoint, what’s most peculiar about John G. Avildsen’s 1970 film Joe is that the title character doesn’t even appear until the 27-minute mark. And it’s not some kind of Third Man situation, where his entrance has been carefully prepared by existing characters; Joe Curran (Peter Boyle) appears out of nowhere, sitting on a stool at the bar of the conspicuously-named “American Bar & Grill,” loudly expressing his blustering opinions about Black people (but using the bluntest and most offensive term for them), homosexuals (ditto), and hippies—and doing so with an enthusiasm and abandon that implies this is part of his regular routine.
Up until his memorable entrance, Joe has told a very different story, one about an upper-class businessman and his runaway hippie daughter. And indeed, when director John G. Avildsen and screenwriter Norman Wexler devised and shot this film, it bore a different title, The Gap, emphasizing its focus on the Generation Gap, a hot topic of the late 1960s. But by the time they were in postproduction, something happened in downtown Manhattan that made them rethink what their film was about—and who it was for.
It happened on Friday, May 8th, 1970, and it began at the intersection of Wall Street and Broad Street in downtown Manhattan: the location of the New York Stock Exchange, the heart of New York City’s financial district. Major cities and campuses across the country were in a perpetual state of protest over the United States’ involvement in the war in Vietnam. Those protests had escalated in recent days over President Nixon’s expansion of the war into Cambodia—and at one of those protests, at Ohio’s Kent State University, National Guardsmen opened fire on a crowd of nonviolent demonstrators, wounding nine and killing four. That was May 4th.
One of the victims was Jeffrey Miller, who hailed from Plainview, Long Island—he’s the young man face-down on the ground in the famous photo from Kent State, with a young woman kneeled over him, arms spread, anguished. Two days after his murder, thousands of antiwar protestors gathered at his funeral on the Upper West Side. Mayor John Lindsay pronounced that May 8th would be a citywide “day of reflection,” with schools closed, and flags at half-mast.
In the meantime, protestors had begun to meet at Wall Street for daily antiwar demonstrations. They chanted, spoke into bullhorns, and occasionally hurled slogans and profanities at passing businessmen. But on May 7th, a group of 20 to 40 American-flag waving construction workers—many of them on the job at the nearby World Trade Center site—clashed with those student demonstrators. It was just a preview of what was to come.
That night and into the morning of the 8th, the NYPD received several anonymous tips that workmen were planning to disrupt that day’s lunchtime demonstration, intending to “knock heads” with and “take care of” the protestors outside the Stock Exchange. By the time speakers were at the lectern of the demonstration that morning, the rumors had made their way to the protestors. One speaker advised the crowd not to fight hard hats that might attack them. “The police are here to protect us,” the speaker insisted. Instead, when the hard hats began working their way into the crowd, a patrolman was heard shouting, “Give ’em hell, boys! Give ’em one for me!”
The construction workers came up Broad Street, marching in their steel-toed boots and colored hard hats, several men wide, shouldering American flags and chanting, “U-S-A, All The Way” and “Hey hey, whaddaya say, We support the USA!” and “Love it or leave it!” Police estimated a total of 400 hard hats on the scene. The shouting, and the tensions, escalated. At first, the police on the scene attempted to keep the groups separate, forming a human chain across Broad Street, and then another behind it. But the hard hats broke through both lines of cops and descended on the crowd with a furious roar. Fists flew. Protesters were thrown to the ground, punched and kicked. Pipes, wrenches, and other construction equipment were wielded as weapons. ABC News reported that “police did little to stop” the workers once the melee began; witnesses would say they saw NYPD officers passively watching the violence, or even shouting words of encouragement.
In the surrounding buildings, office workers crowded around windows to watch the ruckus. Some came down to the ground for a closer look, or to cheer the hard hats on, or more. Eventually, 800 office workers—more than twice the number of hard hats counted—would join in the violence. After fifteen minutes, NYPD reinforcements arrived, but all that did was scatter the beatings from their epicenter. Student demonstrators fled down side streets, only to be followed, attacked, and left on the sidewalks. Several ran to the nearby campus of Pace University; on that building’s grounds, they were beaten with fists, feet, pipes, and wire cutters. But the bulk of the attackers were now marching up Broadway—the Canyon of Heroes, home of celebratory parades for visiting luminaries and victorious sports teams. The office dwellers on Broadway treated them accordingly, showering with them with cheers and ticker tape.
And a large group landed at City Hall, where the flags were at half-staff for the Kent State day of reflection. “Put the flag at full mast!” one yelled. “Raise our flag!” The crowd got larger and angrier, pushing against the police officers stationed at the front of the building, and then past them, hopping fences, knocking over iron barricades, attempting to breach the doors of City Hall. City officials inside, terrified of what would happen if they broke through, raised the flags. The men outside cheered, raised the flags they were carrying, and sang the national anthem. Antiwar protestors who were watching all of this began shouting peace slogans in response. They were quickly attacked.
Finally, by midafternoon, the mob began to disperse. Many returned to their construction jobs at World Trade; few were docked their pay for the time they were gone, and some even received bonuses. The NYPD, which had clubbed antiwar protestors the day before for blocking traffic, did not raise a hand to the hard hats and businessmen. Most chatted amiably with the attackers, laughing with them and slapping their backs.
It was one of the worst outbreaks of civilian violence in the city’s history—a full afternoon of brutal assaults, in the streets and on the sidewalks of Manhattan, that came to be known as the Hard Hat Riot. More than 100 people were injured that day, and by the time it came to an end, the NYPD had arrested only one of the hard hats involved in the attacks.
On June 28th, 1970, less than two months after the Hard Hat Riot, the New York Times Magazine ran a lengthy, sympathetic profile of Joe Kelly, one of its participants. He summed up the response, positive and negative, to the event: “I think that the large majority of people, going as high as 85 or 90 per cent, are more than happy. Not so much for the violence but for the stand that we took. And now they're standing up. The construction worker is only an image that's being used. The hard hat is being used to represent all of the silent majority.”
Joe (Avildesn, 1970).
He was right, and one of the first examples of that representation, in popular culture, was Joe. The screenplay by Norman Wexler spends its opening scenes introducing us to Melissa Compton (played by Susan Sarandon, in her film debut), a free-spirited young hippie chick, shacked up with a loathsome, low-level drug dealer in Greenwich Village. Early in the film, while browsing at a discount store, she has an overdose.
Her well-to-do parents come to visit her in the hospital, and make vague promises towards ending their estrangement; while she recovers, her wealthy, ad executive father Bill (Dennis Patrick) goes to her apartment and runs into her boyfriend there. A confrontation ensues, and in a blind rage, Bill Compton beats his daughter’s boyfriend to death, then ransacks the apartment to look like a burglary. Still in a daze, he goes to the “American Bar & Grill”—and that’s where he, and we, first meet Joe.
Joe’s furious condemnations of… well, of everyone who isn’t a white man, function, in that moment, as the verbalization of the id that Bill Compton has just unexpectedly unleashed. And so an unlikely bond forms between these two men, especially after Joe sees a news report about the death of Melissa’s boyfriend and connects the dots. Each revels in the opportunity to see how the other half lives, while bonding over their shared concern—or, more accurately, hatred—over what’s become of this country.
Alas, though Melissa eventually recovers from her overdose, she discovers what her father did, and runs away from home again. Bill tries to find her, this time with Joe’s help; in the course of their clumsy, makeshift investigation, Joe and Bill end up partying with a bunch of Village hippies. And then things go sideways: while engaging in a bit of free love with girls young enough to be their daughters, Joe and Bill’s wallets are stolen. They give chase to an isolated farmhouse and start blasting; Bill shoots a young woman as she runs out the door, discovering after the fact that the girl he’s killed is, in fact, his daughter—whom he’d gone out that night to “save.”
The original theatrical poster for Joe.
Joe was released on July 15th, 1970. Its original poster featured the title character, front and center, with a shotgun in one hand and an American flag in the other. The tagline above him, in big, capital letters, read: “KEEP AMERICA BEAUTIFUL.” Though Peter Boyle’s Joe—who is seen working a factory job, complete with hard hat—was a decidedly supporting character, the film had been retitled (and, some said, recut) to place him in its center, and its ad campaign was adjusted accordingly.
This savvy recalibration worked. Joe cost just north of $100,000 to make. In its original release, it grossed over $19 million, making it the 12th-highest grossing movie of 1970, ahead of classics like Five Easy Pieces and Kelly’s Heroes. And critics praised it; Gene Siskel, for example, called it “a landmark film because of the issues and social norms it justifies. It is a dramatic, if not always sophisticated, documentary of a growing portion of the national mentality."
But something interesting happened as the film entered the national conversation. Though the film depicts Joe as a dangerously unfiltered influence, it is ultimately Bill Compton who pulls the trigger and murders his daughter. Still, critics and audiences of or sympathetic to the counterculture came away from the film centering Joe as the villain, and letting Bill Compton off the hook. This mental switch was uncannily similar to how journalistic accounts of the Hard Hat Riot had emphasized the role of working-class thugs in their telling of the story (down to its nickname), though white-collar office workers outnumbered them considerably.
The Joe Speaks album of dialogue from the film.
And complicating all of that was the fact that, to another portion of the audience, the character of Joe struck a chord that was not villainous at all. Hard-right conservative viewers championed Joe for telling it like it is and giving those hippies what they deserved; distributor Cannon Films, smelling more money to be made, not only released a conventional soundtrack album of music from the movie, but an odd dialogue soundtrack titled Joe Speaks, so that audiences could enjoy repeat listenings of Joe’s rants in the comfort of their own homes.
Contemporaneous profiles of Boyle, a hustling young actor who found himself a star for the first time, find him cringing at strangers on the street who announce, “I agree with everything you said, young man. Someone should have said it a long time ago.” Such encounters made the actor understandably nervous. “If anything, I'm scared,” he told the New York Times. “I've been scared for a couple of years. I get scared when I meet people like Joe. And I get scared when I hear that kids are standing up at the end of the movie and yelling. 'I'm going to shoot back, Joe.' In fact, the other night I was walking down 46th Street and I had a flash of myself being shot down in the street, just because someone thought I really was Joe."
Adding to that fear, and to the sense that Joe had captured something very present and scary in the culture, was its disturbing real-life analogue. Arville Garland was a 46-year-old railroad-yard switching engineer, a “stable citizen and a loving father,” according to TIME magazine, who “had been driven to desperation by attitudes of youth beyond his comprehension.” His seventeen-year-old daughter Sandra was attending Wayne State University in Detroit, staying in an apartment with her boyfriend Scott Kabran against her parents’ wishes.
So late one night, Garland turned up at the apartment armed to the teeth. He described the events that followed to the police: "I knew my daughter was in there with Scott. I broke down the door to apartment 9 with my right shoulder. I was carrying a flashlight in my right hand. They were both nude. I pulled out my .38 revolver and struck Scott over the head with the gun as hard as I could. The weapon discharged, killing my daughter, who moaned and fell back. My wife screamed, 'You killed my baby!'
"I said it was an accident. After I knew my daughter was dead, I shot Scott in the head two or three times. I don't remember shooting a colored man named Greg, who was in a bed in the same room, but I remember thinking he probably had been taking turns with my daughter. I remember seeing blood on Greg.
"I put the .38 in my belt and pulled out the Luger and walked into the other room and shone the flashlight at Tony on the couch, and I shot him, I believe, through the forehead. I believe he was having intercourse with my daughter also. They all ruined my daughter."
The murders of Sandra Garland, Scott Kabran, Gregory Walls, and Anthony Brown were all committed just after 2am on the morning of May 8th, 1970—the same day as the Hard Hat Riot. When the case went to trial, Judge Joseph A. Gillis advised the prosecution and defense attorneys to view Joe, but carefully weeded out any potential jurors who had seen it.
Garland pleaded temporary insanity. In spite of the brutality of the crimes, and the fact that he had brought extra ammunition indicating premeditation, Garland was only convicted of manslaughter in the death of his daughter and second-degree murder for each of the three teens in her home. While in prison, he received letters of support from other parents of wayward teens. It made the conclusion of Joe, which was presumably intended to play like Greek tragedy, into something closer to social realism.
Rob Reiner and Carroll O'Connor on All in the Family (1971-79).
Whatever the case, Joe had clearly tapped into something in the air in 1970. Before long, Joe-like figures started appearing elsewhere in popular culture—most notably, in the character of Archie Bunker on TV’s All in the Family. But the influence of the hard hat, and the idea that the white working class was ready to fight back against young rabble-rousers and their ilk, wasn’t just seen on television and movie screens.
Twelve days after the Hard Hat Riot, in cities across the country, working-class citizens gathered for what amounted to the nonviolent version of the Riot—with the largest turnout in Manhattan. Something like 150,000 construction workers, longshoremen, Teamsters, and the like descended on City Hall, singing their anthems, chanting to love it or leave it, waving American flags. TIME magazine declared the day “Workers’ Woodstock,” and noted, “Almost overnight, ‘hard hats’ became synonymous with white working-class conservatives.”
This was a change. Hard hats like Joe, and like the men who descended on Wall Street on May 8th, had traditionally voted Democrat, as most unions did. But Nixon had been quietly courting them, from less a fiscal than a social angle, since his 1968 Presidential campaign. When he accepted that nomination in the midst of a season of protest (much of it violent), he promised to represent another voice, “the quiet voice in the tumult and the shouting. It is the voice of the great majority of Americans, the forgotten Americans—the non-shouters; the non-demonstrators.” Not long after, Nixon would put a name to that voice: “The great Silent Majority of my fellow Americans.”
The name stuck, and it was invoked to describe those who participated in these rallies, violent and non. Nixon had barely won in 1968, and not because the Democratic nominee, Hubert Humphrey, was particularly hard to beat. It was because of George Wallace, the former governor of Alabama, who had run as an independent.
Jefferson Cowie writes in his book Stayin’ Alive: The 1970s and the Last Days of the Working Class that Wallace “drew together the segregationist South with anti-liberal northerners concerned about blacks moving into their neighborhoods, fearful of the riots, and feeling simply forgotten.” Writing in the New York Post, columnist Pete Hamill surmised of Wallace voters, “They want change; the America they thought was theirs has become something else in their own lifetimes, they want to go back. A lot of the people attracted to George Wallace are just people who think America has passed them by, leaving them confused and screwed-up and unhappy.”
The day after “The Workers’ Woodstock,” presidential advisor Pat Buchanan wrote a memo to President Nixon. “Last week, a group of construction workers came up Wall Street and beat the living hell out of some demonstrators who were desecrating the American flag,” he wrote. “Whether one condones this kind of violence or not, probably half the living rooms in America were in standing applause at the spectacle… No union man would have done that ten years ago…. These, quite candidly, are our people now.”
The bond had been cast. And it’s held to this day, as have other byproducts of that particular moment in history. The most obvious, of course, was the 2016 election of Donald Trump, who pledged to bring manufacturing jobs, coal mining, and other vanished industries of the white working class back to the nation. He wore a hard hat at some of his rallies, where he waxed rhapsodic about “forgotten Americans” and the “Silent Majority,” and spoke Joe-like pronouncements about the racial minorities, liberal elites, and other boogeymen that they could blame for their woes. And when he pulled an unexpected upset in that election, most pundits attributed that victory to the support of the white working class.
His actual accomplishments didn’t deliver much to that electorate, at least economically. He gave huge tax cuts to the rich, and loaded the courts with a generation’s worth of ultra-conservative judges. But he used his Twitter and his press conferences, his version of the barstool at the All-American Grill, to mouthpiece the grievances his base wanted to hear. In his book The Hardhat Riot: Nixon, New York City, and the Dawn of the White Working-Class Revolution, author David Paul Kuhn writes, “for many alienated whites, Trump was a middle finger to elites. As people do, they compared their present to their personal past, as well as against America’s promise.”
Kuhn’s book was published in early 2020, so he had no way of knowing that his deeply researched, blow-by-blow account of the events of May 8th, 1970, would echo so chillingly to the scenes we’d see on January 6th, 2021: the chanting, the marching, the violence, and most of all, the waves of furious men, blue collar and white collar alike, attempting to overtake a seat of American governance, in the name of what they called patriotism.
The generation gap may no longer be with us—at least as a focal point of discussion and despair, the way it was in Joe. But the class gap, the political gap, and the ideological gap of 1970 are still very much alive, pulsing and consuming our discourse, every hour of every day.
—Text by Jason Bailey.
The opening title of Avildsen's Joe.
The Deuce Film Series is a monthly, 35mm presentation created by “Joe Zieg” Berger and co-hosted with “Tour Guide Andy” McCarthy and “Maestro Jeff” Cashvan. Produced by Max Cavanaugh for Nitehawk Cinema Williamsburg, The Deuce was founded in November 2012.