ICE-Vision: Joe (John G. Avildsen, 1970)
Wednesday, October 10 at 8 PM
Lamar Dodd School of Art Room S150
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ICE-Vision continues with Film Studies major Daniel LoPilato’s weekly selections of eclectic, idiosyncratic, psychotronic, or otherwise eccentric excursions into world cinema.
Notorious for its violence, both on-screen and rhetorical, “Joe” is the twisted hippy-revenge plot fantasy which catapulted Peter Boyle into unwanted fame among the ranks of blue collar workers terrified of the social changes of the sixties, and into the scorn of the youth espousing the lifestyle of the counterculture. The first non-pornographic feature of Cannon Films which the critic J. Hoberman calls a “precursor to such subsequent guerrilla productions as Sweet Sweetback’s Baadassss Song and Billy Jack,” Joe bears the undeniable on-location sleaze of Greenwich Village drug culture upon a satire made stunning and ambiguous by Boyle’s acrimonious performance as Joe, the twin faces of everyman hero and vigilante villain, whose friendship with white collar adman Bill (Dennis Patrick), the unwitting murderer of his own daughter’s junky boyfriend, climaxes with the irreverent defiance of Arthur Penn’s Bonnie and Clyde.
Next week… You the Living (Roy Andersson, 2007)