Jonah in a Hard Hat

By Mark Goodman

"The niggers," sneers Joe Curran. His beer belly enfolds the bar, and his close-set black eyes burn bright with contempt. "The niggers are getting all the money. So why work? Welfare! They even give them free rubbers . . . You think they use them? Hell, no. They sell them and use the money for booze. All them social workers are nigger lovers. And the white kids, they're acting like niggers. They got no respect for the President of the United States. A few heads get bashed and the liberals behave like Eleanor Roosevelt got raped. The liberals. Forty-two per cent of the liberals are queer--and that's a fact. Some Wallace people took a poll."

Joe Curran is the ultimate hardhat: outraged, terrified, violent and more than a little envious, lashing out blindly at threatening forces that he only dimly comprehends. His furrowed brow puckers when he hears his son has bought a motorcycle; his jowls tremble with rage when his wife breaks the news that a "colored" family has moved into his lily-white Queens neighborhood. His basement is formidably stocked with World War II weaponry. His hatred is so raw, his ideas so primitive and naive, that he often radiates a genuinely amusing innocence. For all its funny moments, however, Joe is anything but comedy. It is a film of Freudian anguish, biblical savagery and immense social and cinematic importance.

Fear and Frustration. Bill Compton (Dennis Patrick) is a $60,000-a-year Manhattan advertising executive whose young daughter (Susan Sarandon) has run off to live with an East Village junkie. She is not there when her father goes to her apartment, but he gets into an argument with her boy friend and inadvertently beats him to death. He staggers into a local bar where Joe (Peter Boyle), a $160-a-week welder, is holding forth. When Joe finally screams, "I'd like to kill one of them!", Compton looks up and whispers, "I just did." Joe later realizes that Compton was serious. He looks him up--not to blackmail him but to idolize him. "There's plenty of people," says Joe, "who would make you a hero."

Joe becomes Compton's Jonah. They form a curious but substantial relationship, a fraternity based on fear and frustration. Joe takes Compton to a bowling alley, and Compton shows Joe the fashionable Ginger Man, passing Joe off as a top-drawer adman. Slowly, Compton's harmless, homogenized ideas and civilized manners give way before the barbaric force of Joe's fury. "Sometimes when I'm with Joe," Compton tells his wife, "I feel almost as if I'd performed a humanitarian act."

Together they comb the East Village for Compton's daughter and end up wallowing in a smoky pad with a group of hippies. Joe looks at the welter of nude flesh in wonder. "This is an orgy, ain't it?" he asks (pronouncing "orgy" with a hard g). But the kids taunt them mercilessly, steal their wallets and take off for a commune. Joe and Bill track down the youngsters in a closing scene of such horror that Joe must surely rank in impact with Bonnie and Clyde.

Harsh Power. Technically Joe is not on a par with Bonnie. Norman Wexler has written a tough, sure script, but the cast offers only one first-rate actor, Peter Boyle. The others are not much more than typecast foils for Joe's brutality, and when Director John Avildsen allows his camera to linger on them too long they tend to deteriorate into caricature. Even Joe is sometimes overdrawn: he does not need to burp every time he takes a swig of beer. But Avildsen maintains a generally crisp pace, and Boyle more than compensates for the inadequacies around him. He obviously has studied early Marlon Brando movies with laudable results: he performs with as much harsh power as the young Brando ever did, and he is funnier than Brando could ever hope to be.

Beyond Boyle's superb performance, the most striking aspect of Joe is the film's essential honesty. Though the characters seem stereotypical, they are nonetheless real. Joe is no stock cops-v.-flower-children exploitive enterprise. Compton's daughter is not a free spirit but a trapped head with an Electra complex. Her boy friend is a cruel, indifferent junkie who peddles pills to teenyboppers.

One of the film's more bitter ironies is that Compton might have avoided ultimate tragedy by merely surrendering and standing trial. A lot of Joes sit in jury boxes these days.

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