Fragment of Folklore

By * Jay Cocks

Not yet 20, Joseph Hillstrom arrives from Sweden in 1910 hoping, as so many others then did, to find a new life in America. He becomes a hobo, a songwriter, an organizer for the Industrial Workers of the World. In 1915, as Joe Hill, convicted murderer, he is executed by a firing squad at the federal penitentiary in Utah. His final instructions to his trade union supporters: "Don't mourn! Organize!"

Working with these fragments of folklore and history, Swedish Film Maker Bo Widerberg has fashioned them into a touching tribute but an only intermittently successful film. 70e Hill works best in its early, New York City episodes. Joe falls in with an immigrant ragamuffin nicknamed "The Fox"--an Italian version of the Artful Dodger --who gives his friend harsh glimpses of life in the New World, where it is often necessary to steal food just to stay alive. Joe also meets a soft-eyed refugee named Lucia. They huddle together on the fire escape of the Metropolitan Opera, listening to the music drifting out from the grand hall. These scenes have a kind of ruthless poignancy that the rest of the film seldom achieves.

A Lavish Meal. Unable to find work and oppressed by the poverty of the city, Joe leaves for the West, riding the rails and enjoying the vagrant's life. In every town he sees labor organizers being routed by cops and strikers being ridden out of town in boxcars. It is enough to convince him--if not the audience--that he must join the I.W.W., and the songs that he composes set the movement to music.

He also becomes an effective, occasionally ingenious organizer. He notices that the cops are quick to interrupt I.W.W. rallies even while the Salvation Army is attracting large crowds just across the street. Demanding an explanation, Hill is informed that the Army has the right to assembly because they are performing music. The next time Joe Hill appears on a soapbox he has his own I.W.W. song in hand --set to the tune of a Salvation Army hymn. People gather around and the police are temporarily thwarted. In another town, Joe goes into a restaurant and deliberately orders a lavish meal that he cannot pay for! Banished to the kitchen to wash dishes, he persuades the help to strike.

Eventually, Hill is tried for the shooting of a Salt Lake City storekeeper and his son, a charge that both history and the film imply was trumped up. Feeling is running so high against the union movement that a conviction is handily achieved and Joe Hill is executed.

As he did in his most popular film, Elvira Madigan, Director Widerberg tends to see events in soft focus. His abiding affection for lambent light produces some beautiful images (a deserted wheat field with a long black train seeming almost to slide across it in the distance), but it plays him false just as often, making his film merely pretty where it should be brutal.

Joe is memorably played by Thommy Berggren (the lover in Elvira Madigan), whose diffident yet forceful manner and ingratiating uncertainty with the English language make him the perfect incarnation of Hill. Kelvin Malave is also charming as The Fox, but the rest of the cast is distractingly nonprofessional. What is decisively wrong with Joe Hill is that it lacks historical complexity. The Molly Maguires, another film about labor's early struggles, was remorselessly real, almost like a dirge. Joe Hill, despite its occasional beauties, is more like a sentimental pop tune.

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