Joe (1970) on Netflix
Advertising executive Bill Compton kills Frank Russo, the dealer who lives with his daughter Melissa, and confesses the crime in a bar to Joe Curran, a factory worker who hates hippies.
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- Netflix3.2/5
- IMDb6.8/105,242 votes
- Rotten Tomatoes77%
Trailer
Plot summary
Bill Compton is a New York advertising executive with a wife, Joan, and a daughter, Melissa, who has been living with Frank Russo, a drug dealer. When Melissa is hospitalized after an overdose, Bill goes to Russo's apartment for her belongings. Russo taunts him, and Bill beats him to death in a rage, then carries off a bag of drugs and stashes it in his car. To settle his nerves he stops at a bar, where Joe Curran, a factory worker, is ranting against hippies. Bill announces that he has just killed one, then calls it a joke. A few days later a news report about a slain dealer prompts Joe to telephone him. Bill expects blackmail; Joe offers admiration instead.
Cast
- Patrick McDermottas Frank Russo
- Estelle Omensas Woman in Bargain Store
- Bob O'Connellas Man in Bargain Store
- Audrey Caireas Joan Compton
- Mary Caseas Teeny Bopper
Did you know?!Facts and trivia about Joe (1970)
Can contain spoilers, watch the movie first.
- Ten weeks before Joe was released in the United States, a mass murder with similarities to the film's climax took place in Detroit, Michigan: a railroad worker killed his daughter, her boyfriend and two other students at a university residence.
- Peter Boyle was disturbed to see audiences cheering the violence in Joe, so he refused to appear in any other film or television show that glorified violence, passing on the role of Jimmy "Popeye" Doyle in The French Connection, which won Gene Hackman the Academy Award for Best Actor.
- During pre-trial deliberations, Judge Joseph A. Gillis saw Joe and strongly advised both the prosecution and defense teams to watch it, then screened the jury pool and excluded anyone who had seen the movie, forbidding seated jurors from watching it at all.
- Joe inspired the creation of other tough, working class characters in 1970s film and television, including Archie Bunker, the character played by Carroll O'Connor on All in the Family.
- Joe was produced on a budget of only $106,000, and the sleeper hit went on to gross more than $19.3 million in the United States and Canada, the 14th highest-grossing film of 1970.
