A-Z GUIDE TO MOVIES AND TV SHOWS PARODIED BY MAD, CRACKED, CRAZY, ETC. UP TO 1996. THEY HAVE NOTHING TO DO WITH THIS. SPOILERS AND OTHER NON-SEQUITURS, TOO. SOMETIMES THESE THINGS HAVE WORDS OR SITUATIONS WE DON'T USE ANYMORE. YOU KNOW, 'CAUSE THEY'RE OLD.
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Saturday, April 30, 2022
SHMOE
JOE (1970)
dir: Jon Avildsen
SHMOE
MAD #144, July 1971
w: Larry Siegel
a: Mort Drucker
The character of Joe (Peter Boyle) doesn't show up until about a half hour into the movie. Joe's a working class right-wing World War II veteran living in Queens, a sort of more “serious” and sociopathic version of Archie Bunker. You see him at his machine shop shift.
It begins with Melissa Compton (Susan Sarandon), who's run away from home to live with her drug-dealing and using boyfriend Frank (Patrick McDermott).
Melissa's father Bill (Dennis Patrick) shows up at Melissa and Frank's apartment and kills him for brainwashing and seducing his little girl. Then we finally meet Joe on his drunken rant against everything the right saw wrong with America circa 1970 (“60% of all liberals are queers and that's a fact!”)
Bill ducks into the bar where Joe is carrying on and when he says he'd like to kill a hippie, Bill says “I just did.” Joe dismisses this as a joke, then sees how a hippie was killed the next day, puts two and two together, gets in contact with Bill, and blackmails Bill into being his friend. Joe and his wife have dinner with the Comptons (we get to that later in the parody), their backgrounds initially clash, but they bond over their hatred of hippies, and go out infiltrating the hippie scene so they can find Bill's daughter.
This is the dinner part. They write it out of order so they can do the punchline, and the movie satire being for kids can't use the getting laid at orgies (remember to pronounce that with a hard G) and killing hippies.
Joe shows Bill his gun collection they later use to kill the hippies. Here they use the punchline that he's really Spiro Agnew. Hard to imagine in the polarized country we live in now that Nixon and Agnew were once considered as far right as you could go. Like most people my age who began reading MAD post-Watergate and before 1980, we learned who he was from MAD's specials reprinting five-year old material.
Peter Boyle was offered the lead in The French Connection but turned it down because he was allergic to the gray paint he didn't want to be typecast as a psycho.
On page 5, in panel 3, there's a portrait on the wall, and I wish I knew who it's of. I could almost convince myself that it's Robert Welch, founder of the far-right John Birch Society, because that would make sense in context, but the toothy grin seems wrong.
Whoever it is, Mort Drucker must have hated them, because that's one of his most vicious caricatures I can recall. He prided himself on his ability to capture likenesses without being gratuitously cruel, so a drawing like that really jumps out.
On page 5, in panel 3, there's a portrait on the wall, and I wish I knew who it's of. I could almost convince myself that it's Robert Welch, founder of the far-right John Birch Society, because that would make sense in context, but the toothy grin seems wrong.
ReplyDeleteWhoever it is, Mort Drucker must have hated them, because that's one of his most vicious caricatures I can recall. He prided himself on his ability to capture likenesses without being gratuitously cruel, so a drawing like that really jumps out.