Oscar Got It Wrong!: Best Original Screenplay 1970

The Contenders:

Five Easy Pieces
Joe
Love Story
My Night at Maud’s
Patton (winner)

Where You Goin' with that Gun in Your Hand?

Films: Joe
Format: DVD from NetFlix on laptop.

Sometimes with NetFlix, I play a game I call “What will I get roulette.” The idea is that I stack all of the movies with a wait time at the top of my queue, figuring that even though there’s a wait on them, I’ll get one of them. In this case, I got Joe from 1970, which was not the movie I thought it was going to be. Joe is an ugly movie in a lot of ways. It’s politically ugly, socially ugly, and brutal. It’s also a movie that helped shape the 1970s in a lot of ways.

We start with Melissa Compton (Susan Sarandon), who lives with her drug dealer boyfriend Frank (Patrick McDermott). One fine evening, Frank fixes Melissa up with an overdose that lands her in the hospital. Melissa comes from a wealthy family. Her father, Bill (Dennis Patrick) works in advertising and makes the equivalent of about $400,000/year. Upset at what has happened to his daughter, he tracks down her boyfriend, and during their argument, beats him to death. Bill runs away with Frank’s stash, and a few days later, Frank’s body is found. Since the drugs are gone, it’s assumed that this was a drug hit.