Joe Hill

Biography you say? No...only the here and now is of concern to me. I am "a citizen of the world" and I was born on a planet called earth...,will only say that I have done what little I could to bring the flag of freedom closer to its goal.

Joe Hill stands as one of the great mythic figures in America's radical labor history. A songwriter who skewered middle class values with scornful lyrics, an agitator who belonged to the dynamic leftist union, the Industrial Workers of the World (the Wobblies), a radical who was executed on a murder conviction based on circumstantial evidence, Hill led a colorful life perfect for idealization. During the months of court appeals be encouraged the myth growing around him. His flair for the dramatic continued down to his parting words of "Don't waste any time in mourning--Organize!" and insured his elevation to martyrdom. Such a man surrounded by such a legend calls for a hard, accurate film of dignity and restrained anger. Joe Hill is not such a movie.

In Joe Hill director Bo Widerberg commits the worst of all artistic crimes: dishonesty towards his subject. In what purports to be a dramatization of Joe Hill's history, he has invented, deleted, and rearranged the life and times of the IWW bard. Such exploitation might be forgivable in the name of dramatic license, but Widerberg turns his liberties in no particular direction. The editing (which Widerberg also did) muddies the development of theme and plot with arbitrary shifts in scene. The script (again his work) offers no possibility for growth or awareness in the characters. The film's tone is soft, sentimental, easy-going, and totally wrong. Minimizing the period's very real pain and brutality, it deals with highly political people and events in an almost apolitical way. Joe Hill avoids the politics the original hero struggled for, and lacking anything else to say, it slowly dies of a lack of purpose.

The film takes Joe (played by Thommy Berggren) off the boat in New York, winds him across the continent to a union career in California, and eventually drops him in Salt Lake City to be framed and executed. Because of Hill's own reluctance to discuss his past, Widerberg's imagination has free rein at the beginning. The New York sequence with its shots of skid row hits harder than anything else in the picture. Still, Widerberg feels compelled to add a romance nipped at the bud and a cute little street urchin who teaches Joe the city's lore. Joe leaves to search for his brother, takes up with a veteran hobo, and heads west. Their journey plays like Huckleberry Finn without the cruelty, and by softening their occasional scrapes with reality, Widerberg weakens the logic of Joe's conversion to radicalism.

Violence clung to the IWW; its members wore the scars inflicted by the self-righteous brutality of vigilantes. Repression and cruelty were an unavoidable part of the IWW's burden, a load that Joe Hill helped to bear. Widerberg avoids this facet of his story until the film's historical pretense forces the issue. Obliged to include such a mob action scene in the San Diego sequence, he skims over the ugliness and jolts the camera so that most of the clubbing doesn't show. Either from disinterest or squeamishness he is unwilling to deal with Joe's life as an organizer. When Joe sings his rally songs, his humor is apparent--but not his skepticism. Even his trial is handled in a vague off-hand manner, as if knowing the ultimate outcome made it uninteresting. Joe Hill's life in the labor movement was charged with drama. Afraid of overstating his case, Widerberg has underplayed it out of existence.

Someone familiar enough with IWW history to follow the film's meanderings also knows how mutilated this version of that era is. The free-speech battle in San Diego becomes a minor skirmish. A group called the Over-alls Brigade pops in two years early for no discernable reason. By weaving Joe's first love back into the film, Widerberg states as fact the unconfirmable alibi Hill gave at the murder trial. And because the scenes of labor upheaval lack conviction, the trial fails to gain credibility as a politically repressive act.

Widerberg's greatest offense stems from his attitude towards the IWW. He tries to ignore them, and when that's impossible he downplays and perverts their role. The first time the Wobblies cross Joe's path, they look like a travelling glee club. Later, as their identity becomes established, they are portrayed as weekend radicals, trouble-makers without purpose. And while Joe sits in prison, they scheme about how to exploit his situation. Bullshit. These unionists were men willing to die for their cause; many actually did. They had a plan of action and an ideology based on their own bitter experiences with the ruling class. The IWW fought hard for Hill's re-trial, and at a time when defense funds were meager and members were imprisoned everywhere, Hill received special aid. By failing to take its hero's ideals and struggles seriously enough, the film equally fails in making the audience take Hill himself seriously.

Joe Hill is so fundamentally wrong in its orientation that one forgets the acting. In fairness to the cast, they play their misconceived roles well; Thommy Berggren as Joe and Evert Anderson as Blackie, the hobo, are especially successful in entertaining while filling out Widerberg's obscure motivations. Still, nothing could save this movie from the apathetic response it deserves. A film about such repression should move one to anger and tears; Joe Hill moves not at all. Hill said "Don't mourn for me," but Bo Widerberg slobbers all over his memory. It is dishonest biography and a worse film. Joe Hill, 1915