“Joe” (1970) is a powerful film about hatred.

Joe Curran, played by Peter Boyle, is a young husband, father, and steelworker living in Queens, New York. We’re in late 1960’s/early 1970’s America, the time of the Vietnam War overseas and culture clashes here at home.

Curran’s basement in Queens is stocked with rifles, a pistol, and his prize possession, a sub-machine gun.

He’s wary, suspicious, and hateful of hippies, liberals, and just about anyone unlike himself.

And yet, as expertly played by Boyle, he’s also someone who can charm you with a smile or a laugh.

The movie paints a vivid picture of 1970 America: the divide between the counterculture, “hippies,” and the establishment, as well as the loosening of restrictions, and enhanced freedoms, in many aspects of life and society vs. the tradition-bound world of the status quo.

Here’s the set-up for the story: Melissa Compton, played by a young, thin, Susan Sarandon, is a 20-year old woman from an upper-class New York City family. Her father, William, is an advertising executive, while her mother, Joan, is her husband’s educated, refined wife. Melissa and her boyfriend, Frank Russo, live in Greenwich Village in downtown Manhattan, deep in the hippie/drug world of the era.

The film shows what happens when the upper-class world of Melissa’s parents collides with the drug-soaked world of Melissa and Frank, and with Joe Curran, the steelworker from Queens.

“Joe” was released on July 15, 1970, a little over two months after the Kent State Massacre, in which four unarmed students were shot dead by Ohio National Guard members at an anti-war rally at Kent State University, in Kent, Ohio, forty miles south of Cleveland.

The film has a gritty, realistic, immediate look and feel. Much of it seems to have been filmed in the cinema verite/hand-held camera style then popular in the U.S. and Europe.

I watched the film recently on Pluto TV on-line (www.pluto.tv). The movie was free, and played fine, but unfortunately, there were lots of commercials.

According to the Internet Movie Database (imdb.com), the cinematographer for “Joe” was the film’s director, John Avildsen.

Born in the Chicago area, in suburban Oak Park, in 1935, Avildsen went on to win an Academy Award in 1976 for directing “Rocky.”

Norman Wexler, a native of Massachusetts, wrote “Joe.” He was nominated for an Academy Award for the screenplay.

In addition to “Joe,” Wexler also wrote the screenplays for “Serpico” (1973), and “Saturday Night Fever” (1977).