[5][6] The film follows New York business executive Bill Compton as his life unravels into murderous chaos after he kills his daughter's drug-dealing boyfriend and enters into a peculiar partnership with factory worker Joe, a veteran with racist fantasies of vigilante violence.

Advertising executive Bill Compton, his wife Joan, and daughter Melissa are a wealthy family in New York City's Upper East Side.

To calm his nerves, he has a drink in a nearby bar, where he hears factory worker Joe Curran ranting about how he hates hippies.

Produced on a budget of only $106,000,[citation needed] it was a sleeper hit and grossed over $19.3 million in the United States and Canada,[2][3][7] making it the 13th highest-grossing film of 1970.

[8] Variety wrote, "It sounds like heavy stuff, but scripter Norman Wexler has fleshed his serious skeleton with both melodrama plotting that sustains interest and the grittiest, most obscene dialog yet to boom from the silver screen.

"[9] Howard Thompson of The New York Times wrote, "The sad, disappointing thing about 'Joe' is that a devastating, original idea cynically slopes into a melodramatic, surface fiasco.

"[11] Charles Champlin of the Los Angeles Times called it "an immensely sophisticated piece of film-making," adding, "The plot is laced with implausibilities and the movie full of scenes which are heavily contrived but which play well because they are swept along by the plausibility of Joe himself.

This included passing on the role of Jimmy "Popeye" Doyle in The French Connection (1971), which would earn Gene Hackman the Oscar for Best Actor.

Citizen Joe would have followed the titular character as he tried to rebuild his life after spending 10 years in prison, and would have also dealt with his grown children who held more liberal beliefs.

[17] In his 2022 book Cinema Speculation, Quentin Tarantino deemed Joe "a kettle-black comedy about class in America, bordering on satire", while conceding that contemporary viewers may find it controversial to classify the film as such.

He recalled that the audience he saw the film with in 1970, in a double feature with Carl Reiner's Where's Poppa?, watched the first section of Joe in silence, only to begin laughing "once Dennis Patrick enters the tavern, and Peter Boyle's Joe enters the movie", having gone from "repulsed repose to outright hilarity".

[18] Ten weeks before Joe was released in the United States, a real-life mass murder with similarities to the movie's climactic scenes occurred in Detroit, Michigan.

On May 7, 1970, a railroad worker named Arville Douglas Garland entered a university residence and killed his daughter, her boyfriend and two other students.