Word: widerberg
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...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...
...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...
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...
...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...
...most popular film, Elvira Madigan, Director Widerberg tends to see events in soft focus. His abiding affection for lambent light produces some beautiful images (a deserted wheat field with a long black train seeming almost to slide across it in the distance), but it plays him false just as often, making his film merely pretty where it should be brutal...