| Movie Review | The Journal of American History, 87.3

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| Movie Review | The Journal of American History, 87.3 | The History Cooperative

Movie Review

Joe Gould's Secret. Prod. by Charles Weinstock, Elizabeth W. Alexander, and Stanley Tucci. Dir. by Stanley Tucci. A USA release of an October Films production, 2000. 108 mins.

Joe Gould's Secret is a film about the legendary New Yorker writer Joseph Mitchell and the patrician hobo Joe Gould, a character who was the subject of two of Mitchell's New Yorker profiles, written fifteen years apart. 1

     The film begins with a dreamy voice-over: "In New York City, in Greenwich Village, down among the cranks and the misfits . . . and the has-beens and the would-be's and the never-wills and the God-knows-whats, I have always felt at home." It is Mitchell's voice we hear, recounting something that Joe Gould told him early in their relationship, not knowing that he "felt the same." 2

     When Joseph Mitchell first encounters Joe Gould in a Greenwich Village coffee shop he is intensely drawn to him. Half madman, half literary icon, Gould carries bits and pieces of his magnum opus, "The Oral History of Our Time," in a ratty portfolio and claims to live solely on "air, self-esteem, cigarette butts, cowboy coffee, fried-egg sandwiches, and ketchup." Mitchell begins to accompany Gould on his frenzied rounds of drinking, declaiming, and panhandling donations for the "Joe Gould Fund." Eventually Mitchell begins to press his volatile subject for a glimpse of his masterwork, the "OH," which may exist in its entirety in black-and-white composition books distributed amongst his fans; on a duck and chicken farm on Long Island "for safekeeping"; or solely in its author's own dazzling but decentered intellect. 3

     On its surface, the film is a love song to cosmopolitan Manhattan in the early 1940s. Shot in more than forty locations, some extant, some splendidly re-created, the film takes us from Washington Square to the Minetta Tavern to the Village Vanguard to Greenwich Village cocktail parties where bohemians gather to drink and smoke, form wild conga lines, and talk about the lively arts. . . .

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