The Incident (1967): Psychological Torture on a Train

Posted on February 17, 2022 by 4 Star Films

Before there ever is an incident to speak of in Larry Peerce’s film, we open on the lowest scum of the streets, played by Martin Sheen and Tony Musante, shooting pool and kicking up any trouble they can manage. Between catcalling after women and ambushing pedestrians for 8 lousy bucks, they’re still starved for more action.

It’s all a game to them, an adrenaline rush to get their Sunday night fix before the week sets in. What’s most telling are the perspective shots that can best be described as sociopathic POVs. Even momentarily they get us inside their heads, and we realize just how debased they are.

The opening display shows us who we are dealing with and what we are getting ourselves into. Because they all but evaporate from the movie for a time. But in the back of our minds, we know they will not be gone forever. It’s inevitable that they will return to wreak some kind of havoc.

The rest of the movie is an act of building out from here. We meet other supporting players from other cross-sections of society. There’s the husband and wife (Ed MacMahon and Diana Van der Vlis) who stayed out late with their daughter and quibble about hailing a taxi or not.

Another elderly couple (Jack Gilford and Thelma Ritter) bickers about their grown son who seems to have a perfectly situated life with a wife and kids and still seems ungrateful. Then, there the young lovers — the guy’s quite the Romeo (Victor Arnold), and he’s only interested in a girl if she puts out. His tentative girlfriend (Donna Mills) feels pressured but also anxious to win his aggressive affections.

If it’s not evident already, almost all of the characters come in couplets because there is something poetic and practical about it. Everyone has a talking partner, someone to nag and gripe with over the course of the movie. They all have their petty problems and individual relational dynamics.

These are the seeds of conflict, ready to combust under the right circumstances, and they do. One of the more light-hearted pairings includes two soldiers (Beau Bridges and Robert Bannard) who are currently on leave visiting some of their parents. Just wait…

We can see what the screenwriters are working towards already. All these stories are slowly interwoven together, crosscutting between each individual pair as they make their way to their respective train stops. Each group has its bit of business to take up as they file aboard all but oblivious of everyone else.

Although the black and white does wonders in making the film feel older than even its release year of 1967, there’s probably one thread that signifies the cultural moment better than most. Brock Peters and Ruby Dee play opposite one another, not as a groveling black couple but as a husband seething with militant desires and his high-minded social working wife who evidently listened more to Dr. King than Malcolm X. Even here we see the tension stretched out taut between them.

What coalesces almost feels like a psychological experiment put to film. Sure enough, Joe (Musante) and Artie (Sheen) come on the scene cackling and drinking like they have all night — going crazy and swinging their way through the train car like a pair of monkeys. For anyone who’s ridden the subway, you can witness some weird things to be sure, but there’s an immediate knee-jerk reaction to mind your own business.

This movie tests these principles whether it’s Good Samaritan syndrome or the diffusion of responsibility. The crux of our story is triggered when the two malcontents accost a homeless man snoozing on the train, prepared to light his boot on fire. Only one bystander (Gary Merrill) tries to casually get them to stop their antagonism, and it’s the first time where the invisible bubble is broached. When he encroaches on their anarchic freedoms, they look to intimidate him.

What’s made plain throughout the movie is the horrifying indifference as the thugs have free rein to perpetrate infractions and humiliations on the people around them. Sheen now is the big name of the two thugs, but Musante is arguably the most chilling, giving a performance that makes the insides crawl with its cruel manipulation. He literally walks through the camera, lumbering around and ruling the car like a vindictive prison warden where the prisoners are now running things.

Although all these moments of duress feel compartmentalized; no one is let out of their incisive games, and each group is hustled and harried with all sorts of mind games laced with the threat of menace. Old men, old women, children, pretty girls, soldiers. Each one has a weakness and some pressure point to be prodded.

Oddly enough, this is the black man’s paradise watching white people degrade and torment each other for his personal pleasure. Little does he know, he can’t be an impartial observer forever. He too is thrown headlong into the fiery inferno. He too comes face to face with a mortifying breaking point.

By the end, Sheen and Musante aren’t human anymore, and not just because they are movie characters. They feel like evil demons looking to undermine everyone and bring their victims faced to face with their greatest fears and humiliations as they systematically make their way through the car triggering just about everyone.

There’s no conceivable end to this movie other than Beau Bridges taking on Martin Sheen as they look to beat each other to a pulp. It seems almost prescient because these men would become fairly big names in future generations, but for now, they represent the youth movement and where it could take us in the ’70s.

The aftermath of the picture feels equally indicative of the times. When the police rush on the scene, they are quick to apprehend the one black man and pin him down, only to realize their mistake and amend it in the heat of the moment.

There’s something poignant about the final coda: The drunk remains sprawled out on the floor and each and every bystander steps over him. It’s like one final symbol to show the threshold they’ve bypassed. There’s no turning back and whether they realize it or not, The Incident might embody an event that will haunt them for the rest of their lives. They managed to live another day but at what cost? It’s the kind of trauma causing heroes to come out of the woodwork and others to totally capitulate.

It feels like a film perfectly caught between two decades. It’s grittier and more audacious than I was expecting. But then again, this is a low-budget film and the year is 1967. We’re already getting Virginia Wolf, The Graduate, Cool Hand Luke, and Bonnie and Clyde, the forerunners to a generation of New Hollywood films that would blow the cover off what was permissible in the Hollywood scene. The Incident has some of that, but it also has a wealth of players and a premise that feels planted in a different era.

I recently watched The Silver Thread and it has the same distinction. Although it’s far less graphic, these are films totally suspended in time, hearkening back to the ’50s and still somehow forewarning the films of the future. The Incident, in particular, feels like an antecedent to Mean Streets, Badlands, The French Connection, and even Taking of Pelham 1, 2, 3. It’s fascinating to see glimpses of this emerging generation, especially in a film that, while rarely being discussed in a broader context, is still full of genuine heart-stopping drama.

4/5 Stars

One Potato, Two Potato (1964): Love and Games

Posted on February 15, 2022 by 4 Star Films

I was recently marveling how a theater actor I know predominantly from TV show appearances, William Redfield, could show up as an earlier incarnation of himself in an unorthodox film like The Connection. Then, about a week later, I had a similar revelation seeing Barney Miller’s wife, actress Barbara Barrie, doing something equally daring and landmark in One Potato, Two Potato.

Yes, it’s another black and white film of humble means, but it’s hardly short on ideas or purpose. Despite a childish title and production values that are a bit clunky around the edges, there’s still a fundamental sincerity to it in the tradition of something like Marty.

The very DNA of the picture is so fragile and tender, and yet it has a heart and exudes a kind of genuine candor capable of smoothing over a plethora of technical inadequacies. What I mean is that I like the movie — appreciate what it’s trying to do — and it feels bolder and braver than many of its contemporaries.

An all-knowing narrator helps bookend a story with court proceedings, but the crux of the matter must begin with Barbara Barrie and Bernie Hamilton. They meet in the carpool to work with their mutual friends, a pair of chatty lovebirds. Julie’s a white divorcee. Frank’s a black man who lives with his parents.

This is what the outside world sees, but in the movie, we watch how their temperaments meld as they are put in sharp relief with their friends. They gravitate to one another, not for some outlandish reason, but their simpatico and emotions are somehow attuned.

They have brief interactions. It’s tentative at first. There’s no intention on the part of either party. They have many walk-and-talks at night, quiet and pensive because they appreciate the company, and their demeanors are perfectly suited.

Then, in one of many grounding moments, maybe a policeman comes by, shining his lights on them, and ordering them away (what he sees as a black man and his prostitute). Either that or there’s some other sin of humanity, and they are shocked back to the debilitating frameworks that society has set up around them. These are blatant visual articulations, hardly subtle, and yet they acknowledge the prevailing cultural incongruities of the time: He’s angered; she thinks it’s funny, but together they must press on.

The resistance goes both ways because his own father (Robert Earl Jones) gives him a blatantly severe talking to. He brings up the questions of societal pressures and the prospect of kids: They’ll be outcasts, and it would be even worse to bring children into the world.

Frank almost buys it. He tells his beloved, “It won’t work.”

She responds, “What won’t work? Kindness and love?”

Yes, it’s true. The culture is entrenched with a deadly narrative of hate, riots, lynchings, and prejudice between their disparate people. But they want to push against this with their love. It’s all they can do.

In an earlier scene, after a friend’s wedding, they dance by lamplight, not like Astaire and Charisse in The Band Wagon, but like normal people would. Slowly and tentative, pressed up against one another. Instead, they play like a pair of kids with imaginary games of hopscotch and follow the leader. It’s a different kind of whimsical magic hearkening back to a world of possibility before children learn racism and are taught the limits placed against them by “reality.”

Their own wedding is punctuated not by joyous dancing and merrymaker but the jaundiced ire of a lady witness looking on in contempt. Because even if she’s not going to put a stop to it, we can read her face. She thinks this is repugnant, against nature or something. Her face is a canvas to reflect the peer pressure of an entire society. And it’s not the only one…

Julie’s ex-husband (Richard Mulligan) comes to visit his daughter after years away, and they have fun playing cowboys and shoot ’em up together. It’s another instance of play where the man is stripped of his responsibilities only for them to become firmly established again when he sees his estranged wife living in the home of a black man. He doesn’t want his daughter to somehow be sullied by such a sordid existence. One questions if it’s really for her well-being or his own reputation because people will talk.

It seems only realistic to encapsulate One Potato, Two Potato through the sum of its various sequences since it’s really a film of ellipsis as scripted by Orville H. Hampton and Raphael Hayes. Even when they feel a bit abrupt and unpolished, there’s an unparalleled potency to them because they speak into the moment like few films I’ve been aware of. What it lacks in fluidity, becomes bottled up in these perceptive moments that come to represent very specific even salient points of view and bits of trampled humanity.

Joe Cullen goes to a local preacher who admonishes him for wanting a God who has racial prejudice too. But God will not let him off that easy. His very commands adjure his people to “Love thy neighbor as thyself” without any kind of qualifying remarks or addendums. The man’s problem, along with so many cultural Christians, is reflected in their religion, which is such a self-serving construct rather than a way of life and relationship.

Then, the drama comes thick and fast. Julie confronts her former husband who still remains skeptical of her, full of outrage and insinuations (You talk about how he loves the girl, loves you, but can you love a black man?). And yet she remains resolute.

Frank feels successively beaten down as a husband, left emasculated and powerless because he cannot protect his wife based on the color of his skin. He goes to a college lawyer friend for help. He’s a jovial, accommodating fellow who grows scared and defensive when he learns about the parameters of the case. This is before Loving v. Virginia. Regardless of right or wrong, there is no legal precedent and a hot case like this could ruin him, and so he folds. Not because he’s a “bad person” but because he’s spineless and scared like you and me.

We stew in Frank’s powerlessness much like Ivan Dixon’s struggles in Nothing But a Man from the following year. They are kindred spirits. He gets some kind of catharsis by proxy watching the American Indians massacring the whites in the western at the drive-in theater. One can’t imagine he’s the first man to ever cheer for the other side even as he yells and shouts — slamming on his steering wheel.

The movie has an inevitable conclusion, if not an altogether just one. The judge (Harry Bellaver) makes a final decision predicated on economic viability rather than true measures of parental love and affection. It’s indicative of a culture that while acknowledging its fault lines — how a couple like that is made into social pariahs — nevertheless reinforces the status quo. Although it may be fictitious, this isn’t fanciful drama. It cries out with streams of all too apparent truth.

By the end, it feels like social horror, more heart-wrenching and harrowing than even something like Get Out because this was very real and no peppy nursery rhyme tune can wipe any of that devastation away. I still can’t believe this film. It feels like a small but mighty gem of a movie.

4/5 Stars.