I’LL KNOW WHAT TO DO WITH YOU.” This leaves Artie to respond, all wide eyed and brimming with sarcasm, “Woaaaah Joe!,” resulting with both of them laughing as another relationship is obliterated in the wake.
#THE INCIDENT 1967 FULL#
They start off messing with the bum, threatening to give him a hot foot, when our recovering alcoholic, Douglas (Gary Merrill) steps in, making himself a target, leaving Joe to retort, “Is he a friend of yours, Mister?” It’s all downhill from there, with the two standouts being the scene where Joe sidles up next to Donna Mills and starts asking her date, ‘Hey Mack, what’s she like in the sack?” The guy, Tony (Victor Arnold), once full of dumb testosterone bravado, is now nervous and shaky, weakly defending her, stating that “she’s a good girl.” Musante, not missing one inch of a beat, eyes him up and down, asking, “If she’s a good girl, what’s she doing with youuuuu?” This culminates with Joe toying with her hair, while she looks frightened and her pussy boyfriend looks away, leading to the line, “Well honey, if you change your mind, look me up. All of these people are about to have their lives changed forever when Joe and Artie get on board, making their grand entrance by being as loud and obnoxious as possible.īut what initially seems like two drunken clowns quickly turns sinister, when Joe and Artie start to systematically go to each person and break them down psychologically. In addition to our pairs and families, there is also a recovering alcoholic trying to get his life back on track, a wino passed out on the subway and a lonely, repressed gay man.
The last pair is two young soldiers, Philip Carmatti (Robert Bannard) and our catalyst hailing from Oklahoma, Felix Teflinger (Beau Bridges). Our last married couple to board is a young, attractive African American pair, including Joan (Ruby Dee), a peaceful activist and social worker and her boneheaded and overly aggressive husband, Arnold (Brock Peters), who tries to pick a fight with the ticket taker before getting on the subway. Then there’s Harry (Mike Kellin) and Muriel (Jan Sterling) Purvis, a schoolteacher and his status hungry ice queen wife. Always.) There’s another married couple, this time an older, Jewish one, made up of Sam (the legendary Jack Gilford) and Bertha (the equally legendary Thelma Ritter) Beckerman, who are constantly bickering over whether or not their son is a good boy or no-good-nik. (Note to our readers: remember that being alone is always preferable to being in the company of assholes. He’s borderline rapey and she ends up being insecure enough to put up with this horny bastard. Continuing the couple theme, there’s a young pair on a date, with the amorous mook badgering his pretty and hesitant date (a young and unrecognizable Donna Mills) into basically putting out. There’s a working class married couple with child, trying to get to their home in Flushing, with the husband (played by Ed McMahon, in his best role ever, and yes, that includes his turn as a pimp in Slaughter’s Big Rip Off) constantly bitching about money and how he doesn’t want any more kids. In fact, the beauty of The Incident is its complete surrender to the ugliness of the human condition.Īll of this is conveyed with our cast of characters, most of whom rank very high on the dysfunctional scale. Everything looks beautiful in the ugliest of ways.
The stark black and white cinematography, courtesy of Gerald Hirschfield, who went on to work on Mel Brooks’ Young Frankenstein, gives the film a documentary meets violent pulp novel feel. This film reeks of the sweaty seediness of a warm New York evening in the late ‘60’s, with our two main anti-heroes, Joe (Tony Musante) and Artie (Martin Sheen), heading towards Times Square after an evening of pool playing and low rent thuggery. So why is a film this stellar still semi-obscure? Other than the lack of creative justice that has plagued the arts since the dawn of man, a lot of it could have something to do with the unrelenting grittiness that permeates the screen.
#THE INCIDENT 1967 TV#
Based on a 1963 DuPont Show of the Week movie, entitled Ride with Terror, The Incident is a cult film that has mysteriously languished, despite having an all star cast, a terrific soundtrack and being taut from the opening frame right down to the end credits.ĭespite all of this, it remains unreleased on DVD and Blu Ray, with only a long out of print VHS and Laserdisc release, not to mention the occasional TV airing, to its credit. This is exactly what happens to a subway car full of people in the extremely underrated 1967 film, The Incident. It’s an intense if not outright harrowing thought, that your whole life could be upheaved into pure rubble in just a few hours. It can just take one night to rattle and bone-break one’s entire perspective.
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