The Incident

The Incident (from Weird and Wonderful II: Fifty More Cult Films by George Hughes, available from freefall-productions.com on 02/11/20)

1967 / US / 107 minutes

“Take it easy- you’ll live longer.”

Director: Larry Peerce / Screenplay: Nicholas A. Baehr / Director of Photography: Gerald Hirschfeld / Music: Terry Knight / Production: Edward Meadow and Monroe Sachson for Moned Associated / Cast: Tony Musante (Joe Ferrone), Martin Sheen (Artie Connors), Beau Bridges (Felix Teflinger), Robert Bannard (Phillip Carmatti), Brock Peters (Arnold Robinson), Ruby Dee (Joan Robinson), Jack Gilford (Sam Beckerman), Thelma Ritter (Bertha Beckerman), Donna Mills (Alice Keenan).

On 9/11 (the US one in 2001 rather than the now all but forgotten original on September 11th 1973 when Chile was violently taken over by the brutal dictator Augusto Pinochet- Thatcher was a big fan- in a US backed military coup), photographer Stan Honda took a photograph. The picture was of Marcy Borders, a legal assistant who had been working in the Bank of America’s offices in the World Trade Center.
    Marcy Borders survived that day but was so covered in dust and other debris in Honda’s photo that the image became known as “The Dust Lady”. She died aged 42 in 2015 of stomach cancer caused by exposure to toxic dust after years of paying medical bills had left her in so much debt that she could no longer afford any treatment. Never does the post 9/11 “United we stand” slogan sound quite so hollow, than after hearing that story.
    But the “Pull the ladder up, Jack and sod the rest” Randian selfishness that Americans are still taught to encourage has been about for a long time. Thirty- four years before the twin towers fell, a film was made- also in New York City- that perfectly illustrates it and it’s terrifying consequences. Based on an old TV movie script, that film was Larry Peerce’s shocking, intense and brilliant low- budget black and white drama, The Incident.
   Taking place entirely during one night, the film begins with two hooligans, Joe (Tony Musante) and Artie (Martin Sheen in his debut performance) getting chucked out of a closing pool hall onto the almost deserted early hours streets. Joe and Artie begin their walk home by mugging an old man at knifepoint, then battering him unconscious for only having eight dollars on him.
   Next, we meet several passengers as they each board a night subway train: an elderly Jewish couple complaining about their family, a recovering alcoholic and the repressed gay man he spurned earlier in the evening, a teenager and his date, a henpecked history teacher and his nagging wife and another arguing couple with a young, sleeping child. They’re next joined by two army privates heading back from a weekend’s leave and Arnold Robinson (Brock Peters), an aggressive, bitterly anti- white racist with his more idealistic wife Joan (Ruby Dee).
   All of them get on the same train, trapped together in the same carriage that has a broken connecting door, cutting them off from the rest of the train. The only other person in the carriage is a sleeping, drunken tramp who Arnold- having just had an argument with the unhelpful station staff- points out to Joan: “There’s your white man”.
   The passengers sit there in silence, ignoring each other as they each will the journey to
be over sooner so they can get home. Then Joe and Artie get on. At first, everyone’s just irritated by their juvenile, drunken shouting and messing around. But things take a darker turn when they begin to intimidate and terrorise each of the trapped passengers in turn. Throughout, everyone else makes it their business to quietly pretend not to have noticed and nobody stands up for each other.
   The teenager dismisses the two thugs’ bullying of the gay man by telling his girlfriend, “Looks like they got hold of a queer”. Arnold starts to actively enjoy their antics, amused at the spectacle of white people abusing each other instead of him, he even keeps Joan on the train when they have a chance to get off.
   Joe and Artie then take things further, stopping anyone from boarding or leaving the train at each station, threatening to set fire to the tramp and to rape the teenager’s girlfriend. Then they put an abrupt stop to Arnold’s enjoyment of the whole episode by racially abusing him and his wife. And when they start on the history teacher’s wife, he turns on her rather than them.
   Only Felix (Beau Bridges), one of the two young soldiers, briefly tries to talk Joe and Artie down- but he has a broken arm and is advised by Phillip (Robert Bannard), the other young private (unlike him, an NYC native), not to get involved. Having been through everyone else in the carriage, Joe and Artie then turn their attentions to the child…
   The Incident is an incredibly intense and claustrophobic, extremely shocking and starkly brutal character study examining the moral cowardice and apathy to the plight of others among the passengers. Played out almost entirely on a single set (a recreation of a subway carriage was built in a studio and is intercut with stolen, covertly filmed night footage of the real thing), the film recalls Priestley’s An Inspector Calls and could almost work as a stage play itself. Annoyingly, Twentieth Century Fox keep remembering they own it every few years and renew the copyright- otherwise I may have attempted adapting it for theatre myself by now.
   Without ever actually spilling a drop of blood or getting into any shouty swearathons (the racial stuff didn’t count in 1967), Peerce’s direction and Baehr’s script (the 1963 TV movie version- entitled Ride into Terror- was much less tense) batter the audience with relentless menace and frustrate them with the characters’ indifference to each other’s plights. At any point, everyone else could work together and easily overwhelm the two troublemakers- but nobody cares until they themselves become a target.
    While it’s debateable now in the age of iPhones and permanent headphones, I don’t think The Incident would have worked in a British or, say, a French or Australian city of the same time period- a sense of civic society would have kicked in much sooner and Joe and Artie would have been dealt with before things could escalate so far. It’s very much the American devotion to individualism that’s condemned each of these individuals to face their tormentors alone. Everyone’s a world champion at looking after number one.
   Of course, there are still plenty of Joes and Arties pissed up and pissing about on night buses and trains the world over but, if anything, I’d say increased CCTV surveillance, rather than reassuring people, probably puts those who would otherwise intervene off doing so in case they ultimately end up in more trouble than the troublemakers.
   The most recent national strikes on the UK’s disastrously privatised railways have been caused by train companies trying to get rid of guards and, whilst some are so useless they wouldn’t be any help anyway, you only have to look at the London Overground to see what happens on a now pretty much totally unsupervised service- frequent last second dives through closing doors, endless near misses with the gap between the train and platform and, apart from anything else, it’s completely self- defeating for the greedy companies running things because you can guarantee hardly anybody’s paid for their journey either.
   Over my last seven years of living in the capital, I’d also say the main problem on public transport there isn’t drunks or gangs anymore- it’s the mentally ill. As with the operators trying to save a few quid by ditching the guards, this all comes back to moneysaving. But cuts to mental health services can be justified by claiming that the powers that be are encouraging independence.
   Anyone who questions it (even those who work in related fields themselves, as I have) can be branded intolerant or ignorant, which is fine until someone incapable of independently accessing public transport gets themselves or someone else killed on it. Like the passengers in The Incident, those responsible are just hoping that doing nothing will work out OK and that nobody will blame them if it doesn’t.
   At least back in 1967, such people were getting some support- an obviously dated “Work with the mentally retarded” recruitment ad is visible in the carriage throughout the film. The Incident shows it’s age in other ways too: the civil rights- supporting Joan and the more militant Arnold, the gay character having to operate in secret and a bit part player (one of the passengers prevented from getting on the train) being credited as “Negro Woman”. Filming in black and white wasn’t a cost issue though but rather a decision made when it was found that colour tests “Weren’t sombre enough” for the material.
   Eventually, Artie looses all of his confidence once he’s deprived of Joe (Felix finally has enough of him) and like all bullies, shows he’s useless alone without backup. Such wretched characters are always pack hunters and Artie’s complete cowardice is brilliantly played by the young Sheen (like Patrick McGoohan before him, Sheen would catch a pretty severe case of Catholicism in the early ’80’s and stopped playing any roles he found even slightly morally dubious- as a result all of his villains are confined to the beginning of his career).
    In the end, the train reaches it’s final destination of Grand Central Station. The police rush into the carriage and promptly arrest the wrong man (seeing Arnold, they immediately decide it must all have been the black man’s fault). The rest of the passengers get off, leaving only the drunken tramp who never even woke up and was oblivious to it all.
   Felix’s arm is in a much worse way than it was as he kneels, exhausted, on the carriage floor. “There must be something I can do” Phillip tells him. Of course, there was always plenty everyone could have done, summed up in Felix’s response and the film’s final line: “Where were you, buddy?”