Cinema: Subway of Fools

A Manhattan-bound subway train lurches on its way, long after midnight. Two by two, the passengers come aboard at successive stops: a crabby old Jewish couple, a soldier and his Oklahoma-born buddy with his left arm in a cast, two sets of middle-aged bickerers, a sad-eyed homosexual and the seedy intellectual he is unsuccessfully trying to seduce, a get-Whitey Negro and his worried wife, two love-happy hippies. Grand Hotel on wheels? The Subway of Fools? That, for about the first third of The Incident, seems to be the intent.

Then two more passengers arrive: a pair of horrifying punks (Tony Musante and Martin Sheen) high on muscatel and low on decency. By turns wildly obstreperous and slimily cozy, they work their way up and down the car, baiting here, pummeling there, lucid only in their awareness of their own power to shock and paralyze. The numbed passengers can only respond in ineffectual cliches. “What kind of people are you?” screams one, all too aware of the answer. The Negro (Brock Peters), sensing in the punks’ violence a kindred spirit, attempts to make friends, is brutally rebuffed, and finally collapses in empty sobs.

Based on a 1963 television drama by Nicholas E. Baehr, The Incident is a taut, disturbing drama that tries to clarify why men fail to help each other in times of stress and danger. Unquestionably, the passengers could have saved themselves; any one of them might have got off to summon help before the thugs thought to block the doors, or at least yanked the emergency cord. Nobody does, because the paralysis of fear has linked them all. The eventual resolution is placed in the hands of the one person least caught up in the life of the jungle of cities—the crippled Oklahoma soldier (Beau Bridges). The Incident thus plausibly proposes the desiccating, depersonalizing pressure of urban life itself as the probable villain. And Director Larry Peerce moves far beyond his 1964 One Potato, Two Potato in welding his cast of adept Hollywood second-string players (among them, Thelma Ritter, Jack Gilford, Jan Sterling and Ruby Dee) into a concerted exposition of this plausibility.