You are here: Home » Entertainment » E-buzz » One Potato, Two Potato Movie

One Potato, Two Potato Movie

MODESTLY conceived and executed by a pair of movie tyros and cheered and honored at the recent Cannes Film Festival, “One Potato, Two Potato,” which arrived yesterday at the Murray Hill, Embassy and other theaters, deserves its accolades and yet, like life itself, disturbingly shows its imperfections.

In simply mirroring cancerous injustices stemming from an interracial marriage, a terrible quandary is starkly, if patly, pictured. Gnawing doubts remain after the film’s climactic decision is made, but this festering problem of our flawed society, which could have been depicted sordidly and sensationally, is, instead, often made moving in basically honest terms.

The newcomers involved—Larry Peerce, the director, and Sam Weston, the producer— have not achieved anything new cinematically nor have they presented the problem in exceptional dramatic fashion. Nevertheless, they engage a viewer by the restraint and decency of their approach. They have focused sharply on an as yet unrelieved bigotry that should gain sympathy from audiences willing to understand and appreciate these traumas.

One Potato, Two Potato Movie

Filmed in Ohio, One Potato, Two Potato was a “critic’s darling” film of 1964 dealing with the then-daring topic of miscegenation. White Barbara Barrie divorces her husband Richard Mulligan, then falls in love with and marries African-American Bernie Hamilton. When the ex-husband sues for custody of Barbara’s child, arguing that a mixed household is an improper place to raise the girl, Hamilton fights for his parental rights in court. But the judge is driven by the prejudices of the era, and the child goes back to its natural father. At the time of its release, One Potato, Two Potato was praised beyond all proportion for its realistic and progressive dissection of race relations. Only a few renegade critics like Judith Crist dared to note that sociologically, the film was still mired in the patronizing Pinky era. Instead of concentrating on the injustices heaped upon black Bernie Hamilton, the film’s sympathies are almost totally directed towards poor, put-upon, snow-white Barbara Barrie.