The Incident

a truly excellent film with remarkable performances from all of the cast. The film explores a theme of the uncaring New Yorkers which was very much a dominating force here in the mid and late 1960s. Two boys terrorize and essentially hold hostage about a dozen people on a subway car in the early morning hours. The passengers represent a crossection of New York society. It is a film about ones fears in confronting terror...in allowing evil to happen to all around you and doing nothing to stop it. It ends when finally an outsider in that subway car has reached his breaking point. Yet he too is eventually abandonded.

as a New Yorker and a subway buff i really enjoyed the exteriors of the number 4 train although the cars early on are pre 1960 and later on the exteriors are the post 1964 cars...but this is a continuity error that someone like myself would look for.

Along with a very young Martin Sheen...look for Donna Mills as a late teenage virgin..the veteran Great THELMA RITTER and a surprise appearance in a dramatic role by Johnny Carson's sidekick ED MCMAHON

It's the subway ride we all dread, closed in for many minutes with street hoods. In the early a.m hours, petty criminals (Martin Sheen, Tony Musante) board a crowded subway train after mugging a helpless old man. Inbetween subway stops, the hoods terrorize the passengers in the subway car. They hit upon the women, taunt the male passengers into fights. Finally, a young man in uniform (Beau Bridges) becomes the first to defend themselves, and gets into a harrowing fight with Musante. One of the first attempts at a low budget independent film. Director Larry Pearce gets excellent performances out of the all-star cast. Some of the dialog is a rather forced, cliched, and the time period between subway stops go on way too long. But there are fine moments (Musante verbally tearing apart passenger Brock Peters, Sheen scaring the daylights out of boarding passengers when the subway DOES stop) The film makes one think of the more exciting, and more thought out "Taking Of Pelham One Two Three (1974)"

I caught this movie on AMC at 3 o'clock this morning (or so), and was blown away! What a tense, gritty drama - and what a cast! I was trying to figure out who was who, as they were all so young (Ed McMahon? Donna Mills? Ruby Dee without Ossie Davis? Wow!) Martin Sheen's baby face made his psycho character all the more frightening. To me, the movie is a great time capsule of the sixties, and of New York. I do have a complaint to register regarding the AMC channel - instead of squeezing the end credits to make room for commercials for the next movie, how about staying true to your movie fans who have a compulsive need to read the credits, and show them full-screen to the end? Who's with me on this one? Thank goodness for IMDb to get us through!

I loved the way this film captured the essence of the 60s. Some people today think the 60s was the decade of long hair and flower power, but for the masses, that was really the 70s. The 60s, and most passengers on the ill-fated train car, were represented by tight clothes, businessmen who still wore hats and nondescript overcoats, and young women with straight, glossy hair. The two thugs who take over the train look like they might have come from a Beatles concert. I liked the realistic gritty look of the interior of the streetcar, with litter on the floor, and a design that seemed to come from about World War I. The outdoor scenes of the train passing by are very grainy, and in their black and white simplicity create an appropriate feel.

The movie is a bit heavy handed, though, in its morality lesson. It's as if the screenwriter had a framed copy of the German missive on the Nazi takeover above his desk: "First they came for the Jews, but I didn't speak out because I was not a Jew, then they came for the communists, but I didn't speak out because....." I simply can't believe that so many people could be so cowardly. The mod guy who freezes up while a bully strokes his girlfriend's hair is too much. And the fact that the bullies essentially insult everyone on the car in turn while everyone looks away doesn't wash either. You know you're next, so why not try to put a stop to it now? The black guy who was so eager to punch a white could have pummeled them both as soon as they let his wife/hostage go. Where did all his anger go? And the gay guy who tried to get off meekly returned when the weaker of the two bullies merely said, "go to your room". He was inches from freedom, and was much larger than Martin Sheen's character.

This movie is worth seeing for its cast alone. It's fun to see such a young Beau Bridges, and to see TV's Ed McMahon in a serious role. Virtually every cast member was known to me, if only as a familiar face from countless other movies from the 50s, 60s, and 70s.

Oh, and I burst out laughing at a scene which probably was originally intended to be very poignant and thought provoking. Blame my recent addiction to Dave Chapelle's comedy. When the police finally come and see the carnage, they immediately try to cuff the black guy, without asking any questions.

With its flaws noted, I recommend this movie as a great time capsule of the 60s, and a study of how cowardice can lead to worse and worse situations.

The plot is simple: Late night subway riders are terrorized by 2 thugs out for kicks. The thugs jam the subway doors so no one can get on or off and the conductor never visits the car. It really makes the viewer feel trapped with the rest of the victims, who are, by the way, pretty standard stereotypes of everyday America. There's the teenagers in love who are always kissing, the black man with a chip on his shoulder about white America and his social worker wife who pleads for him to not be so angry, two servicemen on their way to or back from an assignment and one has his arm in a cast, the harried married couple with a sleeping child, the elderly Jewish couple, the alcoholic, the squabbling couple, a man who may or may not be homosexual, a sleeping bum, and that may or may not be all. Tony Musante as the creepier of the two tough guys is well played. He has venom dripping off of him like a coiled serpent about to strike. His villainy is so real you I sometimes wondered if he was acting or just really mean in person. Martin Sheen, of all people, plays the other tough guy, who seems like he is drawn along by the lead of his pal into the mental and physical games they play on the other subway riders. The two laugh a lot at the misfortunes of their sport and as you watch you wonder if there is a happy ending in sight or is this one of those movies where nobody goes home happy, not even the viewer. The movie is in stark black and white and made better by that fact. In the shadows behind each characters eyes you see a universe of fear and loathing but you keep looking for a positive sign. A very well made movie with my only quibble being that the set up is kinda long. We see each person making it to the fateful subway car and learn their back history. If this film were remade today I can see this entire section being dropped. We could start right in on the subway and use flashbacks to illuminate the histories. But that's just me.