Mixed Marriage

One Potato, Two Potato arrives in the U.S. brandishing a batch of warmly enthusiastic European press notices. Deemed by Hollywood to be unworthy of this year's Cannes film festival (TIME, May 15), the movie about racial intermarriage was submitted by its makers as an unofficial American entry and ended by winning a Best Actress award for its star, Barbara Barrie. Now U.S. filmgoers can see for themselves that the hot Potato hardly deserves to be whipped into a cause celebre. It is an often tedious and oversimplified polemic, even though Actress Barrie's sensitive, unaffected performance does lend some dramatic validity.

The story begins awkwardly with a judge reviewing the evidence in a child-custody battle. His problem: to decide whether a little girl thriving in a home "superior by every standard except one --the world we live in" should be taken from her white mother (Barrie) and her black stepfather (Bernie Hamilton) and given to her white father. A lengthy flashback recounts how a young blonde divorcee meets and marries a Negro fellow worker as climax to "an ordinary, everyday, uncomplicated relationship." Thus slighting the tough and painful realities of the problem posed, the film takes aim at the usual clay pigeons and sitting ducks. But except for one brutal police officer, the Midwestern town where these events take place is seemingly untouched by ordinary everyday race prejudice. In a cliche scene that emphasizes the childlike purity of their love, the couple romp in the park playing tag and hopscotch, and steal their first kiss at the foot of the Civil War memorial. Once married, they move out to the farm with his wonder ful parents, soon have a baby brother for little Ellen Mary. It is an idyllic existence. Too idyllic, perhaps, for it is a world created to serve the plot--a happy, integrated limbo unsullied by social pressures until Julie's worthless first husband reappears, armed with a giant Teddy bear and some mealy platitudes about the joys of parenthood.

Occasionally, One Potato makes a forceful point, particularly in a wedding sequence played against the cold, tight-lipped silence of a female witness. The drama's emotionally wrenching climax succeeds because Actress Barrie has built to it scene by scene. Her quiet, vulnerable eyes enter a plea for understanding that the dialogue cannot match. Mostly, the actors are stuck with expressions of immaculately liberal sentiment, as when the Negro suitor tells his father: "Pop, we're in love, just like you and Mom. What difference does it make if she's black, white, purple or green?" Fledgling Director Larry Peerce (son of Tenor Jan Peerce) too often stages the action with operatic solemnity, and an insistent musical score stresses points already made. For all its sincerity, One Potato, Two Potato is an effusive message film with more heart than art, more timeliness than truth.

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