Rant #2,517: Going Underground

I have absolutely no interest in the Super Bowl, and I am happy that all the pomp, circumstance and over-done promotions are finished.

Although this isn't scientific by any means, I would say that probably 75 percent of the population really doesn't care about the game. However, they care about the parties that they are going to revolving around the game, the bets that they have placed on the contest, and they care that the game has pretty much knocked off any programming from regular television that might interest them.

That being said, what did I do on Super Bowl Sunday to pass the time on what was otherwise a lazy Sunday?

I watched a trio of movies, two of which I won't talk about here because I really want to focus on the movie my wife and I watched directly against the Big Game.

We watched a nearly forgotten relic from 1967 called "The Incident," and it was well worth the 90 minutes or so that the movie ran, not only eating up time but, more importantly, bringing us back to a grittier time in our lives, New York City in the late 1960s.

My wife and I both grew up in the city during this period--both living in different sections of Queens during this time--and even though we were young, New York City was grittier and more down to earth back then.

Sure, there was the ever-present hype of New York City back then which still runs today, but there was an undercurrent in the city at the time that things were as they were, and things weren't going to get any better than they were in the near future.

You could definitely see this on the subway, with graffiti-strewn and filthy trains littering one end of New York City to another, delivering millions of people a year to their destinations in spite of the carnage, human, animal and otherwise.

The movie kind of put all of that in its own bubble, creating its own urban pastiche for viewers to look in on. If you were a New Yorker like my wife and I were, you knew this incident could have happened, and probably did in one way or another. If you lived in, say, Montana, it simply fed into the stereotype of the big, bad city.

The film, written by Nicholas Baehr and directed by Larry Peerce, is about two street punks who ending up terrorizing a diverse group of train riders early one Sunday morning.

The two thugs go on a drunken rampage on the train, forcing the riders in one car to stay on the car, many past their actual destinations.

The film, shot right in New York City, is another one of these movies that is on the ledge, tacking subjects that most films out during this period would never touch, including homosexuality, infidelity, and addictions, and it is carried out by a fine cast, most of whom went on to greater things in the 1970s, 1980s and beyond.

The two punks, played to the hilt by Martin Sheen and Tony Musante, are dirtier than the subway car that they take over, and this car is populated by the likes of Beau Bridges, Barry Morse, Brock Peters, Ruby Dee, Donna Mills, Jack Gilford and believe it or not, Ed McMahon, leading a real New York-based cast of character actors, all of whom give it 100 percent in this film.

Even though we know most of the main actors, we believe they are who they are in the movie, and that is a testament to excellent acting, fine writing and top-notch directing, something today's special effects-laden films know nothing about.

Viewers of the film are often treated as being on the train themselves, with garish closeups of the punks' faces almost making us believe that we are part of the mayhem pushed by these two drunken losers.

The reaction of the train riders to these punks was the one prevalent during the day--get angry, but don't really do anything to stop things from happening--just a few years after the Kitty Genovese incident, where people heard the ruckus leading to her murder but decided to not call the police.

The only person who stands up to the punks is Bridges, who plays a southern good old boy G.I. who reaches a breaking point later in the film. New Yorkers don't stand up to these thugs, but the "aw shucks" southern boy does. I guess the filmmakers had their own message there.

Without giving away the end of the movie, the New Yorkers are not emboldened by the southern boy's stand, and, well, that is all I am going to say.

You can find the movie on YouTube at https://youtu.be/aH24v-Q9r8Q, and I would highly recommend it, whether you lived in the city at the time or just want to look back at what was.

And with the recent anarchic protests that happened in the subways this past week, where people literally took over the subways, it comes to mind that the world shown in "The Incident" really isn't as far removed from today as we might like it to be.