Movies: Mixed Marriages at Cannes

Today the smallest child can tell a movie (it is "made" in Hollywood) from a film ("created" anywhere else), and serious students of the cinema know the U.S.'s last big one was Birth of a Nation. So critics at Cannes's 17th annual film festival were startled last week to see that the picture they gave the longest, loudest ovation in nine years was 100% American.

Comfortingly enough, One Potato, Two Potato is no Hollywood product. A delicate semidocumentary on the indelicate issue of racial intermarriage, it was directed by ex-TV Actor Larry Peerce, 34, son of Metropolitan Opera Tenor Jan Peerce, and produced by a friend and colleague, Sam Weston, 36. The film was shot in Painesville, Ohio, and has no big stars. When the scant $250,000 budget started to run dry, Producer Weston doubled as actor.

Major Hollywood studios, every bit as frightened by miscegenation as by Communism, approached the finished film with asbestos gloves and judged Potato too hot to handle. British Lion felt differently, snapped up world distribution rights, and a special screening in Paris so impressed foreign critics that they got the festival to accept the picture as an unofficial American entry.

Child custody is ordinary movie fare and positively trite in television, but if the child is white and her stepfather black, the subject gets special in a hurry. Julie Cullen (Actress Barbara Barrie) divorces her husband on grounds of desertion. With her child she moves to a small Midwestern town, takes a job in a factory. Her friendship with a Negro fellow worker (Bernie Hamilton) turns gradually to love. His parents are appalled, warn him "not to marry any damn white woman," and accept the union only when a son is born. Four years later, Julie's first husband turns up. He has made good money, he says, and he demands custody of Ellen. An understanding judge finds the Richards' family life "exemplary" but cannot defy the social structure, and he sends the child home with Cullen.

Some mixed marriages simply won't do, even in Cannes, and Italy's La Donna Scimmia (The Monkey Woman) is at the head of the list. The hero is a Neapolitan con man who marries a girl covered tip to toe with monkey fur (played by pretty Annie Girardot, who spent two hours getting hairy every day, three hours shaving every night). He has a purpose: he figures he can put her in his sideshow and his fortune will be made. He does, he prospers, then—alas—she gets pregnant. Worse yet, she dies in childbirth. But all is not lost. He has the corpse embalmed, puts it on show, and trade is as brisk as ever.

Nervous American exhibitors were considerably soothed to learn that their version will have "a happy ending." The monkey woman loses all her hair at death, and even her reluctant husband concedes that the corpse is too normal and unsightly to put on exhibit.