One Potato, Two Potato
Howard, Lake County, Ohio, population just over seventeen thousand, among them Mrs Julie Cullen, a single mother raising her young daughter Ellen Mary alone, her husband Joe having abandoned them to take up a construction job in South Africa four years previously, the letters and money he sent stopping after only a few weeks, she divorcing him in his absence and moving on with her life, lonely but resolute.
Working in the personnel department of a local business while Ellen is in school, Julie is introduced to Frank Richards through mutual acquaintances, the two of them becoming fast friends and Ellen adoring the new presence in their lives and looking forward to family picnics, blind to the fact that Frank is black, something Julie chooses to not allow to effect their life, but which Frank and his parents know will make their relationship unacceptable to some.
Directed by Larry Peerce from a script by Orville H Hampton and Raphael Hayes and shot around the town of Painesville on Ohio’s Grand River, One Potato, Two Potato was released in the summer of 1964 and won the Cannes Film Festival prize for best actress that same year for Barbara Barrie for her role as Julie, an independent woman who knows her own mind and what is best for her and her daughter and refuses to back down from what is right, the film presenting a love story which feels sweet and genuine, never forced or overplayed and nor with the repercussions downplayed.
Starring Bernie Hamilton as Frank, he is the one who knows history and how cruel it can be, how many will judge a man only by the colour of his skin, how a white woman who associates him will be also tarnished, his parents William and Martha (Robert Earl Jones, father of James, and the iconic Vinnette Carroll, first African-American woman to direct on Broadway) bringing brutal honesty in their assessment of the situation but also humour which isn’t demeaning.
The film refusing to fall into caricature, even in the reappearance of Joe (Richard Mulligan) and the complications he brings, fighting for custody of the daughter he abandoned seemingly out of spite, he knows that he is flawed but is unable to bring himself to do the right thing and let Julie and Ellen simply be happy, the film depicting the prevailing view of interracial marriage in the United States three years before the Supreme Court decided Loving vs Virginia and Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner was released.
Restored in 4K by StudioCanal, the new edition of One Potato, Two Potato is supported by new interviews with Peerce and Barrie who recalls that despite being aware that the material might have been shocking to some she never experienced any backlash, an introduction, a commentary and an analysis; also of interest is the love theme by Gerald Fried who would rework it into his score for Star Trek’s Shore Leave to represent Kirk’s long-lost Ruth.
