One Potato, Two Potato (1964)

User Rating:

7.7/10   

Director:

Larry Peerce

Writers:

Orville H. Hampton (writer)
Raphael Hayes (writer)

Release Date:

29 January 1965 (Finland)

Genre:

Drama

Plot:

Study of interracial marriage in the 1960's. A white divorcée falls in love with and marries an African-American man...

Plot Keywords:

Judge | Child | African American | Husband | Divorce

Awards:

Nominated for Oscar. Another 1 win & 2 nominations

Cast

Barbara Barrie	...	Julie Cullen Richards
Bernie Hamilton	...	Frank Richards
rest of cast listed alphabetically:
Harry Bellaver	...	Judge Powell
Faith Burwell	...	Ann Hruska
Vinnette Carroll	...	Martha Richards
Robert Earl Jones	...	William Richards
Marti Mericka	...	Ellen Mary
Richard Mulligan	...	Joe Cullen
Paul S. Orgill	...	Lawyer
Michael Shane	...	Jordan Hollis
Anthony Spinelli	...	Johnny Hruska
Jack Stamberger	...	Minister

Runtime:

83 min

Country:

USA

Language:

English

Color:

Black and White

Sound Mix:

Mono

Certification:

West Germany:12 | Finland:K-12 | Sweden:11

Filming Locations:

Fairport Harbor, Ohio, USA

Company:

Bawalco Picture Company

Trivia:

Intermarriage between African Americans and Caucasians was illegal in 14 states until the U.S. Supreme Court decision Loving v. Virginia was handed down on June 12, 1967. The court unanimously ruled that anti-miscegenation marriage laws were unconstitutional. In his opinion, Chief Justice Earl Warren wrote, "The freedom to marry has long been recognized as one of the vital personal rights essential to the orderly pursuit of happiness by free men. Marriage is one of the 'basic civil rights of man,' fundamental to our very existence and survival. To deny this fundamental freedom on so unsupportable a basis as the racial classifications embodied in these statutes, classifications so directly subversive of the principle of equality at the heart of the Fourteenth Amendment, is surely to deprive all the State's citizens of liberty without due process of law. The Fourteenth Amendment requires that the freedom of choice to marry not be restricted by invidious racial discriminations. Under our Constitution, the freedom to marry, or not marry, a person of another race resides with the individual and cannot be infringed by the State." Interestingly, many anti-miscegenation marriage laws were enacted in the wake of African American heavyweight champion Jack Johnson marriages to two Caucasian women, as pointed out in Ken Burns' documentary Unforgivable Blackness: The Rise and Fall of Jack Johnson (2004). Johnson married his white mistress Etta Duryea in late 1910 or early 1911, then married another white woman, Lucille Cameron, soon after his first wife's September 1911 suicide. The two marriages outraged white America, and Johnson and Cameron fled America for Canada and then Europe under threat of lynching. Their relationship was fictionalized in the stage play, and subsequent movie, _Great White Hope, The (1970), for which the Caucasian playwright Howard Sackler won the Pulitzer Prize. The 1913 Massachusetts anti-miscegenation marriage law, which did not recognize any marriage made in a state forbidding the marriage of different classifications of people (the law left unspoken the racial issue of black and white; in Virginia, blacks were allowed to marry other, non-white "races"), was considered inoperative after Loving v. Virginia until in 2005, then-governor Mitt Romney used it as the basis to deny out-of-state couples the right to wed in the Commonwealth of Massachusetts after the Bay State's Supreme Court legalized gay marriage.

One Potato, Two Potato

I grew up in the town where this movie was made! At first I felt why my town for this movie? I always felt that although where I lived seemed part of the 'tolerant' north, however it was in the end just like every other place in 'middle' American that represented the themes in this movie. It had a profound effect on me, besides being a well-made film, it's thought-provoking theme woke me up in 1965 to all the undercurrents of racism around me and in the town that I had been ignoring. To bring the theme even more to the fore, I saw this movie with our then exchange student who was from Africa. I think he found the movie very bewildering, but all of us with him were very uncomfortable! I would really like to find a copy of this movie, any ideas? I am told that it can be ordered but is very expensive, but I don't even know where to order it.