The Bedford Incident

Along the same lines as FailSafe this is a tense Cold War drama with a cat and mouse game going on between an iron willed Navy Captain and an essentially unseen Soviet submarine. Great performances all around are what make this a good film. Richard Widmark is great as the somewhat tyrannical ships skipper who has his crew drilled, trained and poised for all out war up to the breaking point. Sidney Poitier as always does another superb job as the journalist aboard to do a story of a Navy deployment and gets more than what was expected. Despite the fact that an individual like the Poitier character would not enjoy that much freedom aboard a US Naval vessel this motion picture is quite realistic. Martin Balsam and James MacArthur also put in outstanding performances with Balsam as a newly arrived unappreciated ships doctor and MacArthur as an Ensign who is dogged endlessly by his commanding officer.