TV Reviews : A Good Twist on a WWII Story in ‘The Incident’

It’s World War II. An elderly doctor has been clubbed to death at an Army base on the edge of a small Colorado town, and one of the German soldiers imprisoned there as a POW is charged with the murder.

“If the hangman’s job was open, I’d take it,” declares Harmon Cobb, not only a close friend of the victim but also the father of a GI fighting the Germans in Europe. Most of the townspeople share Cobb’s anger.

Instead of the hangman’s job, however, he gets the job as defense attorney.

This incendiary wartime setting nourishes the crackling good mystery at the core of “The Incident,” a CBS drama airing at 9 p.m. Sunday on Channels 2 and 8.

The opening two-thirds of the story by Michael Norell and James Norell are intricately plotted and charged with the kind of edgy intrigue that keeps you continually interested, and director Joseph Sargent supplies energy and suspense. It’s the last third--mainly the trial sequences designed as the story’s payoff--that dissipates, leaving you feeling cheated.

It’s soon evident that Cobb has been coerced by a federal judge (wonderfully played by Harry Morgan) into taking the case only because he has a reputation for incompetence and is expected to lose. The open-and-shut case veers sharply, however, and Cobb begins to understand there’s infinitely more to this incident “than a crazy Nazi wanting to kill an American for Hitler.” The reason for the doctor’s death is a neat little twist that is unexpected.

All hunched and hayseedy here, Walter Matthau finds more in Cobb than the instinctive craftiness written into this stereotypically dumb-like-a-fox country lawyer. His eyes hold the weariness of a man dragging himself through life, and his entire body seems to sag as he silently suffers through a tragedy that comes later in the story.

In addition to Morgan, there’s nice supporting work here from Peter Firth as the suspected killer, William Schallert as the town cop and Susan Blakely as Cobb’s daughter-in-law.

Unfortunately, there is never a doubt that Cobb will make a U-turn and gum up the works by being resourceful and competent. Almost too competent, as the swiftness with which he somehow gets it all together in the courtroom is as boggling as his Harvard-educated opponent’s awed acquiescence. It’s a contrived capper on a story that until then is first rate.