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Eastman has a quirkish, distinctly personal tone that goes coy once in a while, as in a labored double-entendre exchange between Vic and a black woman (Rosalind Cash) over the installation of a car radio ("Do you want it in the front or in the back?"). But the movie is also full of humor, melancholy and some dazzling film making. This is Eastman's first film as a director, but he demonstrates considerable sophistication, a feeling for textures and odd nuances. One long scene in a gym—empty at first, then slowly filling with fighters doing exercises—is as carefully controlled and lovely as a fugue. It is characteristic of Eastman that the sounds of the gym—a jump rope skipping against the floor, a bag being punched hard in irregular rhythm, the bursts of quick breath from the athletes— mingle with a Gregorian chant issuing, presumably, from upstairs. The place is called, after all. the New Avenue Walk-up Gym and Cultural Center. It could be a sort of royal court for the kind of kingdom Eastman creates, whimsical but not cute, tinctured with a sort of likely absurdity.
Filmed in 1970, The All-American Boy is being released after a great deal of infighting during which it acquired a leper-like reputation in the trade. The published screenplay (Farrar, Straus & Giroux; $6.50) disclosed that, fully realized, the film would have been considerably longer and rather less oblique. Vic would have been blessed and cursed by occasional shafts of self-knowledge. As it is, Voight's performance consists of careful character shadings that can only add tone to a silhouette. In more concise roles, the supporting performances are sharper. Carol Androsky as Vic's sister-in-law, who seems to dwell in the middle of some lunatic serenity; Art Metrano as Vic's anxious brother-in-law Jay David Swooze ("Just a formal handshake will be just fine for me, thanks"); E.J. Peaker as the imperious Janelle; and Anne Archer as the fetching but deadening Drenna—all these are especially noteworthy out of a large and shrewdly chosen cast. Each nicely complements the excellences of a distinctive, gifted movie.
∎ Jay Cocks