Dubious Battler

By JAY COCKS

THE ALL-AMERICAN BOY Directed and Written by CHARLES EASTMAN

"A white fighter without responsibilities is not reliable," says Aspiring Manager Ariel Van Daumee. "A middle-class white son of a bitch without goals will usually break your heart." He knows his boy. Vic Bealer (Jon Voight) fights heavyweight, talks about going to the nationals and getting to the Olympics, even turning pro. He has the equipment to do it, too. Blond and tall and blue-eyed, Vic is the kind of guy people like to pin hopes on; he is the young man of vast promise in whom the confidence of others is so eagerly invested.

Vic needs high hopes like he needs pocket money, and he uses them just as casually. Everyone seems to recognize this, not only his manager but also his girl friend Janelle (E.J. Peaker). She has become pregnant by him, has left town to have the child, and tells him with some accuracy, "You're the most pathetic person I've ever met. Because you could be so much and you won't be anything." Still, she loves him because she, like everyone else, expects and invites the kind of lurking, perennial disappointment that Vic Bealer can ensure.

The All-American Boy is a funny, wily, eccentric and inventive movie about dead ends and dubious dreams, opportunities lost and responsibilities evaded. Director-Writer Charles Eastman (best known previously as the author of the screenplay for Little Fans and Big Halsey) evokes, in the character of Vic, the kind of wary protagonist whose abdication of personal responsibility made anti-heroes out of Dean and Brando, Fonda and Hopper. The film builds to a crazy, disorganized hillside ceremony in which the entire town of Buddy, Calif., comes to cheer its boy Vic off to the nationals. Vic sees it all as a shuck, refuses to go and hits the road out of town, pursued by his new fiancee Drenna Valentine (Anne Archer), who talks very sincerely in movie-magazine captions: "And the dumb part is I really do understand and don't really expect you to jump on any white horse and carry me off . . ."

Having adopted the Dean-Brando mold, Eastman then cracks it. He never takes advantage of his characters, never looks down on them or their poorest dreams. Yet he does make it clear that Vic's accurate reading of the situation--why should he assume the burden of anyone's ambitions but his own?--is also a dodge. His idea of freedom is a sort of emotional copout, a yearning not so much to find something as to be away from everything. In this most of all, Eastman suggests, Vic is the all-American boy.

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.

qed Jay Cocks

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