[Canby, long associated with The New York Times, is one of the most distinguished American film and theater critics. In the following review, a portion of which appeared in CLC-20, he praises Scorsese's eye for realistic detail, but faults him for not displaying a more sophisticated understanding of the world than that possessed by his characters.]

J. R. (Harvey Keitel), a young, essentially decent Italian-American, has grown up in a comfortable New York City apartment that is protected by his mother, lit by holy candles and sanctified by china figurines of Virgin Marys who wear the wan, distant smiles of tired airline hostesses. J. R. goes to the movies—he cherishes the memory of Rio Bravo and The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance—and he walks under marquees announcing Ulysses. Although out of a job, he doesn't lack funds. He drinks beer with the boys at the neighborhood friendship club and occasionally he sleeps with "broads," as distinguished from "girls," who are the virgins one is supposed to marry.

J. R., the troubled hero of Martin Scorsese's first feature film, Who's That Knocking at My Door?, is the sort of young man who, in a total confusion of values, can one minute offer to "forgive" the girl he loves for having been forcibly raped, and the next minute accuse her of being a whore. Puritan Roman Catholicism, the kind that bedeviled Stephen Dedalus and Studs Lonigan, is alive and ill and in the movies.

J. R.'s dense wrong-headedness is real and commonplace but not especially affecting in the film that opened yesterday at the Carnegie Hall Cinema. Scorsese, who is 25 years old and won a number of festival prizes for shorts made while he was a student at New York University, is obviously a competent young filmmaker. Working on what must have been a minuscule budget, he has composed a fluid, technically proficient movie, more intense and sincere than most commercial releases.

It is apparent that the Italian-American milieu is a firsthand experience, but the vision Scorsese has made from it is detailed in the kind of self-limiting drama and dialogue that Paddy Cheyefsky abandoned some time ago, and in images that look very much like film school poetry. There are lots of panning shots across gray, squalid cityscapes and around interiors made easily grotesque with objects of religious adoration. I must say that I like Scorsese's enthusiasm even while wincing at some of the results, as in a love scene in which the camera swoops around a nude couple as if the photographer were a vertiginous Peeping Tom.

Scorsese is effective in isolating the moments of Marty-like boredom that J. R. accepts as concomitants to life—a drunken beer party that almost turns into a gang bang, and a curious visit to the country during which J. R. is made vaguely uncomfortable by all the fresh air and nature. However, the director, who also wrote the original story and screenplay, hasn't succeeded in making a drama that is really much more aware than the characters them-selves. The result is a movie that is as precise—and as small—as a contact print. The performances by Keitel, Zina Bethune (as his girl) and Lennard Kuras and Michael Scala (as his companions) are good and in the same scale as the film.

The experience of watching Who's That Knocking at My Door? was not entirely drab, however. It reminded me of another, supremely wrong-headed character, the young Sicilian in Pietro Cermi's Seduced and Abandoned who adamantly refused to marry the girl he had made pregnant because she wasn't a virgin. Good imported Italian social comedy, which once was as common as Gorgonzola here, seems to have become quite rare.