I've tried hard to find something admirable or engaging about "The Story of a Three Day Pass," but I can't make it. I don't see why the fact that the film was directed by a Negro—Melvin Van Peebles—and was achieved in a bad, hard time should inhibit anyone from saying that it is a craven and unfelt picture. You could call it "unpretentious," but that would be a coverup, for the truth is that you pine for the film to be a little immodest and quit licking your boots. The story is very simple, and it could be fine. An American Negro soldier with three days' leave has an affair with a French girl—in France, tactfully—which ends in idly dealt-out perfidies and retaliations by the whites around him. If the film had mustered any natural effrontery about telling what happens, or any regard for its characters, that in itself would have been exhilarating, and the picture might have seemed true and grievous. The trouble is that the hero … has been given a fatally winsome and wet personality. He apologizes all the time for being a Negro…. [The] film wants to make its general point about the suspiciousness that whites have bred—though it doesn't possess the gumption to raise womanish moaning to the level of rage.

[The coyness of the girl] is enough to drive you up the wall. She stands bemused at the window in her nightdress, and looks throbbingly at things, and smells the air, and wishes that moments could last forever. But for all her enveloping wooziness she is also startlingly bigoted for a character who is supposed to be French. When her lover comes near her, she has an immediate fantasy of him as one of a band of cannibalistic savages in leopard skins. France has many right-wing problems, but this unfortunate hallucination is not one of them. The affair that the film depicts is very, very retarded, like some halcyon bunk-up between Christopher Robin and Winnie-the-Pooh. This is obviously because the picture is terrified that it is handling dynamite. If only it had hung on to the fact that it is supposedly handling people…. It's true that [the couple] are hampered by having no language in common, apart from entirely suitable kindergarten talk. She speaks to him in pidgin French and he speaks to her in pidgin West Indian English, and then each translates for the other, thus surreally supplying the other's instant subtitles and making the film marketable all over the place. I kept being reminded of the generally excruciating experience of watching ballet try to present a sexual narrative. The two depleted creatures here mime and swoon and posture, and seem like no human beings on earth…. Every frame and word of the picture expresses something affected and heedless of character…. [How] much better things would be if the movie could have found the courage to be grown-up. (p. 78)