Screen:

...At the same time that they love showing off their super copter and all its razzle-dazzle fire power, they also want to play upon feelings that such a machine is evil...

...One is a well-to-do WASP with whom he fights constantly and whom he stands up on her birthday...

...In the course of this story we meet other engaging characters besides Angelo, especially the thief and his wife, who are played by some gypsies Duvall got to know out in California...

...But it is not the reasons he is as he is that absorb us...

...Besides, it's far from clear to me how much being a gypsy has to do with Angelo's being Angelo...

...The basic story here is just another thriller...

...Murphy (Roy Scheider) is the ace copter jockey on the L.A...

...As the film opens, he is scooting down some stairs into one of New York's hottest discos, where his virtuoso performance soon clears the floor of everyone except himself and the beautiful women twice his size and age who ring the periphery, waiting to dance with him...

...it is simply the result...

...What comes of such efforts is middle-brow drivel, a movie that manages to be totally self-defeating...

...Because they're not, the gypsy melodrama of thievery, deception, and ghosts in which they figure seems to me less compelling than Angelo himself does...

...By diverting his movie to the bigger subject of that world, Duvall has in some ways made it too small to contain its central character...

...Back on the street, this man-boy is in his element, in a larger public world where he can go from one exciting environment to another, mastering them all...

...Angelo gets a bit lost in the crush of adults and the shuffle of events...

...Blue thunder is also a movie that's trying to go in two different directions at once...

...Angelo appears to squirm and sulk under this humiliation, as if for once he's met his match...

...They feel the need to say more-about politics, the Vietnam war, human nature, and whatever else they can think of to throw in...

...These clips thrown in at the end kept everyone at the theater in their seats until the house lights went up...

...Yet the extraordinary appeal that Angelo has for us is not, I don't think, as a gypsy...

...For those of you who didn't get the handout, the movie itself also contains numerous demo scenes, including one where the helicopter virtually detroys a Nevada ghost town while a grandstand full of spectators looks on admiringly...

...The surly behavior was just a calculated ploy, another example of his ability to manipulate every situation...

...This time it's about police helicopter patrols and the men who fly them...

...You might say that the whole movie is nothing but grandstanding, a kind of flying circus that has only one act in it...

...The audience just couldn't get enough of Angelo...

...On the contrary, the other men in the film, though wonderful, some of them, all seem far more limited...

...Duvall was hooked immediately...

...Perhaps Duvall felt that by exploring more fully the gypsy world from which Angelo comes, he would discover the secret to Angelo's personality...

...Actually, this last scene isn't exactly in the film...

...If that is the film's intention, it fails...

...Clearly these people are not playing themselves, however, in the literal way that the street-wise kid Angelo is...

...In the last scene of the film, Angelo is standing out on a sidewalk arguing with a fully-grown woman because she won't marry him...

...School was too confining for him...

...force, so he's the one who is asked to test a new prototype for the feds and the military...

...When I arrived at the preview, I was given a glossy color handout with isometric illustrations of how all the gadgetry in the movie works...

...Duvall was walking along Broadway one night several years ago, and he heard this imp of a boy berating a woman about marrying him...

...Another is a pubescent country-and-western singer into whose dressing room he barges in order to pick her up right in front of her mother...

...They are people who remain restricted to the gypsy world in a way that Angelo does not...

...Neither could Robert Duvall, who re-created in this last scene the first one he ever saw Angelo play...

...I know that Duvall would claim it has everything to do with it...

...He moves through the city quickly, effortlessly, and is in control wherever he goes...

...That's what all kids do today-grow up too fast-and Angelo is attractive because he allays some of our fears about this fact...

...This is something that never happens to him on the dance floor...

...It's trying to be both a mindless entertainment and something to think about, a low-brow movie for the masses and a high-brow movie for liberals...

...Yet in a curious way Duvall's attention seems to wander in the film, a work ultimately more preoccupied with the gypsy world from which Angelo comes than with Angelo himself...

...It's part of a series of out-takes that are interspersed with the closing credits...

...He has as much presence at a gypsy trial in the back room of a bar as he has on the dance floor...

...The whole project of the film began, like everything in Angelo's life, right there on the street...

...Between its indulgence in dare-devil copter stunts and its political pieties, Blue Thunder is trying to play both ends against the middle...

...To this end, scriptwriters Dan O'Bannon and Don Jakoby have created a nemesis for Murphy in the person of Cochrane (Malcolm McDowell) who comes back into Murphy's life like the pain in an old war wound, and who is in cahoots with the CIA, the FBI and the other forces of evil in this movie...

...There his teacher sympathetically but firmly demonstrates to him that he can't read...

...This movie is heavily into the tech side of helicopters...

...This little promotion alone probably cost half the budget for Angelo My Love...

...COLIN L. WESTERBECK, JR.ESTERBECK, JR...

...It is simply as a child who is so comfortable with having grown up too fast...

...I never felt that I was seeing in Angelo's background the sources of his own largeness of character...

...In this case no one should mind, though, since neither of them is the right direction...

...But director John Badham and the other people who made this movie are not willing to leave it at that...

...Screen SPLIT DECISIONS GYPSIES & COPTERS THE TITLE CHARACTER in Angelo My Love, which is Robert Duvall's first effort as a director, is a boy of ten or eleven who is a smooth talker, a sharp dresser, a great dancer, a sexy lover, and a gypsy, in that order...

...But when his lack of cooperation finally gets him thrown out of school, he and his brother are exultant...

...It may be that he is able to give brashness and precocity so much charm because he's a gypsy...

...What does it matter whether a bad movie is bad in only one way, or in several...

...The complicated plot revolves around the theft of a ring, a family heirloom that Angelo and his brothers are trying to recover...

...The next morning his mother drags him to school...

...His girlfriends are of every shape, shade, and description...