The Manly Art in Six Acts

One of those movies that I had never heard of until it finally showed up on TCM a few months back is a boxing movie called The All-American Boy. It sounded like it could be interesting, so I decided to give it a chance. Having watched it, I can see why I'd never heard of it before.

Jon Voight plays the titular "All-American boy", a young man named Vic Bealer who at the start of the movie is walking down a road in the middle of nowhere. It turns out that he's heading back to his home town for a funeral, and that he left town because he wanted to make it in a bigger city, possibly as a boxer because that's the one thing he's really got ability in.

After the funeral, he goes to the local gym, but nobody at the boxing gym in town remembers him for whatever reason. But Arty Bale (Ned Glass) sees Vic and gives him a chance, even giving him a place to sleep at his house. There's talk that perhaps Vic could train for the Olympics, but this doesn't fit for me since IOC and USOC head Avery Brundage would have had a conniption fit over anything at all resembling non-amateurism and everything here looks more like professional boxing than the amateur game.

Along the way, Vic gets two girlfriends, although he's unable to hold on to either, largely because he's one of those erly 1970s characters who simply can't figure out a way to fit in with the broader society. The first is Janelle, and after Vic knocks her up she heads off to the big city to try to make a name for herself. Later, Vic starts a relaionship with young Drenna (Anne Archer, who was impossibly young at the time), although that one doesn't succeed either.

After struggling a lot and burning a lot of bridges, Vic finally gets another chance, this time with the whole town preparing for one of those big small-town sendoffs reminiscent of an earlier era in moviemaking. Will Vic be able to make it?

As I said, there's a reason I'd never heard of this movie. Well, maybe a bunch of reasons. Part of the problem is that it's more of a character study than a movie with a fully fleshed-out plot, and Jon Voight isn't given enough of a character to work with here. The movie was also recognized as a mess by the studio. Supposedly it was filmed in the wake of Voight's star-making turn in Midnight Cowboy, but shelved for two years because the director couldn't make anything coherent out of it. Then, with the success of Deliverance, the studio gave the movie another chance, but it was a box-office and critical failure.

Like Jon Voight's character, The All-American Boy doesn't quite fit in to any place or time, with an oddly dated soundtrack but no real references to the exact time period. Jon Voight may be lovely to look at if that's your thing, but that does not a movie make.