Street Strut

By RICHARD CORLISS

ANGELO MY LOVE

Directed and Written by Robert Duvall

Gypsies! Hot blood and fast fingers. Fortune-tellers and fortune hunters. Families feuding over a stolen sacred ring. It sounds like Late Show melodrama, with Maria Montez or Jane Russell parading about in pancake makeup, spitting out insults and endearments to a castanet heartbeat. Not quite: the performers in Angelo My Love are real gypsies, using their own names and, more or less, playing themselves. Six years ago, Actor Robert Duvall saw one of them, an eight-year-old charmer named Angelo Evans, arguing with a woman on a Manhattan street corner. For Duvall it was love at first sight of an impish star quality. Since then, he has spent more than $1 million of his own money to bring Angelo's story to the screen.

Angelo lives with his brawling family in a New York tenement, but he spends most of his time, day and night, out on the streets. Whether peddling wilted flowers in a local restaurant or just fast-talking a pretty girl, Angelo is a born hustler who has a fleet foot in each of two worlds--the gypsy and the Anglo--and who has no time to be a child. There is a plot here--Angelo and Brother Michael trail another gypsy, a garrulous, carbuncular drunk named Steve, to recover the family ring--but this is mainly a device to give some shape to the anecdotes and insights. In an ordinary fiction film, neither the story nor the audience would sit still while the characters took side trips to, say, a gypsy shrine in Quebec, or into a country-western nightclub where Angelo flirts with a young singer. It is precisely in these back alleys of narrative that the film almost romantically luxuriates, watching a gang of natural exhibitionists reveal themselves and their exotic world.

Duvall, a gifted, risk-taking actor for 20 years (Apocalypse Now, Tender Mercies), plays men whose rage seems about to explode from their guts. Always Duvall watches, looking for the tiniest tear in society's fabric. As the entrepreneur of Angelo My Love, he has found a dozen spirited gypsies tumbling out of that hole, victimized by their historical typecasting as scavengers and scoundrels.

There are some wonderful performances here: Steve Tsigonoff, as the ring thief, and his sister Millie, as the thief's chatty gargoyle of a wife, should become popular character actors, and Angelo could become a star. Catch them here first, under Duvall's critical, compassion ate, intelligent eye. -- By Richard Corliss This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so viewer discretion is required.