The Story of a Three Day Pass is unredeemedly painful…. As Van Peebles is a Negro and as this may be the first fiction feature directed by a Negro, the event is a social milestone. It is nothing else….

The story is triteness trying to be daring…. Its racial irony is muddy….

Even this feeble script might have been given some appeal if Van Peebles had cinema imagination and an understanding of acting. He has neither. His attempts at lyric lift (in the love episodes) are lame, his attempts at cinema imagination (the soldier envisioning himself differently in a mirror, the girl seeing him as an African native) would be thought dubious in a first-year film student….

If the film were an ambitious, gifted failure, there might at least be a case to be made for it on paper. But the racial comments are stale and childish, and...