"This film version of (Leroi Jones (now Amiri Baraka)'s) Dutchman is a reproduction of the performances staged in London; it could not be filmed in America because of censorship regarding explicitly offensive language, although one suspects that the volatile theme of the story would have prevented the film's American distribution. As it turned out, Dutchman never received national release. In structure, the confrontation between a middle-class Black man and a forcefully-seductive white woman in a New York subway car is reminiscent of the atmospheric malevolence of Albee's The Zoo Story. Each character, alerted to the challenges and vague promises of the other, pulls the spectator into a realm of symbolic behavior and slowly, a moment of lust becomes a deadly game. Shirley Knight's performance is wonderfully detailed; her brilliant authority brings the entire film to a high level of dramatic terror. Al Freeman, Jr. personifies the conservative Black male, whose cool intelligence might mask the most inchoate furies of the human heart. Dutchman is the debut film of the British director, Anthony Harvey (The Lion in Winter).... It is ironic that he had no idea that Dutchman would become one of the best examples of the symbolic struggle against racism in cinema history." Albert Johnson