LEROI JONES'S "Dutchman" ran for a half-hour when it was done as a one-act play at the Cherry Lane Theater in 1964. It runs for 55 minutes in the film version Gene Persson has produced—in England, for economy reasons — which opened at the Little Carnegie yesterday.

For all its 25 minutes of padding—at least five to 10 minutes of which must be voted to shots of empty New York subway stations, with empty trains pulling in and pulling out—it is still just a drawn-out, rancorous gabfest in a sometimes empty, sometimes half-filled subway car between a clearly psychotic young white woman and a pleasant but gullible young Negro man.

As such, it commands criticism not only on the level of what it says, but on the level of the way it says it with the devices of cinema.

What it says is fairly obvious — allegorically interpreted, that is. By teasing and taunting the young man with sexual provocations and cutting words until she goads him to a venomous outburst against her. whereupon she stabs him with a knife, this young woman, with sadistic methods, indicates the ugly ways in which some whites agitate and abuse some Negroes and then destroy them.

And the young man, by falling for her come-on and then losing his cool and spewing his scorn on her, reveals the pathetic vulnerability of some Negroes to the trickery of some whites.

This is apparently the message Mr. Jones wants to convey in this otherwise sordid observation of an attempted pickup that doesn't work out. Its validity as a message depends upon how sensitive and sympathetic one is to the agonies of discrimination in our society.

But the validity and plausibility are both jeopardized and taxed by the way in which Anthony Harvey, a young British director, has staged the film. Beginning with his couple meeting in an empty subway car and pursuing their grotesque flirtation in a vacuum, as it were he has seemed to establish this encounter on a surrealistic plane. Two symbols are going nowhere through the surrounding night.

Then along towards the point Where the couple are starting to tangle and snarl, he has the train filling up with people. Other passengers become inevitable observers of these erratic goings-on. The setting becomes naturalistic. It is obviously a New York subway train, and this is an ordinary brannigan between a cracky woman and an agitated man. Yet no one pays it the least attention. And no one intervenes when the man in his violent agitation, starts batting the woman around.

The conspicuous indifference of the public would seem to negate the idea of tension between the races and go against probability. Mr. Harvey would have done better to keep the car empty, as it was on the stage.

As the only vocal performers. Shirley Knight and Al Freeman Jr. expand the indecencies and violences in the words of Mr. Jones. Miss Knight is sleazy and treacherous in a striped, miniskirted dress, with an endless supply of apples, which she uses to symbolize a noxious Eve. And Mr. Freeman is amusingly incredulous and eager to play the game until Mr. Jones suddenly calls upon him to spew profanity and excessively rhetorical hate.

They both do their jobs with gusto and hold the viewer mildly absorbed. But the whole thing boils down to a polemic that is tedious and without consistency or conviction in this form.

DUTCHMAN, screenplay and play by LeRoi Jones; directed by Anthony Harvey; produced by Gene Persson for Gene Persson Enterprises, Ltd.; presented by the Walter Reade Organization, Inc. and released by Continental. At the Little Carnegie Theater, 57th Street east of Seventh Avenue. Running time: 55 minutes.
Lula . . . . . Shirley Knight
Clay . . . . . Al Freeman, Jr.
Subway Riders . . . . . Frank Lieberman, Robert Calvert, Howard Bennett, Sandy McDonald, Denis Peters, Keith James and Devon Hall.