[Who's That Knocking at My Door? explores] the hermetic environments of working-class post-immigrant American society…. Knocking's Italian-America [is a social structure] in which the isolation of imported nationalism and Roman Catholicism collides with dreary urban or industrial town living to produce characters somewhat dislocated in time and place. [The film doesn't seem] quite up to date…. A world where guys still wear white shirts and grey suits to a party … becomes a world stable enough so that plot premises like … Knocking's Italo-Catholic obsessions with virgin brides become acceptable because no alternative forms of behavior are even suggested. If the results are somewhat synthetic and theatrical, they also have an admirable austerity and containment lacking in the wilder, so-called swinging movies so currently prevalent.

Synthetic and theatrical, too, are much of the [picture's] acting and dialogue. Lines seem lifted off the typewritten script-page and thrust into the...