Richard F. Shepard of '' The New York Times '' wrote in his review : " This Dino De Laurentiis production is , puzzlingly , more realistic in its parts than in its whole , which tries to attack the entire problem of crime and neighborhood self-protection , of selfless community service and of temptations to use service as a stepping stone . It approaches and touches the matters of racism , political opportunism , civil rights , vigilante tactics and the process of law , but it does not come to extreme conclusions about them . And so we are left with a story , but fortunately the story is interestingly spun . '' Fighting Back '' is set in an Italian neighborhood of Philadelphia , where a storekeeper , played by Tom Skerritt , is outraged by an incident on the streets that results in his pregnant wife losing the baby and by a robbery in which his mother 's ring finger is cut off . He organizes the local people into a security patrol . The patrol does wipe out crime but operates beyond the law , with our hero carrying on more of a personal vendetta , western-style , than a campaign to establish law and order . " Critic Gary Arnold of '' The Washington Post '' wrote in his review : " '' Fighting Back '' is a lurid glorification of urban vigilantism remotely inspired by the career of Anthony Imperiale , the charismatic community leader of riled and fearful Italian-American residents in Newark in the late '60s . Imperiale himself is recalled in newsreel clips in the course of the movie , which opens for no justifiable reason with a medley of traumatic documentary footage , from the assassination of President Kennedy through the assassination attempts on President Reagan and Pope John Paul II . ... All of them are impressively overqualified for the minimal , motley quality of illusion that '' Fighting Back '' is content to confuse with effective contemporary melodrama . " '' Fighting Back '' was released in theatres on May 21 , 1982 . The film was released on VHS in the United Kingdom . '' Fighting Back '' was released on DVD
assassination of President Kennedy
Assassination of John F. Kennedy
Fighting Back (1982 American film)