CHINA GATE (1957)

There had been Hollywood films set in Vietnam before, but Samuel Fuller's China Gate is arguably the first "Vietnam movie" to involve an American protagonist in the effort to prevent a Communist takeover of French Indochina. Fuller opens his picture with a prologue history of Indochina up to the Viet Minh uprising against French colonial rule, but he seems a little unclear on what Vietnam is. For one thing, he doesn't really use that name. For another, he writes as if the people of Indochina are "Chinese." On the other hand, China Gate takes an interesting attitude toward ethnicity in general. The Asian characters are written mostly in an entirely unstereotyped way, with none of the stilted conventions of Hollywood or pulp writing. The Viet Minh soldiers we see -- the time is early 1954, before the decisive siege of Dienbienphu -- talk and pretty much act like dogfaces anywhere: happy to see a dame, especially if she's brought alcohol. Meanwhile, singer Nat "King" Cole has a big supporting role as an American fighting with the French Foreign Legion, and his blackness is never remarked upon. His role probably wasn't written for a black actor, and strange to say, Cole's craggy features and raspy speaking voice arguably make his character, identified as a veteran of the "Big Red One" during World War II, even more of a surrogate for Fuller himself. The singer actually gives a credible performance as a tough soldier (he survives a booby-trap spike through his foot without crying out) marred only by a probably-obligatory performance of the rather bleak title song, and even that isn't inconsistent with Fuller's use of song in the same year's Forty Guns.

Where Fuller probably won't pass muster with many modern viewers is his casting of white actors in two crucial "half-caste" roles. Angie Dickinson gets the romantic lead playing Lia, a lithe lush better known as "Lucky Legs" or "Lucky" for short. Everyone remarks on how Lucky can pass for white, but her son is not so Lucky. Although the boy's no more than one-quarter Asian -- his father is American -- he looks so entirely Asian that the father, Sgt. Brock of the Legion (Gene Barry) freaks out and runs out on wife and child. That fact makes him a heel to everyone else in his unit, and it definitely complicates his mission to penetrate enemy lines to find the Communist weapons depot beyond the China Gate, with Lucky, a fixer who travels often between the lines, as their guide and shield.

Fuller quickly establishes his anti-communist credentials -- many of the Legionnaires are Korean War veterans who went to Vietnam so they could keep killing commies -- and that gives him cover from which he attacks his real target, American racism. By comparison, we never really encounter a dogmatic communist. As noted, the Viet Minh grunts we meet are simply grunts, no better or worse than other soldiers.  When we get to the final boss, Major Cham, he's shown to be no more than an opportunist who had formerly hated communism, as Lucky notes in an embarrassing moment in front of Cham's masseuse, but now sees it as the wave of the future and his surest path to success. On the evidence of China Gate, communists are bad guys mainly by virtue of being more ruthless and indiscriminate, for some reason or other, in their violence.

It's probably for the best that Fuller didn't try to make any ideological statement when his main commie villain, the other half-caste in the story, is played by Lee Van Cleef. While the actor's name actually resembles a Vietnamese name, the resemblance pretty much ends there, which makes it unintentionally preposterous when Cham tells Lucky that he gets along better with the Reds because he looks more "Chinese" than she does. Cleef actually tries hard here to pull off a character who has actual feelings for Lucky, apparently his sometime lover, and for her son, whom he'd like to give a chance at advancement by getting him educated in Moscow. I have a feeling, however, that the naturalistic, non-stereotyped dialogue Fuller gave him made him even more damningly unconvincing as an Asian in the eyes of contemporary audiences, so that what actually looks now like a halfway decent performance probably looked like the worst in 1957.

By modern standards, given China Gate's anti-racist line, any ending that falls short of a happy ending for Lucky, Brock and their son probably will look like a cop-out. Does it undercut Fuller's message that Lucky sacrifices her life, after tossing Cham off a balcony, to blow up the ammo dump, even if the ending makes clear that Brock will take his Asiatic boy home with him after all? Some people are bound to think so, but let's remember that Fuller comes from an older tradition that values pathos and aims for bittersweet effects. If anything, you can argue that Lucky's death will only remind Brock even more of the wrong he did her earlier and the debt he owes their child. Tragedy was more commonplace in pop culture back then, especially when the one-and-done format of TV drama meant that heroes and heroines often loved and lost in a single hour. The same format also encouraged people to shrug off tragedy rather than wallow in it, and something like China Gate probably should be taken in the same spirit. It's not really a Fuller masterwork but it has a lot of interesting stuff going on, including the best performance I've ever seen from Gene Barry. The guilt trip he takes in this picture breaks down that typical smugness that makes his Bat Masterson so insufferable and suggests that he could have done more with his career if wanted to or was goaded into it. Cole also shows potential he got very little chance to develop further beyond his W. C. Handy biopic of the following year. I doubt anyone accepts Angie Dickinson as even partially Asian but she gives the right kind of charismatic performance for the familiar type of pulp heroine she plays. Overall China Gate is the typical "primitive" Fuller mix of impressive tracking shots, intense action, mostly decent art direction, badly integrated stock footage, etc. The film won't really tell you anything about Vietnam, but it's a diverting yarn on its own terms.

THE REBEL (2007)

A Google search for "Vietnamese martial arts" reveals a long history that I should have taken for granted, given the nation's proximity to China. The general term Vo Thuat refers to a full range of skill sets, from open-hand combat to a variety of weapons. Martial arts gained the glamor of the forbidden during the period of French rule, when they were banned. How the Communists regarded it all is unclear from the Wikipedia entry. A clue on past attitudes might be gleaned from the fact that a Google search for "Vietnamese martial arts movies" generates only two results, both asking if anyone knows of Vietnamese martial arts movies.

Charlie Nguyen's film, known at home as Dong Mau Anh Hung, thus seems to fill a vast cultural gap in Vietnamese popular culture. According to different reports, it's both the most expensive and the most popular Vietnamese movie ever made. It's the handiwork of two Viet-American brothers, director Charlie and co-producer, co-writer and star Johnny Tri Nguyen. Another Viet-American, Dustin Nguyen of 21 Jump Street fame, plays the leonine villain.

Johnny Tri Nguyen has blood on his hands (well, his face) in The Rebel, while Dustin Nguyen (below) continues to aspire to be the Vietnamese Johnny Depp.

Johnny and Dustin play agents of the French colonial government during the 1920s. Their job is to help put down nationalist independence movements. Both men are Westernized, but Cuong (Johnny) is ambivalent about his work, while Sy (Dustin) is ambitious to rise in the colonial hierarchy despite the disgrace of his mother being a prostitute. We see them in action foiling an assassination attempt and capturing Thuy, a female rebel. Coung doesn't like to see Sy torturing the girl, and he thinks something's fishy about the way the lead assassin was gunned down before he could even pull his gun out. It looks like Sy has inside information, but may be abusing it to make himself look good at the risk of other people's lives. Refusing to let Sy torture Thuy to death, he breaks her out of jail and goes out on the run with her, leaving behind his opium-addicted dad as well as, most likely, his career. He's told her that there's a mole in her father's rebel organization, and he heads back to her home with her to find out about it for himself.

An episode in the iron mines reminds Coung of the cruelty of the French occupation, and he seems more of a committed rebel when he and Thuy bust out in explosive fashion. But Sy is on their trial, and their arrival at the rebel stronghold is only the cue for Sy to make his move.

A "Frog's" about to flog poor Thuy at the iron mine, but this Viet-minx knows how to handle those cheese-eating imperialists. Below, she makes her farewells as Cuong chauffeurs her home.

He captures Thuy's dad, intending to take him back to Hanoi and earn his long-coveted promotion. If Cuong wants to play rebel, he concludes, the poor schmuck can die like one. Disappointment is in store for our villain, however, when his French superiors meet him on the train to tell him he's been passed over in favor of another Frenchman. Sy snaps and has his personal goon squad slaughter the French officials. Has he turned rebel too? Hell, no! He's going to pin all the killings on Thuy's dad, take all the credit for bringing him in, and claim that damn promotion. That is, if Cuong, Thuy and some angry villagers can't stop the train from leaving the village....

This is a fast-paced unpretentious and pretty much apolitical action film. It has nothing to say about Communism, and if Ho Chi Minh was up to anything at this time no one in the film has heard about it. The rebellion of this film is purely nationalistic, and while the French are shown as bad guys throughout, the script goes the extra mile to say that they weren't all bad and actually brought some benefits to the country by modernizing it. The Nguyens, I think, had an eye on the international martial arts audience and not just on Vietnam, so ideology is off the table. Anyone but a racist would root for the Vietnamese while watching this film, and at the same time a Vietnamese, rather than a Frenchman, is the main bad guy.

On the humid city streets Cuong prefers to kick around in a natty white ensemble. On the road, he opts for rustic, earthy colors and a more casual look overall.

The martial arts are closer to the Thai style popularized by Tony Jaa than to traditional Chinese film style. Johnny Tri Nguyen practices a family style of martial arts called lien feng kwon as well as a Vietnamese style called vovinam which emphasizes elbows and knees. It's a cumulative style that followers of mixed martial arts as well as pure cinematic fighting will appreciate, though there are a few too many showy spins for my own taste. As an actor, he gets the period look right in the early part of the film, including the hair, but opts for a more rugged look as he goes native. His co-star, Ngo Thanh Van, is a beauty queen and Vietnamese pop singer who proves her versatility by brawling quite nicely here. Dustin Nguyen makes no effort to fit into the period apart from wearing the clothes, but that greying mop of hair definitely makes him stand out. He's been working in Vietnam more often lately, American opportunities having apparently dried up for him. He projects a certain menacing cool but is out of his depth in the one scene when Sy must vent his bitterness over the way everyone talks about his mother. Overall, though, his Magua-style villain is nasty enough to keep you interested in his comeuppance, though you do wonder how that's going to happen when he seems to have superhuman invulnerability early in the film.

Ngo Thanh Van kills in style -- a style that seems partly derived from professional wrestling -- in The Rebel.

As a martial arts film, I don't think The Rebel is on the level of the Thai films I've seen lately, but as a period action film it looks good and stays lively. The relationship of martial arts to large-scale 20th century violence is a little shaky, though. I can understand the scene where the disarmed villagers use mass drop kicks to disarm the colonial troops and then arm themselves, but in the climactic attack on the train it seems like the armed and explosive part of the assault is only a prologue to the decisive vo thuat phase. If I were Cuong and I had access to guns, I'd want to bring one with me to a final showdown with Sy. Then again, nobody paid admission (and I didn't put the Albany Public Library disc into my machine) to watch two dudes fire pistols at each other. That'd be like putting Fred Astaire in a big romantic scene and watching him take his clothes off. In this film, I wanted hand-to-hand, foot-to-foot, elbow-to-wherever combat, and if that's what you're after, The Rebel will probably satisfy you.

Here are two trailers. First, a Vietnamese preview uploaded by lecoquino

Now, the English-language Dragon Dynasty trailer, uploaded by 9charlie25.