China Gate | Gene Barry, Angie Dickinson | Great Classic Vietnam Movie!!

China Gate | Gene Barry, Angie Dickinson | A Film urgently needing reissue on widescreen DVD.

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China Gate

	China Gate Gene Barry, Angie Dickinson Republic Pictures, 1998 average customer review:based on 2 reviews view larger image
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Director Sam Fuller's 1951 The Steel Helmet was probably the first movie to deal with the Korean War; undoubtedly China Gate was one of the first to discuss Vietnam. In the early days of the Vietnam War, a motley crew of mercenaries and French Legionnaires set out to destroy a Communist ammunition dump and hobble the war effort of the Vietcong. An element of melodrama is added when the tough sergeant Brock is confronted by his ex-wife (Angie Dickinson--as a Eurasian?); he doesn't want anything to do with their son simply because the boy is of Asian descent. What would be a fairly routine war film is livened by its setting and the familiar fixations that Sam Fuller often addresses in his movies. Antihero Brock refuses to face his son and by doing so refuses to admit his own racism. As in The Steel Helmet, one of the supporting roles is held down by a black actor--Nat "King" Cole, in this case. The interplay and conflicts between characters lives up to Fuller's quote of "film is like a battlefield," with emotions running the show and setting the entire tone of the movie. It may not be one of Sam Fuller's greatest movies, but it's certainly interesting, if for no other reason than its early look at the dynamics of the Vietnam War. --Jerry Renshaw

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Great Classic Vietnam Movie!!

This is one of the first classic 50's movies concerning the relationships,war and turmoil in Vietnam also featuring the reknowned singer Nat King Cole.It's a must see!!

A Film urgently needing reissue on widescreen DVD.

I'm giving this VHS version 4 stars instead of the 5 it really deserves because the current cropped VHS version does a grave injustice to Samuel Fuller's visual style and his creative use of cinemascope. When the film was available on 16mm I used to run it in my Samuel Fuller class to show students the type of innovative work several films exhibited in the 1950s. As it stands at the moment, the VHS cropped, pan and scan version represents a travesty of an outstanding film.

As the other reviewer has noted, CHINA GATE is one of the first American films to deal with the Indo-China conflict that formed the prequel to the Vietnam War. But the casting of Angie Dickinson and Lee Van Cleef as Eurasians is not as bizarre as several reviewers noted. Lucky Legs (Dickinson) has been abandoned by Brock (Gene Barry) due to his racist reaction against his newborn son who looks Oriental. The film thus takes a more incisive look at American racism than does THE GREEN BERETS a decade later. By contrast, Lee Van Cleef's Viet-Minh commissar is a more humane end educated man than his American counterpart. He wishes to adopt Brock's son and Lucky Legs and provide the home Brock refuses to give them. However, Lucky Legs wishes her son to be an American despite her personal experience of racism from a man from "the land of the free." Like RUN OF THE ARROW, CHINA GATE deals with the complex issue of American identity and pulls no punches. Nat King Cole's Goldie has lost his wife to cancer, lives only for killing "commies", and condemns his white American counterpart for deserting his wife and child. It is one of the best performances Cole ever delivered in any American film.

But, as well as exhibiting Samuel Fuller's baroque visual style indebted to yellow journalism and the comic strip (which Jean Luc-Godard appropriated in the Vietnam sequence of PIERROT LE FOU a decade later), the film opens with documentary footage before it moves on to its fictional component. As early as 1957, Fuller has already begun to blur the boundaries between documentary "reality" and "fictional" narrative to raise issues usually related to the alternative realm of experimental cinema, boundaries that were not generally questioned in contemporary Hollywood narrative.

Far from being a perversely bizarre film disdained by most mainstream reviewers, past and present, CHINA GATE is actually a more challenging work dealing seriously with issues of American politics, history, and racial identity than any of its contempories. It is a film urgently needed DVD restoration restoring it to its original widescreen format with audio-commentaries by Fuller critics of the caliber of Bill Krohn and Jonathan Rosenbaum. Hopefully, some enterprising company should begin to do this soon.

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