China Gate (1957)

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.

This is a great film that has been lost to the masses for too long. Now, the only time the movie is shown is late at night. And, it is the chopped up, badly edited version.

It is amazing that so many films are not available on DVD. It took forever for the John Ford movies "Wagon Master" and "Sgt. Rutledge" to make it into DVD. Hopefull "China Gate" will soon join the ranks of lost films found again.

And on a musical note, one of the great singers of all times Nat King Cole not only has a supporting role, but also sings the theme song.

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Gritty Sam Fuller war film finally restored...kind of. It's great to have this back in print again. As Fuller notes in his autobiography, "There were enough hot topics in this adventure love story to push everybody's buttons.Communism and colonialism.Racism and tolerance.Black markets and capitalism. Abandonment and fidelity." Great cast led by a nasty Gene Barry,a very young Angie Dickinson,Nat Cole,Marcel Dalio,Lee Van Cleef. The new BluRay has deep blacks and decent contrast through most of the film, but there are episodes of white digital "snow" marring the image through parts of the middle of the film.Not sure if this existed on the original master or if it is a flaw in the transfer.Quite a distraction,nonetheless.

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Olive Films and Paramount Pictures have released this DVD of this Twentieth Century Fox film in its

original 2.35 Cinemascope ratio,the picture quality being very good.This leaves us with a very interesting

question.

If Olive/Paramount can do this, why can't Fox do it themselves with their Archive releases, where many of

their Cinemascope pictures are released in pan and scan?

Perhaps Fox could transfer all future releases (and reissue their pan and scan failures) to

Olive/Paramount for us movie buffs everywhere.

Incidentally I am not too enamoured with the movie itself. To see the cast chasing around the jungle,

mainly in the dark, I find rather boring.

Want China Gate (1957) Discount?

Angie Dickinson as a Eurasian smuggler, Nat King Cole as a fighting soldier who sings the title song, Lee Van Cleef as a Eurasian guerilla leader plus Gene Barry all in this unusual Vietnam War movie. Not bad! Good photography in this widescreen disc. Angie is the best in this very different role.

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