Walsh was a true democrat who loved the feisty racial jibing of city life, and appropriately his rabble-rousing pre-Code imagining of New York in the Gay Nineties has something to offend end literally everyone.īroken Blossoms (D.W.
Wallace Beery plays Chuck Connors, the legendary self-proclaimed “White Mayor of Chinatown,” here a slovenly unprincipled oaf whose prime preoccupation is getting the better of fellow showboat Steve Brodie (George Raft). The Bowery (Raoul Walsh/1933/92 mins/DCP) Shades of Sax Rohmer, but the joke is on Russell’s outsider, doing his best John Wayne impersonation and playing the archetypal all-American blowhard. Hop on the Jack Burton Pork-Chop Express! Long before Hollywood descended on Hong Kong to cannibalize its cinema, director Carpenter was attuned to the vibrations coming across the Pacific, as evidenced in his cult classic which has local boy Dennis Dun and honky buddy Kurt Russell penetrating the catacombs of San Francisco’s Chinatown to take on supernatural overlord Lo Pan. Wing and “Number One Son” to Warner Oland’s Charlie Chan), in Woody’s world a mystical version of an Upper West Side analyst.īig Trouble in Little China (John Carpenter/1986/99 mins/35mm) She seeks help from a Chinese herbalist, Dr. Metrograph pays tribute to the complex tradition of Chinatown on film, beginning Wednesday, September 27.Ī lesser-known but wholly delightful entry from the heyday of Allen’s collaboration with the wizardly cinematographer Carlo di Palma, this magic realist spin on Alice in Wonderland stars Mia Farrow as a coddled Manhattan housewife whose tidy existence is upended when she begins to fantasize about handsome stranger Joe Mantegna. Chinatown has been rendered as a hyperbolic fantasy space where anything-even Mogwais- can be bought and sold where one partakes in copious amounts of opium from what a Broken Blossoms intertitle calls “the lily-tipped pipe” where crime and sin are believed to go unpunished because the locals play by their own rules and “Forget it, Jake-it’s Chinatown.” While far too often trafficking in insidious stereotypes, these were among the first films to create roles-albeit caricatured ones-for pioneering Chinese-American actors (when not featuring white actors). At once a place of yearning for the far-flung homelands of an ever-growing pan-Asian population abroad and a locale onto which the West’s collective fantasy of the Orient can be projected, the exotic exteriors and supposedly mysterious, vice-ridden corridors of Chinatown have never failed to stir the imagination of Hollywood. The international Chinatown, accessed through red lacquered gates bearing formidable dragon motifs, has been a vital aspect of both history and myth- making in the West for over 200 years and counting. Other New York-set films include Gangs of New York and The Bowery, a 1933 film set in the Gay Nineties that Metrograph assures us “has something to offend end literally everyone.”
There are some less expected picks as well: Woody Allen shot part of Cafe Society in Chinatown, but it’s Alice that gets play here, since the titular character visits a Chinese herbalist. If you missed Gremlins when Anthology reunited the film’s cast or when Alamo Drafthouse busted out the Stripe tiki mugs, well then you can see that Chinatown classic as well– just steps away from where Hanksy orchestrated his “No Mogwai Sold Here” prank. Needless to say, Roman Polanski’s Los Angeles-set Chinatown is in the mix, as is Chinatown Nights and San Francisco-set Big Trouble in Little Chinatown. 27, aims to show how Hollywood has depicted Chinatown as a “hyperbolic fantasy space,” where one “partakes in copious amounts of opium” and “crime and sin are believed to go unpunished,” per a press release. Forget It, Jake, It’s Metrograph’s ‘Imagining Chinatown’ SeriesĪfter paying tribute to Fire Island, Metrograph is looking a little closer to home with its newly announced series, “Imagining Chinatown.” The series, opening Sept.
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