An Immigrant Tragedy in Texas Alamo Bay

By RICHARD CORLISS

The Killing Fields, Birdy, The Falcon and the Snowman, Witness: all films acutely concerned with a crisis in American values, and all directed by "foreigners." Be it Sunrise or The Best Years of Our Lives, Fury or Flashdance, Hollywood movies have seen their energy and conscience reflected through the fond, critical eyes of European directors. Be grateful to these immigrant artists; they are among the last adventurers into the dark, hard regions of the American soul.

It is a troubled, divided soul that French Director Louis Malle (The Lovers, Murmur of the Heart) uncovers in Alamo Bay. The script is based on a conflict that exploded in the late '70s on the Texas Gulf Coast. In the film town of Port Alamo, "Anglo" shrimp fishermen battle the current, the depressed prices and the influx of Vietnamese refugees plying an old trade in a new land. Shang (Ed Harris) is one such rowdy all-American, working his ancestral fishing grounds and feeling threatened by the Asians he fought to defend a world and a war ago. Dinh (Ho Nguyen) is a bright, ambitious immigrant who wants a chance to make a living in Port Alamo, whatever the odds. "You gotta be one of the last cowboys left in Texas," Dinh is told by Shang's lady friend Glory (Amy Madigan), who finds her loyalties stretched tight. There is no easy, noble way out of this dilemma. No one can win. No one is wrong until things turn violent, when the good ole boys put on T shirts reading SECRET MEMBER, KU KLUX KLAN and try to blow these new boat people out of the water. It is as if both sides were waging a stupid, losing war all over again.

Screenwriter Arlen has a fine ear for Texas cadences: "Darlin', these biscuits are old enough to vote." More impressive, she creates in Shang an American hero whose every good impulse--pride, the work ethic, a need to stand firm for what he figures is his--turns him into a monster with a red neck. The script would have been even stronger if Dinh had been allowed some convulsive ambiguities of his own. Instead, he must simply endure, selfless and sexless. Such is the yellow man's burden in films of the liberal persuasion.

In Malle, who brought sympathetic candor to Pretty Baby and Atlantic City, his earlier portraits of American dreamers lost in transit, Arlen has a director almost too alive to nuance. The film has a very long fuse; for its first hour it meanders down familiar folkloric byways. It will stop to admire the sight of a Texas fishing boat cutting through the muddy water and purple sky, or linger over the electric heat in the slow dance of Madigan and Harris before their ideals fatally collide. But once it gets going, Alamo Bay delivers its argument with rigor and passion.

Shooting around Rockport, Texas, Malle must have realized that he too was an alien intruder--a rich Frenchman with a glamorous wife (Candice Bergen) pleading the case for a Vietnamese underdog. But this foreigner was the right person to tell this abrasive story, and to capture it in warm colors and cold blood.