Lawbolisted Powerful

Kidskycom It's funny watching the elements come together in this complicated scam. On one hand, the set-up isn't quite as complex as it seems, but there's an easy sense of fun in every exchange.

InformationRap This is one of the few movies I've ever seen where the whole audience broke into spontaneous, loud applause a third of the way in.

Brainsbell The story-telling is good with flashbacks.The film is both funny and heartbreaking. You smile in a scene and get a soulcrushing revelation in the next.

christopher-underwood Very unusual for me to watch a war movie, but anything directed by Sam Fuller deserves consideration and I was intrigued with the casting that included, Angie Dickinson, Nat King Cole and Lee Van Clef. As it tuned out this was not as bad as it might have been, helped very much by the performances, Fuller achieves from his cast. Set in Vietnam, then Indochina, it features the last days of the French rule, when the Americans were seemingly the good guys dropping food parcels to the indigenous population. Nat King Cole, sings the title track twice and puts in a really convincing performance as one of the French rag bag group who trek through the jungle to carry out their wondrous mission. Mostly filmed on back lots, Fuller has interspersed stock footage to give a reasonable approximation of the location. Angie Dickinson is a real trouper and plays this very wide with much non PC banter with the Chinese, who she seems to keep happy with promise of brandy and sex. Lee Van Clef is a real surprise here (I thought he had always had that weathered look!) and helps to make the last quarter a bit more fun.

MisterWhiplash Samuel Fuller's China Gate isn't one to rush out to rent, but if you're already a fan of the director's it's a safe bet that most of his work will be at least brawny and entertaining, and even in the midst of heavy melodrama he can pack a bit of punch in the midst of the studio-set conventions. Make no mistake, this is a studio picture through and through, down to the studio locations (how much of it really is a jungle one might wonder, which isn't much), and the mix and match of real war-torn cityscapes ala Rossellini with stock footage of planes dropping supplies for the citizens. The only overall disappointing aspect is the slightly off ratio of powerful action and tough dialog- there's a little too much of the latter, and not as one of Fuller's most spot-on scripts in trying to wring out the unsentimental emotion, which backfires- as it's almost a minor work when compared to the real big guns, no pun intended, with respect to Fuller's war films. China Gate is simple melodrama, but when it does stick simply, and with Fuller's stylistic strengths and flashes of bravado, it works.One of the pleasantries of the picture is seeing the actors take to the roles, in typical Fullerian mode, as if it was all heart. Angie Dickinson, in one of her first performances, is a hot little number that has just the right, well, 'something' to keep her along with the other male parts, as she plays a hard-bitten mother named 'Lucky Legs' who is the only one who has the right contacts and repore with the Ho Chi-Mon that she can get a small military team through enemy lines. Her strengths are poised against Gene Barry, her once husband (still technically is, thanks to a lovey-dovey scene in the latter part of the movie), who is a bigot and seems to have had all sympathy for most people drained away. He does, however, gain it back by the time the big climax comes, which maybe isn't too far of a stretch considering the many scenes where he and Lucky Legs get a little more intimate (as close as possible during the 'code' anyway). The good news is Fuller cast them very well for their chemistry on screen, as they are totally opposed at first, and then gradually get closer and closer, her beauty with his scruffy face, each hard-bitten by times spent in war and communist locales.Meanwhile, Fuller's got a wild card with Nat King Cole, who not only wonderfully sings an unusually placed song (right before all the men head out on their mission through the Vietnam jungle) but is an unexpectedly touching actor. He goes through some subtle looks at times when asked too many questions from a fellow German soldier in the group, is cool and dead-pan when having to face Sgt. Brock, and plays it perfectly when he is in possible enemy fire range and steps on a spike in the ground, keeping himself mute with his face totally in horror. There's also a good scene with a man who gets wounded on a rocky ridge, with his last minutes not stepping into platitudes but simply allowing a sort of quietly sad cross-cutting between the others looking down at the poor solider seen in a painful close-up. Although there's a fairly bad scene with a French foreign legion guy (I think foreign legion) who tells a story accompanied by a sound effect of a whistle, and the dialog between the men in the less plot-dense scenes is just average Fuller, it's great to see a part for Lee Van Cleef as the heel with all the bombs and explosives in the cave, and the climax is a good, if not astounding, wallop.An obscure early dip into what would become the most insane debacle of Westerners fighting the 'other' halfway across the world (as of then), China Gate is usually exciting and tightly executed, and if it doesn't have the same pulp attitude that Fuller has when he's working full throttle, it never-the-less attains a quality that speaks of the BANG of a headline, telling the story all in one bold swoop, however easy to tell.

chrisdfilm This movie is wildly underrated and, contrary to the usual, often numbskull IMDb opinions here, one of Sam Fuller's most satisfying pictures from the 1950s. Angie Dickinson is very convincing as Eurasian Lucky Legs, an independent woman cast adrift and on her own trying to survive in French-controlled Viet-Nam. She is constantly judged and used by former lover, racist mercenary Gene Barry (who is also the father of her bastard son)for his own ends. Nat King Cole is fine as Barry's right-hand man, Goldie. One of the great things about the film is showing the irrationality of racism, a prime example being that racist Barry has nothing but warm feelings (if memory serves) for longtime comrade, Cole. Full of great insights (no matter how broadly painted) as well as super hardboiled bits (watch for Cole stepping on a spike at night in the jungle but unable to cry out due to proximity of enemy soldiers -- as well as what happens to self-sacrificing Angie at the end). Show me another war film as gutsy and as uncompromising from this time period (outside of Don Siegel's HELL IS FOR HEROES or Anthony Mann's MEN IN WAR). Plus - how can one not warm to a movie where Lee Van Cleef (!) plays the Viet Cong commander in charge of the ammo dump that Barry and cohorts must destroy?

Steve Tarter Nat King Cole acts and sings in this one and that just might be the only item of interest in a very bad movie with one distinction: it has Americans fighting in Vietnam in 1957.We're talking about a few mercenaries (like Gene Barry) who just can't get enough military action and just love killing Commies. Ah, the good old days...Angie Dickinson is your typical half-Chinese, half-American loving mother/double agent/saboteur who drinks heavily but never shows it. Her cute little Chinese son has been spurned by father Barry, whose racist tendencies keep erupting throughout the movie.It's violent, stiff and dumb. There's something about movies that use "gate" in the title--"Heaven's Gate," for example.