MOVIE REVIEW : SUBTLETY IS SUNK IN ‘ALAMO BAY’

The clash of complex rights and wrongs behind the violence in 1980 between Vietnamese refugees-turned-fishermen and long-established Texas shrimpers is the background for Louis Malle’s simplistic “Alamo Bay” (at the Coronet).

Malle has called “Alamo Bay” his “American ‘Lacombe, Lucien’: Both are films about how private behavior is twisted around by political backgrounds.”

If the subject had been treated with the depth of characterization and the subtlety of “Lacombe, Lucien”--Malle’s extraordinary 1974 portrait of a young French peasant boy who goes to work for the Gestapo in occupied France--then “Alamo Bay” might have been another Malle milestone.

And this might have been possible if the real background of the Texas Gulf Coast situation had been revealed. But the screenplay by Alice Arlen (co-writer of “Silkwood”) irons out crucial complexities as tidily as “Silkwood” did crucial details in the life and death of Karen Silkwood.

The film’s Vietnamese, although they may ignore fishing regulations and upset the locals simply by their presence, are upright, foursquare, Christian and deeply hardworking (particularly Ho Nguyen as the young fisherman Dinh); these are the quintesstential tired, poor, huddled masses. The Texas fishermen facing them down, led by a bearded, embittered Ed Harris, are as sorry--and implacable--a bunch of rednecks as ever immortalized by Randy Newman.

In reality (the reality of a marvelous 1982 documentary by Robert Hillman called “Fire on the Water” on this very situation), the Vietnamese included ex-Vietnam army colonels who came loaded with black market money and treated later arrivals like subservient recruits. Asked what he was most interested in, one Vietnamese fishmerman interviewed said fervently, “Money. Just money.” And the KKK who faced them down was headed by a Klansman whose secret was that he himself was an American Indian.

Now that is a situation worthy of Malle at his best.

In “Alamo Bay,” Malle’s best are his two central actors, the blazing blue-eyed Harris as the beleagured Shang, now married and restless, and Amy Madigan, with her cracked, confiding voice, as Glory, his ex-high school sweetheart, recently returned from the city. The two (actually married offscreen) hold the current patent on erotic adultery in movies: a glance, a finger’s touch in “Places in the Heart” were enough to tell volumes about the current that flowed between them. Boldly illicit now in “Alamo Bay,” they flaunt their rekindled attraction in the local beer hall by a dance which is insolent, insinuating and incendiary.

But their very intensity gives the story an unneeded quirk. The two are embattled because of their principles, not because Harris won’t leave his wife and children for her, which is what their quarrels seem to suggest.

And if the film is supposed to carry a bittersweet message about newcomers and the American dream, it fails on that account as well, since the Vietnamese, however winningly played, are thinly and simplistically drawn.

“Alamo Bay,” which ends in bitter, seemingly irrecoverable violence, is concluded by an absolutely mystifying final paragraph on the screen. If what we read is true, where, in sweet heaven’s name, did this situation spring from? Not from anything even remotely suggested in the preceding hour and a half. It makes “Alamo Bay” seem like two-thirds of a story--and a specious and shallowly told two-thirds at that.

‘ALAMO BAY’ A Tri-Star release of a Tri-Star-Delphi III production. Producers Louis Malle, Vincent Malle. Executive producer Ross Milloy. Director Louis Malle. Camera Curtis Clark. Editor James Bruce. Music Ry Cooder. Production design Trevor Williams. Art direction Rhiley Fuller. Set decoration Christian Kelly. Costume design Deirdre Williams. Sound Danny Michael. Associate producer Ken Golden. With Ed Harris, Amy Madigan, Ho Nguyen, Donald Moffat, Truyen V. Tran, Rudy Young, Cynthia Carle, Martino Lasalle, William Frankfather.

Running time: 1 hour, 38 minutes.

MPAA-rated: R (persons under 17 must be accompanied by parent or adult guardian)