Mixed Reviews and a Missed Opportunity : At First, Local Vietnamese Were Excited About ‘Cube.’ Now Some Are Not So Sure.

A Vietnamese teen-ager stumbles upon an illegal gun-running operation and ends up dead in a tacky motel room. His adoptive American brother, a skate-punk with Frost-n-Tip hair and shredded 501 Levis, grabs his board and sets off to find the killers, braving Asian thugs (not to mention potholes) on the streets of Orange County.

That’s the gist of “Gleaming the Cube,” an action/thriller that has been showing in local theaters. The movie combines the intrigue of a supposed Vietnamese underworld with skateboarding thrills and spills. Shots of local landmarks abound, from John Wayne Airport to south county orange groves, but the cameras linger longest on the bustling Little Saigon district.

“Gleaming the Cube” is one of the few commercial films that touches, however lightly, on the Vietnamese population in Orange County. There are more than 100,000 Southeast Asians here, one of the largest concentrations of Vietnamese in the world outside Vietnam. They’re growing steadily, in numbers and in influence.

When the producers of “Gleaming” came to town in September, 1987, the spotlight focused on these people. More than 300 Vietnamese locals were involved in the film--working as extras, loaning their storefronts as backdrops, or assisting as translators under the guidance of co-stars and technical advisers Le Tuan and Kieu Chinh.

Now, reaction to the film from the Vietnamese community has been mixed. Nearly every Vietnamese in the movie seems to be either a thug or a dupe, but of several Vietnamese interviewed by The Times, none said he or she was really offended by the characterizations. Instead, most were sorry that “Gleaming the Cube” offers barely a paragraph on their much longer and more poignant story.

Le Tuan plays Col. Yu Dai Trac, a fiercely patriotic Vietnamese who, under the influence of a shady American businessman, is shipping machine guns instead of medical supplies through his Anti-Communist Relief Fund (VACRF), which he runs from the back of his Little Saigon video shop.

Young Vinh (Art Chudabala) discovers the subterfuge and is tortured and killed. After a modicum of violence and a healthy serving of hair-raising chase scenes, three people are dead and Vinh’s adoptive brother Brian (Christian Slater) is a hero.

Clearly, “Gleaming the Cube” was not intended as a sensitive narrative on the Vietnamese. Tuan told The Times during filming: “No one would be suicidal enough to put out this kind of money to make a movie about the Vietnamese. It has to be a subplot. The skateboard story line will (bring) commercial success.

“But we, the Vietnamese people, will ride the coattail of that success. . . .”

Unfortunately, members of the Vietnamese community say, that ride has proven to be a short one.

“I think the movie has no depth. It’s a good action movie, that’s all,” said Marianne (Beng Tam) Young, who came to the United States in 1964 and has spent years working in local high school programs designed to help Asian youth adjust to life here. She also operates Saigon Depot, a Vietnamese art and gift store in Westminster’s Asian Village.

“I enjoyed it on the American side,” she said, “but on the Vietnamese side, it misses too much. I think especially they missed the closeness of the Vietnamese family together. In Vietnamese life, if something happens to one of our family, we worry to death. (Members of the Vietnamese family in the film) act like Americans,” she added with a laugh.

Tony Lam also thinks that the movie “missed a lot of points.” Lam was an industrialist in Saigon, and when the city fell in 1975, he assisted 52,000 Vietnamese as a manager of a Guam refugee camp. Today he owns Vien Dong, a restaurant in Garden Grove, and he maintains a high profile in the county’s Vietnamese community as founder of the Vietnamese Chamber of Commerce and chairman of the community’s annual Tet festival, a 3-day celebration of the Vietnamese new year.

“Overall, I think it’s a second-rate movie,” he said. “They didn’t picture the homeland in a proper manner. I feel the writer doesn’t understand us well. I know Le Tuan and Kieu Chinh did their best as advisers, but . . . in the end, I don’t think their comments became a deciding factor.”

Khiem Tran, who played a small roll in the movie, disagrees. Tran spent 14 years in the South Vietnamese Army, serving most of the time as a combat photographer. He later worked as a cameraman for CBS and ABC and shot some of the last footage of the fall of Da Nang. Today he shoots family portraits instead of war scenes at Khiem’s Photo, a photography studio in Westminster.

“To me, it is a very great film . . . a highly political film,” said Tran. “The main story is about medical supplies and the medical exchange market . . . the boys on the skateboards are just a little fun on the side.”

Screenwriter Michael Tolkin’s characterization of Col. Trac and the VACRF may be based, at least partially, in the truth. According to Andrew Hall, a former head of the Westminster Police Department’s detective division and now adjutant to Chief Jim Cook, organizations like Trac’s have been known to exist locally.

“Ever since the refugee community was established, we’ve . . . heard lots of rumors about military leaders accumulating funds and weapons to retake the homeland from the communists,” Hall said. “The rumors are persistent, so you can’t help but believe there’s a shred of truth to them.

“The Vietnamese community here is feverishly anti-communist. They want their homeland back,” Hall continued. “I don’t know how many generations it takes for that passion to subside, but it’s still running strong down on Bolsa.

“Don’t get me wrong. There are a lot of positive things going on down there. It’s a fascinating community . . . almost as glamorous and fascinating as the books and movies make it out to be.”

During the filming, Tolkin told The Times that he set his story in Orange County because “the more research I did on the Vietnamese community (there), the more I realized that area deserved more than a . . . sarcastic approach.

“I figured if something was this visually interesting, then the story beneath it was probably worth telling.”

Tony Lam hopes “Gleaming the Cube” will open the door to more of that story.

“There are so many (movies) we could make,” Lam said. “I’d like to see the real story of living under communism, of the boat people, of family breakup.

“There needs to be something more about Orange County’s Vietnamese . . . about the positive contribution by the younger generation (that shows) they are do-gooders for the community. That’s what I’d like to see.”