Rating summary

Movie		3.5
Video		4.0
Audio		3.5
Extras		0.0
Overall		3.0

Alamo Bay Blu-ray Movie Review

Reviewed by Dr. Stephen Larson May 15, 2021

Alamo Bay (1985) is being released exclusively as part of Mill Creek Entertainment's two-disc, Scars of War: Vietnam 4-Movie Collection.

American films about Vietnam during the first half of the '80s tended to center on US POWs and MIAs in Southeast Asia so a picture involving an influx of Vietnamese immigrants pouring into the Lone Star state was quite an exception. The great French filmmaker Louis Malle was trying to recover from the critical and commercial flop, Crackers (1984). Previously, Malle made two films in the US that were much better received: Atlantic City (1980) and My Dinner with Andre (1981). The director read an article by Ross Milloy that appeared in the New York Times Sunday Magazine about a Vietnamese émigré who killed an Anglo over a shrimp-fishing dispute. An all-white white jury ruled the immigrant acted in self-defense. Malle told Philip French in the interview book, Malle on Malle, that Mike Nichols recommended Alice Arlen to him after Arlen co-wrote the script for Silkwood (1983) with Nora Ephron. Arlen wrote a first draft screenplay titled Alamo Bay which got Malle very excited to make it into a film.

Alamo Bay begins along a rural road near the Gulf of Galveston where Dinh (Ho Nguyen), a friendly-looking Vietnamese immigrant, looks to hitch a ride. A woman stops her sedan and when Dinh approaches the passenger side, she sees his face and speeds away. Dinh has much letter luck with Leon (Gary Basaraba), a Vietnam veteran who picks Dinh up in his van and even offers him a beer. Leon brings Dinh to his employer, Texas coast shrimp supplier Wally (Donald Moffat), who hires Linh and other newly arriving Vietnamese refugees. Battle lines are quickly drawn between Wally and the local fishermen, who are incensed when they observe the immigrants taking away the shrimp where they normally fish from. One of the most outraged is Shang Pierce (Ed Harris), a Vietnam vet who feels that Dinh and his fellow immigrants are taking over their fishing region. Shang and his bigoted friends incorrectly calls them "gooks," "commies," "dogs," and Indochinese. What Shang doesn't know is that Dinh and his comrades were on the side of the US-backed ARVN and the many Vietnamese Catholics, who fled their homeland in the years after the Fall of Saigon for Florida and Texas.

Glory (Amy Madigan), Wally's daughter and an old flame of Shang's from their high school days, is sympathetic to the Vietnamese workers. This results in a bitter conflict between Glory and Shang, who begins hitting on his old girlfriend. Shang and his xenophobic wife, Honey (Cynthia Carle), have three kids of their own but when Shang has trouble paying off the loan of his boat (named the American Dream Girl), he leaves Honey for Glory. Shang hasn't shown all of his feelings for the refugees yet and Glory rekindles her romance with him. They dance together at a honkytonk and make love. Shang is hoping that Glory's dad will refinance his boat but when Wally goes into the hospital following heart trouble, Shang resorts to other options. Shang's friends enlist Mac (William Frankfather), a Ku Klux Klan organizer, to devise a strategy to drive the Vietnamese away. Mac is a slick talker who says, most ironically, that the Klan will Martin Luther King, Jr.'s teachings of nonviolence. But things come to a boiling point when the rifle-toting Shang and Klansman confront the immigrants at sea aboard their flotilla.

Alamo Bay was made during a period when a spate of films examining social maladies came out of Hollywood. These include The Killing Fields, Places in the Heart, and other save-the-family-farm-from-foreclosure films, which were all released a year earlier. Malle has told interviewers that he took inspiration from I Am a Fugitive from a Chain Gang (1932) and the lot of Warner Bros. social conscience pictures. I'd add that another important antecedent are the films Stanley Kramer produced during the '50s and '60s, which often chronicled interracial conflicts, cultural injustices, and sociopolitical dilemmas. It's also appropriate to bring Kramer up here because Alamo Bay is often considered a contemporary Western à la High Noon (1952), which Kramer produced.

Alamo Bay Blu-ray Movie, Video Quality 

Alamo Bay appears on this Mill Creek BD-50 (which it splits with Summertree) in 1.85:1, which I can confirm is the film's OAR as Ed Kaufman listed it as such in his April 1985 review in The Hollywood Reporter. The print is struck from the same Sony master that Twilight Time used for its limited-edition release. The TT leaflet credits Jeff Jewett of Burbank-based 1K Studios as the individual who conducted technical services for the label's disc. The transfer is clear, sharp, and free of any blemishes. Cinematographer Curtis Clark uses a light emerald green light, which glints from the Zanadew bar (see Screenshot #s 15 and 17), Malle's cheeky reference to the Xanadu castle in Citizen Kane. Mill Creek has given the MPEG-4 AVC-encoded transfer an average video bitrate of 24812 kbps. Because TT's disc doesn't have a double feature (or any extras with exception of a trailer), it uses a maxed-out bitrate (36000 kbps).

Screenshot #s 1-15, 17, 19, 21, 23, & 25 = Mill Creek Entertainment 2021 Blu-ray
Screenshot #s 16, 18, 20, 22, & 24 = Twilight Time 2013 BD-50

Alamo Bay Blu-ray Movie, Audio Quality 

Mill Creek supplies a DTS-HD Master Audio 1.0 Mono (1066 kbps, 24-bit). In listening to sound f/x and score during the opening shots, I could immediately tell that this is single mono as sound was directed through the center channel. Twilight Time also uses a DTS-HD Master Audio 1.0 Mono (1086 kbps, 24-bit) for the film's main sound track. In spite of the recording's inherent limitations, the master is in excellent shape and doesn't suffering from any inhibiting source defects. It's important to note that actor Ho Nguyen, who portrays Dinh, spoke his English with "difficult and broken" delivery, according to Malle. The director revealed to Philip French that one of his Texas assistants worked every day with Dinh on his lines but the sound department had to re-loop him completely with a Chinese-American actor in New York. Malle was satisfied with the results: "Actually, it worked quite well," he told French.

Ry Cooder enlivens the center speaker with his blues and country rock score. Cooder plays his slide guitar with some elegiac pain during the first half of " Theme from Alamo Bay." The melancholy must reflect Dinh's displacement from his homeland and lonely stroll along an open road. When Dinh hitches a ride with Leon, however, Cooder's playing changes to a more upbeat tone. The second half of this cue has a lyrical beauty, perhaps suggesting to Dinh and those exiled that America is a promising land with opportunities lying ahead. The camera tracks Dinh laterally along a landscape, which reinforces that hope. Cooder also wrote a sad theme for Glory that's a highlight in the film and on the soundtrack album. Amy Madigan and John Hiatt sing a duet for the ballad, "Too Close." David Mansfield (Heaven's Gate) performs on violin and/or cello for four of the nine cues on the score.

Twilight Time has an isolated score for Cooder's music. It's presented in DTS-HD Master Audio 2.0 Stereo (1780 kbps, 24-bit). Unfortunately, the track hasn't been retained on the Mill Creek.

Alamo Bay Blu-ray Movie, Special Features and Extras 

The TT has Alamo Bay's original theatrical trailer and a leaflet with an essay by Julie Kirgo about the film. Unfortunately, Mill Creek has zilch.

Alamo Bay Blu-ray Movie, Overall Score and Recommendation 

Alamo Bay is a very good drama about Vietnamese immigrants' battles with prejudiced locals over shrimp-fishing rights in a coastal Texas town. It's one of the most overlooked films Louis Malle made in the US and one he called "my American Lacombe Lucien," a reference to his 1971 masterpiece about a French teen who becomes a collaborationist with the Nazis after the Resistance deems him too young. (When will Criterion get around to releasing it on Blu-ray along with the other Malle titles from the label's DVD box set?) Alamo Bay does fall prey to the Hollywood shootout and could have filmed a better ending. Sparks fly on screen between real-life married couple Ed Harris and Amy Madigan. The authoring and compression on this Mill Creek disc is not as good or high as Twilight Time's BD-50. But you get a similar viewing experience here. The movie and MC's disc earn a SOLID RECOMMENDATION.