By this point, the moody Orientalism of the 1940s seemed passe and did not resurface in any significant form until Robert Towne and Roman Polanski's retro-styled Chinatown, which once again associated the Asian district of an American city with mystery, violence, and perverse sex. However, one of Chinatown's distinctions lay in the fact that it treated the old-fashioned motifs ironically, as a kind of white projection. The Chinatown street at the end of the film is not a center of evil but an oppressed ghetto controlled by the Los Angeles Police Department and the city's ruling class; the story's true perversity originates elsewheremostly in the dark heart of Noah Cross, who ultimately enters the Chinese community to kill off one of his children and to enclose another in his creepy embrace. Unfortunately, Chinatown's many imitators tended to employ Asian titles or motifs merely to create an exotic atmosphere. During the 1980s, the most ambitious attempt to explore a Chinatown setting in the context of a thriller was Michael Cimino's Year of the Dragon (1985)a neogangster film starring Mickey Rourke, which offered a contemporary version of the old-fashioned Tong wars. By the end of the decade, as Tokyo became an economic rival of the United States, old stereotypes began to reappear in thrillers such as Black Rain (1989) and Rising Sun (1990), which reproduced the classic images of mystery and Eastern decadence, clothing them in sleek postmodern dress and giving them an air of liberalism by virtue of multiracial casts.
When we actually cross over to the perspective of films directed by the 'other,' we can find plenty of noirlike elements but no Asian exoticism. The best examples of film noir in the Japanese art cinema have been two pictures by Akira Kurosawa: The Bad Sleep Well (1960), which fuses Hamlet with a Warner-style crime movie, and High and Low (1962), an adaptation of an Ed McBainpolicier, which makes brilliant use of wide-screen, black-and-white photography. At an entirely different level, the Japanese pop cinema is filled with cathartically violent genre pictures that have noirish settings or themes. One of the most flamboyant auteurs in this field is Seijun Suzuki, a B-movie contract director for Nikkatsu Pictures in Tokyo during the period between 1956 and 1967, who made bizarrely stylized movies about prostitutes and contract killers, somewhat comparable to the tabloid thrillers of Samuel Fuller (see, for example, Toyko Drifter [19661 and Branded to Kill [1967]).
In America, the Chinese-American director Wayne Wang's Slamdance (1987) is filled with visual references to noir classics such as Rear Window and The Lady from Shanghai, although it has no specifically Asian themes. A much more interesting picture along these lines is Wangs' earlier, low-budget Chan Is Missing (1981), which employs an investigative plot structure and a style reminiscent of the early New Wave in order to depict a Chinese-American community from the 'inside.' 10 Peter Feng has described this picture as a 'revisionist Charlie Chan film,' although he points out that Wang skillfully eludes any attempt to be pinned down with the usual terminology of generic classification, commercial categorization, or ethnic essentialism. Ironically, the success of Chan Is Missing in both art houses and video stores led Hollywood producers to offer Wang the chance to remake In a Lonely Place, a project he eventually rejected because the script contained 'all American characters, except for one Asian.'11
More recently, Hong Kong cinema has been in vogue on the American market. One of the most artistically complex of these pictures is Wong Kar-Wai's Chung King Express (1995), which seems to be inflected by the French New Wave's fascination with noir. Far more influential, at least in commercial terms, are the films of action director John Woo, who describes himself as 'un-Chinese,' and who has become a major cult success. Woo's highly stylized productions, such as The Killer (1989), synthesize generic conventions from Hollywood thrillers (especially the crime story motivated by revenge, guilt, or male bonding) with over-the-top flourishes from martial arts movies and Far Eastern musicals. I suspect that many of his youthful fans in America, not unlike Dashiell Hammett's early readers, are indulging in fin de siele Orientalism. In any case, his work in Hollywood has been largely confined to hard-body action films suitable to stars like Jean-Claude Van Damme, or to adventure spectaculars such as Broken Arrow (1995), which are designed for a worldwide market. Unfortunately, except in the karate-style fight sequences, these movies suggest very little Asian influence; the violence is less bloody than in the Hong Kong productions, and the action centers on the sort of swashbuckling trial by combat that Borde and Chaumeton regard as the antithesis of noir. Even in Face/Off (1997), where Woo employs many of the signature elements of his Hong Kong thrillers, the effect is relatively conventional. As Julian Stringer has pointed out, Woo's non-
Hollywood films are strongly affected by the recent history of China and are filled with an unusually melodramatic, 'weeping' style of masculinity. Neither of these qualities can be seen in Face/Off, which transforms the noirlike theme of the 'double' into a high concept for a pair of macho white male stars and weighs down the big-budget actions with clumsy, implausible exposition. At best, the picture appears to have been shot and edited by a mainstream director who was imitating John Woo.
Significantly, Woo's Killer ends in a scene of melodramatic excess, involving fireworks and a bloodbath in and around a bizarre Christian church. The Christian symbolism in an Asian setting seems weirdly exotic, but in one sense it is merely an appropriation and reversal of the cultural semiotics in the typical Hollywood thriller. Notice how Chinatown employs a traditional Asian enclave to create a baroque, carnivalistic ending, in which the characters' repressed passions come to the surface. A similar technique can be seen in many other Hollywood noirs involving Asian themesfor example, in the Chinese theater at the end of The Lady from Shanghai, in the amusement-park shootout at the end of House of Bamboo, and in the Japanese New Year at the end of The Crimson Kimono. But the atmosphere of carnival is not limited to Orientalist settings. Where noir is concerned, almost anywhere will dothe suburban U.S. town in Strangers on a Train, where Guy and Bruno fight one another on a runaway carousel, or even postwar Vienna, where Holly Martins and Harry Lime confront one another on a Ferris wheel. The point is to find a relatively festive locale that symbolizes the Place of the Unconscious or of psychological catharsis and gives the director sufficient opportunity to stage a spectacle. In Hollywood pictures, Latin American cities and villages have been especially useful for such purposes, because they can be so easily associated with baroque celebration. Hence we have the Day of the Dead parade and the tiovivo carousel in Ride the Pink Horse (1947) and the eroticized, Sternbergian carnival in Gilda.
During the 1940s, noir characters visited Latin America more often than any other foreign locale, usually because they wanted to find relief from repression. This phenomenon was no doubt overdetermined by various geographic, political, and economic factors: California's proximity to Mexico; Hollywood's support for the Roosevelt government's 'Good Neighbor' policy; the postwar topicality of stories about Nazi refugees in Argentina; the RKO- Rockefeller interests in Western Hemisphere oil fields; the general importance of Latin America as an export market; and so on. But it also had to do with the purely symbolic value of south-of-the-border settings, which provided a visual counterpoint to the Germanic lighting and modernist architecture in most varieties of dark cinema. In The Lady from Shanghai, for example, Latin America becomes the ' 'bright, guilty place,' contrasting vividly with the dark skyline of Manhattan and the murky avenues of Central Park at the beginning of the story. And in Out of the Past, Jeff Bailey's pursuit of Kathie Moffat takes him to a series of sun-baked Mexican towns that offer a temporary escape from the forbidding shadows of a northern metropolis.
The Latin backgrounds in classic films noirs take a variety of forms, ranging from the sleazy border crossings in Where Danger Lives (1950) and Touch of Evil to the sophisticated capitals and resorts in Notorious (1946) and His Kind of Woman (1950). Sometimes Latin America is indirectly evoked through California's mission-style architecture, as in In a Lonely Place ('Sorta hacienda-like, huh?' a hatcheck girl remarks when she sees Bogart's apartment). Sometimes it is suggested in nightclub scenes, as in Mildred Pierce, when a singer imitates Carmen Miranda. In the darkly claustrophobic Double
