BY FRED BLOSSER
In
Michael Cimino’s “Year of the Dragon†(1985), now available in a handsome
Blu-ray edition from the Warner Archive Collection, gang war threatens to erupt
in New York’s Chinatown when the city’s elderly Triad kingpin is spectacularly
murdered by a young Chinese thug. Police
Captain Stanley White (Mickey Rourke) is brought in to crack down before more
blood is spilled, as long as he doesn’t crack down too hard. As far as the NYPD and the neighborhood
elders are concerned, things are fine the way they are in Chinatown under the
Triad. All that’s needed is to bring the
suddenly upstart youth gangs under control. But Stanley knows that the only way to really clean up Chinatown is to
wipe out the underlying corruption of the Triad itself. To that end, he plunges into his assignment
with a zeal that even Dirty Harry Callahan might find excessive. Stanley figures out that that the kingpin’s
murder wasn’t a spontaneous act by a hopped-up teenager, but the opening move
in a long game by Joey Tai (John Lone), the dead man’s urbane son-in-law, to
seize control of the Triad’s billion-dollar drug trafficking business. Stanley harasses Joey, wiretaps his
headquarters using a Catholic convent down the street as home base, inserts a
rookie Chinese-American police officer undercover into the kitchen staff of
Joey’s trendy restaurant, and pushes back when the department tries to move him
off the case. Recognizing the power of
the media while sneering at journalists as “vampires,†he cynically enlists an
ambitious young female TV reporter to further his strategy. Stanley gives Tracy (Ariane) a scoop every
time he digs up more evidence on Joey, she gives him the lead on the six
o’clock news hour. When their business
relationship becomes sexual as well, the situation strains Stanley’s already
fragile marriage with his neglected wife Connie (Caroline Kava).
Michael
Cimino’s moviemaking career had more ups and downs than this year’s Dow Jones,
plummeting from the high of “The Deer Hunter†in 1978 to the critical and
commercial fiasco of “Heaven’s Gate†in 1980. While “Year of the Dragon†didn’t represent a total rebound from the
latter debacle, it put Cimino behind the camera again in the first of three
respectably budgeted movies for the Dino De Laurentiis company. The partnership continued with “The Sicilianâ€
(1987) and “The Desperate Hours†(1990), even though “Year of the Dragon,â€
based on a novel by Robert Daley, underperformed at the U.S. box office. It made only $18 million in ticket sales
against its $24 million cost, and received a nomination for a Golden Raspberry
Award as Worst Movie of the Year. Strictly
speaking on the picture’s dramatic merit, this less than respectful reception
is understandable. The script by Cimino
and Oliver Stone overlooks or blithely dismisses some key points of basic
logic. The racist, sexist, and
insubordinate White is known to hate Asians, and he’s already rubbed the brass
the wrong way in his career. “Nobody likes you, Stanley,†his colleague Lou
Bukowski (Ray Barry) tells him, as if the NYPD assesses job performance by the
criteria of a high school popularity contest. So why is this loose cannon unleashed on a politically and racially
sensitive murder case? Some of the
confusion suggests that Cimino may have written or filmed expository scenes
that never made it into the final product, as when suddenly, late in the film,
we learn that Lou isn’t just another of Stanley’s NYPD colleagues. He, Stanley, and Connie grew up together as
friends in the same Polish-American neighborhood. He doesn’t resent Stanley just because he’s a
by-the-book bureaucrat and Stanley is a rebellious maverick. He resents that Stanley turned his back on
the old crowd when he changed his Polish name to “White,†and that he makes
Connie miserable.