ONCE UPON A TIME IN HOLLYWOOD . . . (actually from the
late 50s to the late 80s) there was a famous screenwriter who was something of
a living legend. His name was Stirling Silliphant. He’s all but forgotten now
but he was once one of Tinseltown’s most prolific, highest paid writers, having
turned out 47 produced screenplays (including the Oscar winning “In the Heat of
the Night” (1967), literally hundreds of hours of primetime TV episodes
(including “Route 66” and “Naked City”), and several novels (“Steel Tiger”). He
drove around L. A. in a Rolls Royce, sailed the world in a yacht, was friends
with and a student of Bruce Lee, had an office on the Warners lot and was
married four times—his last to Du Thi Thanh Nga, a Vietnamese actress better
known as Tiana Alexandra, who was also a Bruce Lee student and 38 years
Silliphant’s junior.
Silliphant took an active interest in advancing his
wife’s acting career. Between 1974, when they were married, and 1987, he wrote
parts for her in Sam Peckinpah’s “The Killer Elite” (1975), several TV dramas
(“Pearl” (1978), “Fly Away Home” (1981),” and he created a starring role for
her in “Catch the Heat” (1987), an action movie designed to show off her acting
and martial arts skills. (The film has also been marketed as "Feel the Heat"). Silliphant produced the picture and action director
Joel Silberg (“Breakin” (1984), and “Rappin” (1985), directed. Moshe Diamant’s
Trans World Entertainment which had produced a host of action movies with stars
like Sho Kishogi, and Jean Claude VanDamme, released the film.
“Catch the Heat” features Tiana as San Francisco cop
Checkers Goldberg, who goes to Buenos Aires undercover, posing as Chinese
singer/dancer named Cinderella Pu to investigate Jason Hannibal (Rod Steiger).
He’s a talent agent who is actually a drug kingpin from Thailand who is somehow
smuggling drugs into the U.S. Checkers’ partner, Detective Waldo Tarr (David
Dukes) is already in Buenos Aires, ready to slap the cuffs on Hannibal as soon
as Checkers can come up with some drug-smuggling evidence. Waldo also just
happens to be in love with Checkers.
There is plenty of action in “Catch the Heat,” as
Checkers kicks, punches, and thigh-crushes a host of 80s action movie villains
including Professor Toru Tanaka (Subzero in “The Running Man” (1987), Brian
Thompson (Night Slasher in “Cobra” (1986), John Hancock (“Dead Aim” (1987), and
others. Tiana’s karate moves are authentic and she doesn’t stop moving
throughout the entire film, even in scenes that don’t require any action, such
as when she finds out Hannibal’s fiendish method for smuggling heroin into the
U.S., she becomes so infuriated, she goes to Waldo’s hotel room and instead of
knocking or turning the door knob, she kicks the door off the hinges, raging
about what she’d like to do to him. “He’s not a talent agent,” she shouts.
“He’s a monster.” Probably a line she may have uttered in real life more than
once.
“Catch the Heat” may not be the greatest action movie to
come out of the 80s, but it’s certainly not the worst either, and probably
should be better known than it is, especially among martial arts movie fans.
Silliphant’s script is more of a send-up of the genre, even to the point of
having Checkers wear a “Suzie Wong” dress and wig and talk in a sing-song
Chinese cutie accent when she’s on screen as Cinderella Pu. The satiric
elements seemed to have been lost on Silberg, who probably saw the film as just
another chop socky day at the office.
Unfortunately, it would be Tiana’s one and only starring
role in a feature film. In Nat Segaloff’s biography, “Silliphant: The Fingers
of God,” Tiana explains that despite Bruce Lee’s success, studios were still
reluctant to cast Asians, especially females, in leading roles. Silliphant said
it was racism that prompted one Warners executive to tell Lee, when he was
being considered for the Kung Fu TV series, that Americans would be offended by
having a Chinese man in the living rooms every week. Lee had to leave the
country to find success. According to Tiana, she was an even tougher sell. Producers
and studio executives disliked having the wife of a writer/producer pushed on
them. When Silliphant proposed making Dirty Harry’s female partner in “The
Enforcer” (1976) an Asian, Tiana said, “They were not amused.”
In 1988, a year after “Catch the Heat” flopped,
Silliphant, at the age of 70, moved lock, stock and barrel out of the “eel pit”
that he called Hollywood and expatriated to Thailand, where he said he felt he
had lived in a previous life. He and Tiana remained married for 22 years, but the
last several years of their relationship found them apart more than together.
Silliphant was busily involved in the Bangkok film industry, and managed to pen
at least one decent script, an adaptation of Truman Capote’s “The Grass Harp” –
miles away from the likes of “The Swarm” or even “Catch the Heat.” He died of
prostate cancer in 1996.
Tiana went back to her birthplace despite the U.S. Trade
Embargo that was in place at that time to film “From Hollywood to Hanoi ”, a documentary,
which won critical accolades, and was nominated for a Grand Jury Prize at the
1993 Sundance Film Festival. She has since partnered with writer Christopher
Hampton on several significant projects including serving as associate producer
for “A Dangerous Method (2011).”
Her mini-bio on the Internet
Movie Database says that she is working on a documentary on General Vo Nguyen Giap, the Commander of the
North Vietnamese Army during both the French and the American wars, called “The
General and Me,” to be released in 2025. From
late 2020 to 2021 she traveled the
United States collecting stories and characters for a new series entitled “Detour
66.” The project follows in the tracks of her late husband’s TV series, “Route
66” (1960), and “chronicles the dramas and cultural zeitgeist unfolding across
the Divided States of America.”
Kino Lorber’s Blu-Ray release, presented in collaboration with Scorpion, presents “Catch the Heat” in its 1.85:1
theatrical aspect ratio. The transfer to disc is a major league improvement
over the previous MGM video of 2003, which was full-screen. The only extras are
the theatrical trailer, the VHS Preview Trailer, and trailers for half a dozen
other Kino Lorber action flicks from the 80s. It’s really too bad there wasn’t
at least an audio commentary from a martial arts film authority included as a
bonus feature to provide some background and context for “Catch the Heat.” Now
that it’s out on Blu-ray, maybe it’ll finally get some recognition as an
undiscovered ‘80s cult classic.
