All these types are outside the range of most lead roles played by dramatic movie stars. Generally speaking, the harder a minority's struggle for equality in our society, the more restricted the types of characters they've played in our movies. Thus, Irish- and Italian-American characters could regularly display the full moral spectrum of passion and self-assertion long before Jewish, black, and Asian-American characters could. (Though you have to recall that the moviemaking industry, the average star who wants above all to be liked, and the audience for pop entertainment have all played a part in keeping all forms of complexity out of our movies.)

At the same time, the image of Asian men wasn't as desexualized as that of Jews and blacks. However, with the same kind of prurient-racist projection that you saw in the treatment of the black rapist in D.W. Griffith's Birth of a Nation (1915), the most sexual Asian-American male type was the predator, such as Sessue Hayakawa's blackmailer in Cecil B. DeMille's The Cheat (1915), or, more often, a warlord threatening a white woman, such as Warner Oland in Josef von Sternberg's Shanghai Express (1932), Nils Asther in Frank Capra's The Bitter Tea of General Yen (1933), and Mike Mazurki in John Ford's Seven Women (1966). Some of these movies are terrific entertainments, but just the fact that the majority of the characters have been played by non-Asians indicates they haven't been any bonanza for the race.

(While we recognize the perversity of Hollywood in the legendary miscasting of John Wayne as Genghis Khan in The Conqueror (1956), we also have to recognize the perversity of fate in distributing talent and acknowledge that John Sturges's Bad Day at Black Rock (1955; showing this Saturday on Turner Classic Movies at 6 pm), a melodrama about the treatment of Japanese-Americans during World War II, without a single major Asian character, is a better movie than Alan Parker's Come See the Paradise (1990), an epic treatment of the same splotch on American history, with a large Asian cast.)

The juxtaposition of Better Luck Tomorrow with Mean Streets and Menace II Society is especially relevant because Italian-American men and African-American men have both found ways to express full-blooded masculinity as performers in American pop culture, Italians in music and sports and movies, and blacks in sports and music. Jewish-American men, members of an earlier model minority, had a problem similar to that of Asians. They did at least have an outlet in comedy, but one that presented them as harmless neuters, except when it presented them as burlesque satyrs--either infantile (Danny Kaye) or grotesque (Groucho Marx), or both (Jerry Lewis).