Kung fu back on the screen

Jeffrey Wong walked the streets of Chinatown one afternoon last week, playing back the reel of a youth spent at the movies.

The Crown Royal B akery was once the grocery store where the owner showed 16mm Marx Brothers films for free. On Hudson is the merchants building where his whole family would watch Chinese language features on Friday nights.

Behind a set of shuttered doors was the all-Chinese Star Cinema, where the kung fu movies of the 1970s created a generation of mini-Bruce Lees and where Jackie Chan's ``Spiritual Kung Fu" drew such a crowd that people were left outside, begging to be let in.

They packed them in, those cinemas. Grandmothers chatted as the films flickered. Toddlers barreled up and down the aisles. The air smelled like everybody's kitchen.

And then, suddenly, in the late 1980s the movie houses were gone -- converted to restaurants, sectioned into cubicles.

Some of the old devotees think Chinatown lost some of its character, and its sense of community, when those cinemas closed. Starting Sept. 13, they will try to recapture the magic of that time. They will set down folding chairs on a weedy vacant lot by the Chinatown gate, pull a white screen down the side of a building, and create ``Films at the Gate," a five-night open-air Chinese cinema.

Beginning in the 1940s, Chinatown was a movie mecca for local immigrants. At the height of the film craze, in the 1970s and early 1980s, the small neighborhood sustained three all-Chinese movie houses, and all of Chinatown seemed to pass through their doors each week. After Chinatown's residents finished work at the factories and restaurants, children were fed and scrubbed clean and families went to the movie houses, centers of the neighborhood's social life.

``Most of the time, you knew most of the people going to the movies," said Wong, 62, who runs a print shop in the basement of the Oxford Street building where he grew up. ``It was community time. It was special. It was sort of like a ritual."

As a youth, Wong would sneak in and hide in the balcony of the State C inema on Washington Street, hoping to catch some of the skin flicks before the lights came up and the bums were pushed out and he joined his friends and relatives and neighbors, who then filled the theater , eager for that week's offering from Shanghai or Taiwan.

Not all the films had the highest production values: The fights were obviously staged, which made them even more entertaining for some.

``The kids would have a hoot," said Caroline Chang , 65, who was born on Hudson Street and grew up going to the movie houses. ``There would be sword fights and you would see the swords going right by the bodies."

Jean Lukitsh , 56, threaded projectors at the Star Cinema, on Essex Street, and the China Cinema, on Beach Street, from 1978 to 1986. She had come to Boston from Pittsburgh to take tai chi classes in Chinatown. She lived there for 23 years.

A classmate got her a job at the cinemas, and she fell in love with Chinese film.

``The thing that drew me to these movies was that, in them, anybody can be a master of martial arts," she said, as a 1957 Chinese musical called ``Mambo Girl" played in her Dorchester living room recently. ``Old women, monks, nuns, beggars. I just really liked that fact."

The kung fu movies were the most popular, she said, and the comedies. She recalled one series from the early 1980s called ``Aces Go Places" that had audiences falling off their seats with laughter.

The films drew fans from outside the Chinese community, too.

Keith Smith 's mother took him to Chinatown to see ``Enter the Dragon" after Bruce Lee died in 1973. The 7-year-old was hooked.

``I was an addict for the cinemas," said Smith, now 40, and a video game designer. ``I just fell in love with the culture, the idea that with great power comes great responsibility."

After that, his mother brought him to Chinatown to see movies all the time, covering his eyes when things on screen got risqué. Soon, he was old enough to go by himself, after classes at Boston Latin.

``Almost every week, I saw everything playing at all the cinemas," he said. ``My comic books and my allowance financed a kung fu obsession."

But in 1985, the glory days of the Chinatown movie houses ended abruptly.

The VCR killed them.

``Over the course of six months, we lost our whole audience," Lukitsh said. ``We went from standing room only to a dozen old men who didn't have VCRs at home. It was very traumatic."

At first, Smith didn't see what was happening. ``I thought, `This is great, I'm the only guy here,' " he recalled. ``But when you're always the only kid there, you realize what's going on."

The video revolution coincided with other transformations. Chinatown's longtime Chinese population had been gradually shrinking, as people grew wealthier and moved to Brookline or Quincy, and others were pushed out by development.

``It was hard for people to get there, and people had moved out," said Caroline Chang. ``It was hard to get a critical mass."

In Chinatown, as everywhere else, strong communities and large gatherings gave way to private pursuits.

The Star closed in 1986. The China closed a year or two later.

``I miss seeing those movies with large groups of people," said Lukitsh, who trained as a nurse when the cinemas closed and now works at a Chinatown home for the elderly.

The films of Jackie Chan and John Woo became cult favorites with art-house audiences a few years after the Chinese cinemas closed. And increasingly, Chinese films, most famously Ang Lee's ``Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon," have entered the mainstream.

Still, the Chinatown cinema closings left a void in the Chinese community, Lukitsh said.

``You'd see other entertainment -- the opera groups, for example," she said. ``But you didn't see all the ages. It definitely changed my sense of the community, too."

Leslie Davol , a film producer who recently bought a home across the street from the vacant lot on Hudson Street where the films will be shown , suggested the film series because she wanted to bring that sense of community back to Chinatown, she said.

``Chinatown has this wonderful character," she said. ``I really would love this to be an event that knits together some of the old folks in Chinatown and the people working in the downtown office buildings."

Lukitsh will be selecting the films for the series.

``This is what we used to do," said Jeremy Liu , executive director of the Asian Community Development Corporation, who is seeking sponsors for Films at the Gate, in the hope of making it a regular event. ``For some in the community, it really speaks to their memories of what it used to be like here. This is a way of opening the place up again."

Liu says he has received support for the films from Chinatown residents who rarely get enthusiastic about other community initiatives.

``People are so excited it's coming back," he said. ``It's as if they didn't know they were missing it. ``

Yvonne Abraham can be reached at abraham@globe.com.