Maybe you first saw it at a museum retrospective or a revival theater, with the marquee emblazoned with tag-lines like, “The most action-packed film of all time!” and “More exciting than a dozen Die Hards!” Or perhaps your first taste came in a dorm room or a friend’s basement, with a piece of pizza in one hand and a brewski in the other, both forgotten as your mouth gaped and your eyes bulged. Some of you, no doubt, spied it in the Criterion Collection bin at the DVD store and, curious, made an impulse buy, thinking you were in for a particularly well-made Kurosawa-like police procedural.
Whatever the circumstances, if you’ve ever watched Hard Boiled, a 1992 movie from Hong Kong directed by a distinctive auteur named John Woo, within minutes you were privy to this:
[youtube 3wYCh5nxyCI — click here to watch in full-screen]
And your action-movie lovin’ life was never the same.
One of the great Golden Ages of cinema blossomed in Hong Kong between the early 1980s and 1997. Director Tsui Hark once described that city as the Chinese version of New York: “Very business, very crowded, very stink, and people very nervous.” But with one big difference: while New York perennially writhes in the death-grip of the Democrats’ tax-and-regulate machine, Hong Kong is a capitalist’s paradise, harboring freedoms and opportunities unimaginable in modern America. This mindset isn’t just a part of their business or political community, it’s also reflected in their films. John Woo once described the special appeal of Hong Kong pictures:
They look so rich; they have so much energy. Hong Kong filmmakers have been trained to put everything into each film. They’re always creating new kinds of action. The films have lots of drama, humor, romance, action. The films are fun, like a roller coaster. People here find things in Hong Kong films that they can’t find anyplace else. Some people say that Hollywood films are made like a formula; they never mix genres. Hong Kong films do; that’s why people love Hong Kong movies.
In Hong Kong we have a lot of creative freedom. We don’t really care about censors because we have a smaller market than American films. We can do whatever we want; we never have any rules to tie us up. In fact, there aren’t any rules; we just try to make a movie as interesting as we can. We’re carefree and will try anything new.
Carefree is a quality missing from far too many American productions that smother audiences with predictable, ossified genre fare. Here are the authors of City on Fire: Hong Kong Cinema, Lisa Odham Stokes and Michael Hoover, describing the way movies were created on the island circa 1992: “Budgets are smaller, generally between US$100,000 and US$1 million. . . production time. . . is roughly seven to eight weeks from contract to screen. . . Postproduction is often out of the question, and many films are completed days or even hours before their screenings. Typically films are edited as they are shot and, until recently, without synchronized sound — shooting without sound allowing for easier simultaneous release in Cantonese and Mandarin. Subtitles are often cheaply added and mistranslations inadvertently humorous.”
There’s a delightful sprightliness coursing through movies made in this fashion, a lightness and a sense of possibility. You become acutely aware of seeing new things, fresh things, audacious things, and the experience is wonderfully refreshing. In his excellent book Planet Hong Kong: Popular Cinema and the Art of Entertainment, teacher David Bordwell says that
Hong Kong movies can be sentimental, joyous, rip-roaring, silly, bloody, and bizarre. Their audacity, their slickness, and their unabashed appeal to emotion have won them audiences throughout the world. “It is all too extravagant, too gratuitously wild,” a New York Times reviewer complained of an early kung-fu import; now the charge looks like a badge of honor.
He goes on to ask the question that is often on the mind of people who have discovered the unique joys of this cinema: “How did cheap movies made in a distant outpost of the British Empire achieve broad international appeal, while European filmmakers bemoan their inability to reach even their own national audiences? How did Hong Kong filmmakers manage to create artful movies within the framework of modern entertainment?”
John Woo’s own Golden Age lasted from 1986 until 1992, and included as highlights A Better Tomorrow parts I and II (1986 and 1987, respectively), The Killer (1989), Bullet in the Head (1990), Once a Thief (1991), and Hard Boiled (1992). A fun volume called Hong Kong Action Cinema by Bey Logan deftly describes Woo’s style as combining “the ballistic with the balletic.” Another book, Once Upon a Time In China by Jeff Yang, goes into more detail: “Bodies fly through the air, defying common sense and physics as they spin through a murderous hail of bullets; jaded cops bond with noble criminals, before they go out together in a blaze of glory; duels end in standoffs, with multiple guns pointed at multiple targets, each shooter waiting for the wrong move to be made.”
And, tellingly, he adds that, “No filmmaker has done more to shape the vocabulary of the modern action movie than John Woo, perhaps the greatest genre auteur of his generation (some would say the greatest ever).
The first movie in that group of modern classics, A Better Tomorrow, came seemingly out of nowhere to put John Woo on the map as an action director extraordinaire, and made an ex-TV soap-opera actor named Chow Yun-fat a Hong Kong superstar. Kids, toughs and Triad gangsters all over the island mimicked his clothes and mannerisms: a long duster, dark sunglasses, and a toothpick dangling from the mouth (a costume that would later be copied almost in toto for Keanu Reeves, Carrie-Ann Moss, and Laurence Fishburne in 1999’s The Matrix). A Better Tomorrow also heralded the advent of an all-new genre: an amalgamation of Westerns, kung-fu, gangster pictures, Chinese Opera, and classic film noir, eventually dubbed “Heroic Bloodshed” by the Hong Kong film fanzine Eastern Heroes.
A tidal wave of derivative films, many of them excellent in their own right, rolled out in the picture’s wake. The best of them matched Woo’s feat of conjuring up ancient notions of honor, duty, knighthood, and swordplay, for use in tales of cops and robbers doing battle in the neon-lit, concrete jungles of the modern world. “To me,” says Woo, “the gangster films are just like Chinese swordplay pictures. To me Chow Yun-fat holding a gun is just like [classic-era kung-fu actor] Wang Yu holding a sword.”
Many consider 1989’s The Killer to be John Woo’s (and actor Chow Yun-fat’s) masterpiece. It was the first Woo movie to gain international recognition, spreading like wildfire through the film schools, arthouses, and comic-book shops of America — anywhere young men congregated looking for the next cool thing. Author Jeff Yang recalls how, “Featuring for the first time Woo’s full arsenal of tropes and clichés — leaping two-gun attacks, tense Mexican standoffs, flocks of startled doves — on the American arthouse circuit it played to jam-packed crowds, who’d never seen anything like it in their lives.”
I can attest to that, as I distinctly remember first seeing The Killer at the Art Institute of Chicago circa 1992, dragged there by a friend panting “This you’ve gotta see.” As I passed the box office, I noted with amusement that the movie poster showed that the MPAA had given the picture an X rating for its unmitigated, if not egregiously gory, bullet-riddled violence. Unlike so many arthouse screenings I had attended, the auditorium was filled to bursting, and the predominantly male, college-aged crowd hummed with an electricity, a shared feeling that we were about to experience an Event.
To this day I can still hear the massive gasps and cheers that erupted throughout the picture. As certain scenes reached a crescendo, there was raucous, sustained applause of a kind that would have been more at home at the end of a powerful opera performance. It was more than knee-jerk admiration from a giddy audience — it was an expression of true gratitude. Soon after that titanically impressive screening, my friends and I headed to Chicago’s famous Chinatown district, scouring video stores until we found a place that sold widescreen laserdiscs, and purchasing copies of The Killer and other films at $120 a pop. There were no English subtitles, but we didn’t care — we were interested in the almost impossibly inventive camerawork and editing.
Little did we know, when sitting through the even more blistering and mind-altering Hard Boiled the next year, that we were in fact seeing the last great John Woo movie from his Hong Kong period, as well as the last to pair him up with Chow Yun-fat. When, in film school, our Chinese friends informed us that the movie’s original Cantonese title translated to Hot-Handed God of Cops, our expectations were high, and we were not disappointed. In the words of Asian movie scholar Bey Logan, Hard Boiled is a “mind-blowing cops’n’undercover cops saga. The film has all the best elements of pulp fiction, as well as the gunplay stylizations of the Woo-meister.”
Triads had become an enormous problem, with even the island’s movie stars so harassed and threatened that they staged a public protest against gangster infiltration in their industry. “The violence had gone too far in Hong Kong,” says John Woo of those dark days. “The gangsters were ruthless with their gun smuggling and brutality. The police had a hard time dealing with them because they did not have the strength or the firepower. I hated to see so many innocent people hurt. There was so much confusion. At the same time, Iraq invaded Kuwait. It made me feel so angry. There was so much injustice. So I wanted to make a new kind of hero with Chow Yun-fat, like Dirty Harry, who takes it into his own hands to fight evil.”
Whereas the director’s first efforts in the genre had focused more on the criminal element, by 1992 he saw a need to address the other side of the equation. “In Hard Boiled, both the lead characters are cops, so I am hoping this will encourage kids to become policemen!”
Hard Boiled cost four-million dollars to make in 1992, a paltry sum by Hollywood standards. But Woo put every cent of that budget up on the screen via an exhausting shooting schedule lasting an almost unheard of 123 days (by comparison, Woo’s first Hollywood picture, the 1993 Jean-Claude Van Damme actioner Hard Target, was filmed in only sixty-five days). The director himself describes the film as “Dirty Harry meets Die Hard.” and explains that “It’s called Hard Boiled because that was a tough kind of detective novel. I try for a similar style in this film.” A Better Tomorrow and The Killer were more lyrical and laden with the sort of tragic tone that often heralds “true art.” But Hard Boiled was more pure action, pure adrenaline, pure masculinity — in short, pure cinema.
Like The Killer before it, Hard Boiled‘s relentless body count turned off audience members and critics alike in Hong Kong, resulting in only lukewarm box-office (it was only the twelfth highest-grossing movie on the island for 1992). But in America, it was a different story entirely: appearing in the same arthouse and museum theaters that Woo’s previous release had, it sent action-movie fans completely into outer space, and became a surprise darling of the festival circuit. When, soon after, both Hard Boiled and The Killer were released on laserdisc in the US by the prestigious Criterion Collection, both titles rapidly sold out.
Next week in For Conservative Movie Lovers: John Woo’s journey from a slum-dweller bereft of hope into the most successful Asian movie director since Kurosawa.
FURTHER READING and VIEWING
There’s a surprising number of solid, useful books on Hong Kong cinema — the signal to noise ratio is much better than in many other areas of film study. Among the titles referenced for this article were:
City on Fire: Hong Kong Cinema by Lisa Odham Stokes and Michael Hoover.
Planet Hong Kong: Popular Cinema and the Art of Entertainment by David Bordwell.
Hong Kong Action Cinema by Bey Logan.
Once Upon a Time In China by Jeff Yang.
All are recommended reading for anyone looking to discover — or deepen your already significant knowledge of — Hong Kong cinema.
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