Rich and Famous & Tragic Hero

This week, two 1987 Hong Kong action thrillers for the price of one.

Firstly, a little explanation. These were shot back to back by Taylor Wong, but it was the sequel Tragic Hero which came out first. Why?

Well, John Woo’s A Better Tomorrow had recently established itself as a landmark in East Asian cinema. Not only did it break box-office records, but critics loved it too. It won best film at the 1987 Hong Kong Film Awards, while Chow Yun-Fat picked up the best actor gong. His trademark trench coat even set a local fashion trend – with Triads themselves reputedly embracing the craze

With the actor’s profile sky-high, producer Johnny Mak wanted to take full advantage of his star power and decided that as it was more action packed and Chow Yun-Fat was more prominent in the latter movie, Tragic Hero should be released first with Rich and Famous following on three months later.

This is a flawed but understandable choice, which also allowed time so Cantopop superstar Alan Tam of The Wynners could be incorporated into the movie, his addition being seen as another marketing boost.

I can’t see any advantage in anybody watching Tragic Hero first myself.

Rich and Famous is the more epic of the pair, aiming for the kind of historical sweep of The Godfather and Once Upon a Time in America. It starts as refugees are flooding out of mainland China to escape the murderous and totalitarian regime of Chairman Mao.

When one refugee dies in an overcrowded camp, his pal Kit feels dutybound to adopt his little boy Lam Ting-kwok (Andy Lau), who bonds speedily with new family, cousin Tang Wai-chu (Pauline Wong) and most particularly, brother Tang Kar-yung (Alex Man).

Taylor Wong then fast-forwards us to 1969 with the trio now young adults. Yung has developed a serious gambling problem. In an illegal gambling den, he alters his betting slip, forging the number of the winning greyhound in a race but the bookie spots his tampering and has Yung beaten up. Kwok attempts to help, but they’re hopelessly outnumbered.

‘The penalty for forging tickets us cutting off fingers,’ Yung is warned, when taken to see the man who runs the gambling operation on behalf of powerful crime boss Lee Ah-chai. Kwok pleads on his behalf, and Yung is given 10 days to pay it off his debt of almost $10,000 HK, fingers intact.

He devises a scheme to steal the money from a gang of drug traffickers led by Boss Chu Lo-tai (aka Old Chu) and this ends disastrously with Wai-chu being stabbed and Kwok held prisoner.

Luckily, Lee Ah-chai (Chow Yun-fat), has taken a shine to Wai-Chu, who now works as a bar hostess. She persuades him to intervene on their behalf. Chu does release Kwok but not before making him swallow boiling coffee and stubbing out a cigar in his mouth.

Kwok’s bravery impresses Chai, who enlists both brothers into his gang, though he turns down the chance to offer their wannabe gangster pal Mak Ying-hung (Alan Tam) a job with him after he fails to collect a debt.

By 1973, both Kwok and Yung have risen through the ranks with Chai clearly rating Kwok higher than his brother, who employs an obsequious manner whenever he’s together with his boss. Chai, of course, sees through this ploy to gain favour. Yung also talks when he shouldn’t, which Chai finds disrespectful.

Their growing antipathy is exacerbated when Yung finds himself falling in love with Lau Po-yee (Carina Lau), a nurse who looks after Chai’s friend Fan. Like Chai, she sees through Yung’s fake facade. ‘I know what kind of person he really is,’ she tells her cousin Ying-hung. ‘Hiding his ruthlessness behind that smiley face.’

She prefers Chai, who is smitten by her too.

One outburst during a meeting of Triads earns Yung a vicious putdown and demotion by Chai. This sets in motion, a plan that will make sure that the wedding of Chai and Po-yee in a big church in Happy Valley (no, not the one in West Yorkshire where Sarah Lancashire pounded a beat) will always be remembered for all the wrong reasons.

Tragic Hero picks up in the 1980s, with Kwok having given up his career in crime, relocating to Malacca in Malaysia where he has married and adopted the number of children that would drive Keir Starmer apoplectic – I’d guess around ten too many for the Labour leader’s liking.

Chai’s aim now is to become a legitimate businessman but this will be no easy task with Yung utterly determined to kill him.

Not surprisingly Chow Yun-fat is great as Chai and if I had to make a list of the ten best actors of my lifetime, it would be hard not to find a place for the man. Pauline Wong deserves plaudits too for her portrayal as Wai-chu, who clearly loves Chai, but makes do with helping him whenever possible in her role as housekeeper and confidant.

Danny Lee makes a ‘special appearance’ as a maverick cop and it’s a pity he wasn’t given a more substantial role, as in his limited scenes with Chow Yun-fat, the pair display a great chemistry – they did get a lot of practice together around this time and would soon go on to star together in one of Hong Kong’s biggest box-office hits of the era, John Woo’s The Killer.

Many might disagree, but I reckon Alex Man puts in the finest performance here as the increasingly unstable psychopath Yung, who by the end of Tragic Hero has proven himself one of the big screen’s most vindictive ever villains.

It’s likely best not to approach either film hoping to witness the level of cinematic genius that Francis Ford Coppola achieved with his Godfather saga, but this epic story of brotherhood, backstabbing and bullets, is – despite an occasional touch of melodrama – one of the best examples of Hong Kong’s ‘heroic bloodshed’ genre with some highly memorable characters and stunning action sequences.

The movies are released today on the Eureka Classics imprint. For more information, click here.

Golgo 13

This week, Junya Satō’s 1973 action classic based on the cult manga.

I’m no expert on this kind of thing, but discovered yesterday that Takao Saitō’s Golgo 13 is the world’s longest running manga series. Incredibly, it’s been in circulation since the tail end of the ’60s and is still proving popular today, despite its creator’s death in 2019. Inevitably, as its success spread in the 1970s, the major Tokyo film studios began considering adapting one of the Saitō’s tales for the big screen, a common enough practice with Lady Snowblood and Lone Wolf and Cub: Sword of Vengeance being two other manga inspired movies that also appeared around this time.

Golgo 13 begins in Tehran, where a man in a Saturday Night Fever suit is ferociously beaten by a gang of thugs. He’s then tortured as the henchmen interrogate him, desperate to know who he works for. He’s killed before he can reveal the answer to that one.

We then cut to a plane landing in Beirut. One of its passengers is known as Duke Togo or Golgo 13, the latter alias given to him in a West German prison, a reference to Judas Iscariot, whose betrayal sent Jesus Christ to his crucifixion at Golgotha, while the 13 derives from that number’s reputation for bringing bad luck. I guess he wasn’t the most popular inmate in that particular penitentiary.

Togo/Golgo is a rude man with no time for formalities and no observable sense of humour. He only ever speaks when it’s strictly necessary. As characters go, he isn’t a million miles away from Clint Eastwood’s Man with No Name, but there’s also a little Sean Connery era Bond in Togo’s DNA.

Rather than a bounty hunter or spy, though, he’s an assassin, one of the few facts we ever learn about him. Not being saddled with any real backstory, though, only adds to his air of mystique. The worldwide intelligence community can’t even pin down his true identity but a shady organisation somehow manage to track him down. This is to offer him the chance to carry out the killing of another mysterious figure, Max Boa (Ahmad Ghadakchian). Supposedly a shipping agent, Boa is believed to be an international smuggler of weapons and drugs. And wherever he operates, beautiful young woman regularly disappear. Richard Flanagan (Nosratollah Karimi), the leader of the organisation, believes that one of these presumably kidnapped females is his daughter.

Togo’s price for the hit is half a million American dollars to be deposited in his Swiss bank account. The fee is agreed.

Ken Takakura, who rose to fame in his home country during the 1960s cycle of classical yakuza movies, plays Togo, a highly appropriate choice since the manga character’s appearance was, at least to some extent, based on the actor. An undisputed legend in Japan, cinema fans outside Asia might know him from Sydney Pollack’s The Yakuza, or Ridley Scott’s Black Rain from 1989.

He turns in a powerhouse performance here, oozing charisma even though his character is so unpleasant. Not only is he rude, but he lacks any sense of morality too. He’d likely agree to shoot his granny between the eyes if the price was right.

Takao Saitō set two conditions for Tokyo’s Toei Studios before granting permission for them to adapt his work. Togo had to be played by Ken Takakura, and the film must be shot abroad, hence the entire movie was filmed in the Middle East, mainly in Tehran but also taking in the visually stunning ruins of Persepolis.

In these days before the overthrow of the Shah by the theocratic dictatorship of Ayatollah Khomeini, Iran looks very different to what we see from news clips today. Many men have adopted Western 1970s fashions such as big ties, big lapels and even bigger flares, while most of the women have embraced styles such as fur jackets and bright dresses. A couple are shown smoking and drinking alcohol and we even see one belly dancing on the stage of a club.

I should mention that the Iranian characters curiously all speak Japanese even among themselves, while many have Western sounding names. In addition to Nosratollah Karimi in the role of Flanagan, Pouri Baneai, for example, plays Catherine Morton, who is arranged to act as Togo’s escort during his stay in Iran. This, incidentally, must be the only ever example of a Japanese/Iranian cinematic co-production.

It has been difficult to see Golgo 13 outside of Japan for many years, although it did make a rare appearance at the 70th Edinburgh International Film Festival. It’s released today on the Eureka Classics range in a new 2K restoration. This is its UK debut on home video and I’m certainly glad to have finally caught up with it, fifty years after it was made.

Tremendously entertaining throughout, the movie features an array of colourful villains, including Max Boa with his green parrot almost permanently perched on his shoulder and a hitman who hides his pistol in his prosthetic leg. There are some great set pieces too. The gunfight in the ruins is very spaghetti western (and some of the soundtrack definitely owes a debt to Ennio Morricone’s work for Sergio Leone too). The pace is perfect, the cinematography spectacular and there’s some interesting plot twists such as one police inspector’s wife joining the list of local abductees. A fate which befalls Catherine too.

Pouri Baneai is highly compelling in this role, and it’s a shame she didn’t enjoy a much longer time in acting. Not too surprisingly, after the revolution, she was summoned to Evin Prison, a jail synonymous with human rights abuses, and questioned. Although not incarcerated, her career in films ended abruptly as the Ayatollah waged war on the arts in Iran.

I doubt I’ll be seeking out the manga series – though I wouldn’t completely rule it out – but I’m definitely keen now to see the 1977 sequel Golgo 13: Assignment Kowloon, where Ken Takakura is replaced by another celebrated Japanese actor, Sonny Chiba. Hopefully, this will receive a Blu-ray release soon too.

Extras on Golgo 13 include a new audio commentary by Mike Leeder and Arne Venema, a pair who are always informal and funny but also informative. The first print run of 2000 copies will feature a limited edition O-card slipcase and collector’s booklet.

For more details, click here.

Silvania & Vivienne Eastwood (Another Shoegaze Saturday)

In a recent post, I mentioned that one music rule is that shoegaze is best listened to when the sun is shining. Since then, the weather where I live has largely consisted of thundery showers and gusty winds but Silvania’s Un Bosque En La Memoria (A Forest In Memory) still sounds pretty good to me even when accompanied by 40 miles per hour winds roaring down my chimney and through my ancient gas fireplace.

From their 1994 album En cielo de Océano, here is the utterly exquisite Un Bosque En La Memoria:

I know little about Silvania, bar they consisted of a pair of Peruvians, Mario and Cocó, who relocated to Valencia in the early 1990s and signed to Spanish based independent Elefant Records. Fans of the Cocteaus and Eno, according to their biography on Elefant, they collaborated with Spanish visual artists at prestigious events such as the Venice Biennale and put music to Maya Deren´s short film Meshes in the Afternoon, the results of which were later released by the Cosmos label on CD. Apparently, they also went on to spearhead Spanish techno, before Cocó sadly died in Madrid in 2008.

I will be investigating further.

Type the name Vivienne Eastwood into your search engine of choice, and you might be asked: ‘Did you mean Vivienne Westwood?’

No, I did not.

My knowledge of Vivienne Eastwood is also far from encyclopaedic. To be fair, I only discovered them earlier this afternoon. The band, who may or may not still be active, were based in Brooklyn. And I can tell you at least something else about them. On the evidence of this track, they are/were heavily influenced by My Bloody Valentine.

This is the official video for Snooze directed by Jenny Wong:

For more on Vivienne Eastwood, click here for Bandcamp or here for Facebook.