| Collector's Corner June 2006
 Die xue
shuang xiong (aka The Killer)
- Starring: Chow Yun Fat, Danny Lee Sau Yin,
Paul Chu Kong, Kenneth Tsang Kong, Sally Yeh Sin Man, Shing Fui On, Tommy Wong Kwong
Leung, Parkman Wong Pak Man
- Directed by: John Woo
- Theatrical release: 1989
- DVD release: Many
- Video: Widescreen
- Sound: Dolby Digital 2.0
- Released by: Fox Lorber (long out of
print), Long Shong International (see article for availability)
I just wanted to make it a little more romantic, a
little more stylish, just like a European film in the ’60s. In some ways, I just feel
like I’m making my dream.
-- John Woo
Honor, loyalty, and gallantry. Since fighting men have been
celebrated in fiction, artists have looked for ways to embody these noble characteristics
in their creations. During wartime, there is the ease of having a people united in a
cause; fighting men become heroes. Honor drives them to courage, loyalty creates
solidarity, and gallantry bestows a veneer of gentlemanliness. During peace, a writer
wanting to cover these traits has to look for little wars. We end up with police dramas of
cops fighting crime, Rocky, or science-fiction/fantasy like Star Wars.
Sometimes we’re so desperate for a hero we’ll even take a guy who wants to
dance, as in Footloose.
In The Killer, writer-director John Woo
fashioned a pair of heroes who hew to the dark side. One, Ah Jong (Chow Yun Fat), is a
murderer for hire who focuses on killing bad guys. The other, Inspector Li Ying (Danny Lee
Sau Yin), is a policeman who’s more vigilante than cop. Each sees himself as
answering to a higher power, brilliantly symbolized by the Catholic church they find
themselves in as they ruminate on the fate of their class. Their war is against evil, no
matter on which side of the law it lives. If this sounds like heady stuff, it is. Not that
Woo’s famous bullet ballets don’t show up several times here, but more than any
other of his films, The Killer is about philosophy and affection.
The story provides only the barest framework on which Woo
hangs his ponderings. Ah Jong goes to a nightclub, where he kills an underworld thug. In
the process, the club’s beautiful young singer, Jennie (Sally Yeh Sin Man), is caught
in a crossfire. Inspector Li Yeng is assigned to Jennie’s case, but she can’t
visually identify the killer because her injuries have left her blind. Six months later,
she meets a young man who saves her from an attack by street thugs and they become
friends. She doesn’t realize that her rescuer is Ah Jong, who, driven by guilt, is
now trying to help her. He has retired from the assassination business, but loyalty to an
old friend, Sydney (Paul Chu Kong), drags him in one more time -- as does the promise of
enough money to pay for Jennie’s cornea transplants.
What was to be Ah Jong’s final hit job, however, goes
awry when the gangster who paid for the hit tries to have Ah Jong killed. As Ah Jong tries
to escape, a child is caught in the crossfire, but Ah Jong refuses to have another
innocent life on his hands. He scoops up the child and flees to a hospital, where he can
ensure the child’s safety. Inspector Li Yeng, now also on Ah Jong’s trail,
can’t figure out why the killer would risk his life to save a child. At this point,
the delicate interplay between Ah Jong, Li Yeng, Jennie, Sydney, and the underworld
figures out for Ah Jong’s life explodes into a conflict that forces everyone to
examine their ideals, their allegiances, and to make some fateful choices.
IMDb.com
translates The Killer’s Cantonese title, Die xue shuang xiong, as The
Bloodshed of Two Brothers. My best shot comes out as The Study of the Fall of Two
Brothers. In either case, the theme of two brothers is vital and the scenes, beginning
after Ah Jong takes the child to the hospital, have a stately grandeur seldom seen in cop
movies. Beginning 34:30 into the film, Chow Yun Fat and Danny Lee Sau Yin have 60 seconds
of "dialogue" performed almost solely with their eyes -- a bravura piece of
acting. Then there is the iconic moment at the 51:50 point, imitated a thousand times
since, in which they finally meet face to face, pistols inches from each others’
eyes. Their relationship develops until their fight with the mob, when they end up
protecting Jennie and symbolically protecting the church and all they believe to be
sacred. Yun Fat and Sau Yin are transcendent as the film charts the development of these
two samurai stuck in a world of charlatans.
John Woo spent most of his youth either in church or at the
movies, trying to isolate himself from the world outside. He learned his lessons well,
spending time with the great films of Sergio Leone, Akira Kurosawa, and Sam Peckinpah.
Most of all, he was influenced by the two men to whom he dedicated The Killer:
Jean-Pierre Melville and Martin Scorsese. These directors’ fingerprints are all over The
Killer. Look at Scorsese’s Taxi Driver and Mean Streets for their
sense of foreboding and almost superhuman bouts of violence -- or Melville’s Le
Samouraļ for Alain Delon’s stylishly cool hitman: death wearing Pierre Cardin.
The slow-motion, high-octane violence of Peckinpah’s The Wild Bunch shows up,
as do the meditations on respect from Leone’s Once Upon a Time in the West.
There’s also a touch of the cool, Armani-ish look Michael Mann was already creating
in Thief and Manhunter.
But the combination of these was all Woo’s, and the
influence of The Killer has been extraordinary. For years, nearly every cop show
included a two-pistol standoff derived from The Killer. Most of what was visually
interesting in the Matrix films stemmed from Woo. The Transporter, Leon,
Ronin, Ghost Dog: The Way of the Samurai -- the list could go on. Woo’s
influence has been enormous.
For all this, you’d think the film would have been
better served on DVD. There are three DVD editions of the best-known, 107-minute version
of The Killer, with as good picture and sound as we’ll probably ever
get, given the state of the film’s negative. All three versions are letterboxed, not
anamorphic, and all are now out of print. The Criterion Collection edition draws the big
bucks, but the Fox Lorber version, bundled with another masterpiece by Woo and Yun Fat, Hard
Boiled, is usually available used for a reasonable price and looks just as
good. The best version from Asia was from Universe, a gorgeous transfer worth searching
out.
 Several other versions of The Killer
are available on my two favorite websites dedicated to Hong Kong films, www.hkflix.com and www.edaymovies.com. I’m partial
to the 124-minute Long Shong International version. Despite a less-than-optimal picture
that borders on the murky, this is the only region-free version of John Woo’s
original edit. The longer playing time means more rumination, and that’s what makes The
Killer so great. The 17 extra minutes are also available on a much-better-looking disc
from Hong Kong Legends (HKL), but only as an extra chapter; they’re not incorporated
into the film itself. It seems the HKL producers felt that the available masters of the
extra footage weren’t up to their standards, so they kept them separate. Plus, you
need a Region 2 player and a display that will handle PAL to be able to use this DVD. The
main benefit of owning the HKL version is that it is the first to accurately translate the
dialogue. There are many mutually unintelligible dialects of spoken Chinese, and DVD
translations can go though so many iterations that the final English version may bear
little resemblance to the original script. HKL was the first company to go back to the
original soundtrack to create the English translations.
My commitment to The Killer can be measured by the
fact that I spent $125 on the Criterion Collection laserdisc in 1995. I currently own the
Long Shong International version for its completeness, and the Fox Lorber for Woo’s
commentary track, its first-rate picture, and the fact that I was able to pick up two of
Woo’s best in one box.
Once you see The Killer, I think you’ll
understand the devotion it has engendered among its many fans. The fighting may draw the
action fanatics, but it is the musings and meditations on honor and loyalty and trying to
do the right thing in a wrong world that make this film a classic. Back in the 1980s,
before Hollywood declawed him, John Woo had great expectations, incredible gifts, a
student’s love of film history, and producers who let him alone. He made a string of
extraordinary films in Hong Kong, all of which are worth searching out. I’m hoping
he’ll regain his sense of purpose and make a Hollywood film as good as his Hong Kong
output. In the meantime, he can rest assured that he’ll go down in history as the man
who made The Killer.
...Wes Marshall
wesm@hometheatersound.com |
