[image=left]http://www.alternativenation.net/gallery/files/3/2/1/8/cityonfirewee.jpg[/image]A million spotty oiks who make a lot of use of slow motion replay would have you believe that John Woo is the greatest action director that Hong Kong ever produced. Whilst they may be partly right—
Bullet In The Head is one of the finest films period—other film makers such as Kirk Wong and Ringo Lam have made violent, dramatic movies that have far more to say than Woo’s flashy but ultimately emotionally empty pictures such as 1992’s
Hardboiled. Kirk Wong is a story for another day; this piece is focused on Ringo Lam, in particular his 1986 cops and robbers saga
City On Fire, a movie that has probably not been seen by many but has certainly influenced other successful films like
Reservoir Dogs (which itself also lifted bits from
The Killing, but that is beside the point).
The development of
City On Fire lies in Ringo Lam’s need to break from one genre into another. Following a successful run of comedies for Century City (including the fourth entry in the awful
Hong Kong Aces Go Places series), Ringo Lam was finally given the go ahead to make a picture he had wanted to create since reading a newspaper article. The story described a robbery in Tsimshatsui, Kowloon where a jewellery robbery was foiled by the police almost the second the robbers left the store—they even had cameras standing by to capture the arrest. This gave Ringo Lam the impression that there had to have been an inside man for the police within the gang. Building on this idea in 1986 he started work on
City On Fire with Chow Yun Fat in the role of the policeman and Danny Lee as the head robber.
In the hands of a lesser storyteller the film could have been clear cut, black and white tale of cop versus robber, but in Ringo Lam’s film, as in them all, there’s only a variety of shades of grey. Chow Yun Fat’s policeman is hardly a by-the-books copper: he is shown as a bit of an arsehole, especially in terms of the woman he will never get to marry, and he has been underground so long in his guise as a gun runner that there’s almost no one that knows he actually still carries a badge. So as he investigates Danny Lee’s gang, under the pretence of selling them weapons, Chow himself becomes a target of the police until he ends up a member of the gang.
Rather than a flashy Peckinpah take on
Godfather like the
A Better Tomorrow series,
City On Fire follows the rough and ready style of Johnny Mak’s 1984 film
Long Arm Of The Law in that it combines a fly on the wall docudrama tone with an undercurrent of noir. The best noir leaves you knowing the characters are careening headlong into chaos and Ringo Lam’s
City On Fire does just that. The lonely saxophone soundtrack sounds off as the films protagonists make hard decisions and live a hard violent life.
There are no choreographed fight scenes in
City On Fire—this is not typical Hong Kong Legends fare—the action is instead chaotic and brutal, with heists and chases that are among the greatest Hong Kong cinema has to offer.
The Hong Kong legends DVD release includes the usual extras and is released on the 25th of April. Rated 18.
http://www.hongkonglegends.co.uk/ind...=418&art_id=15
