Kanto Street Peddlers: Clan Violent Loyalty (1970)

After having spent only a couple of years behind bars for his role in the climax of the first movie, Bunta Sugawara now roams Japan in this second movie of the street peddling focussed ninkyo eiga series to keep out of Tokyo trouble.

As will surprise nobody who ever watched a ninkyo eiga or two, Bunta soon falls in with group of deeply honourable street peddling yakuza who control an important festival site, but are beleaguered by the intrigues and occasional casual violence of a gang of proper baddy yakuza who want to get at that turf and its riches by any means necessary.

This sequel was again directed by Norifumi Suzuki, who spent a lot of his time in the ninkyo realm before he found his true calling in pinky violence and dubious comedy.

Here we find the director pulling his preferred comedy shenanigans back for much of the film beyond a couple of comical interludes. Instead he concentrates on melodrama and bad yakuza nastiness (even in the less extreme ninkyo eiga variant of the yakuza movie, things could get a bit unpleasant at this point in time, as long as only the villains were doing the really bad stuff). Despite some inelegant shuffling out of and into the movie of characters – some actors probably shot another movie for Toei in parallel, or ten – the film is rather more focussed than its predecessor. This provides Suzuki with opportunity to put more effort into creating more complex character relations and go deeper into the politics of the street peddler world. All this is then used to make the melodrama more intense once the shit hits the fan, until everything culminates in the expected beautiful bloodbath.

That climax isn’t quite as wonderfully done as the one in the first Kanto Street Peddlers, though Suzuki still puts a lot of effort into creating an energetic fight that doesn’t use the standard by the book camera set-ups or blocking of such scenes. In general, Suzuki appears very interested in using all kinds of tricks to make the genre standards Seiko Shimura’s script goes through visually memorable and through this emotionally involving. This works rather well for the movie, and also demonstrates a side of the directors that’s easy to overlook when he’s throwing naked female wrestlers and pratfalls at the camera: he’s genuinely good at the quiet emotional moments, and knows how to provide the Toei stable of thespians with openings to really strut their stuff. As it usually goes when a director does this, they repay him with giving a little extra.

An Ode to Yakuza (1970)

aka Yakuza Masterpiece

aka The Big Pay-Off

Original title: Yakuza zesshô

Mid-level yakuza Minoru (Shintaro Katsu) hasn’t ever met a problem he didn’t solve with violence. Even though this does lead to a degree of respect among his thuggish brothers, he is not a man equipped for much of a visible emotional range between rage and the kind of nastiness you’d expect this kind of man to show towards, say, women like his girlfriend Kanae (Kiwako Taichi).

The only exception here is Minoru’s eighteen years old half-sister Akane (Naoko Otani), whom he has taken care of since she was a little girl. To Akane, he’s about as sweet and kind as he can be, or at least he believes he is. To the outside observer he’s controlling and overbearing, trying to run his sister’s life even though she’s very well equipped to have more than just a little say in her own life story. In truth, Akane can’t help but notice an undertone of more than just brotherly affection from him, something, to be fair to the guy, Minoru can’t even quite admit to himself. Obviously, he is driving away every man interested in Akane is merely because he is being protective, right?

When the film starts, Akane has just about had enough of the whole thing, and decides the best way to get Minoru off her case is to seduce one of her teachers, so Minoru will have to stop seeing her as a pure, little girl.

Which isn’t even the emotional breaking point of Yasuzo Masumura’s pretty incredible melodrama, but a good enough point to understand where the director is going with his film.

Seen from a certain perspective, the tiny yakuza sub-plot and the film’s title(s) can seem stitched on to an intense, somewhat sleazy melodrama, but really, is there a better example for a kind of traditional patriarchal brutishness that treats excluding (at best), using, and mistreating women as a matter of principle than the yakuza?

And isn’t is exactly this sort of social machinery that drives the – most often at least quietly feminist – genre of the melodrama? So this isn’t so much a case of Masumura cheating with labels as him looking at the yakuza world from an angle even critical traditional yakuza movies tend to avoid.

This is, social aspects aside, of course also a film about people who drive each other to desperation out of ideas about love and identity that can’t come together, love – and Minoru and Akane do indeed love one another in their ways – that can only express itself destructively, and acts of escape that only make everyone’s situation that much worse.

All of this is driven by Masumura’s subtly heated direction that seems to trap his characters in the abyss of their own feelings, but also by two fantastic central performances. Katsu – one of the all-time greats in Japanese genre cinema not just because of the Zatoichi films – manages to make Minoru brutal, ugly, and genuinely disgusting, but also as sad and lost as any man you’d care to imagine, controlled by pressures internal and external he genuinely can neither grasp nor understand; whereas the very young Otani shows Akane’s intelligence and courage, her awakening understanding of love and her own sexuality as well as the way her brother’s brokenness has already begun to cause cracks in herself as a complex web of emotions she desperately needs to escape.

So, Yakuza Masterpiece is the proper title for this, even though the deeply ironic An Ode to Yakuza is probably the better one.

Night Falls (1952)

Original title: La noche avanza

Jai-alai (google that one, kids) player Marcos (Pedro Armendáriz) is quite the piece of work. Convinced by his past and present successes to be the same kind of Nietzschean superman as his later Brazilian brother in spirit Coffin Joe, he lords his superiority about everyone he encounters in life, pushing men in the shittiest macho ways he can come up with (and he has the imagination to go with it), and seducing women left and right, to then mistreat them to his heart’s content.

He’s getting away with it, too, or rather, he has been getting away with it until he impregnates good bourgeois daughter Sara (Anita Blanch) and drops her in the most underhanded way possible. Turns out he isn’t quite as great as he thinks he is, and even his impressive talent for weaselling out of trouble will not keep him away from what’s coming for him forever.

I tend to be somewhat sceptical about movies whose main goal appears to be showing horrible people being horrible, and then detailing their eventual karmic (or otherwise) punishment, mostly because spending time with assholes isn’t typically my idea of a good time, and I only have a limited degree of sadism inside me to really enjoy watching cruel but just punishments.

However, Roberto Gavaldón’s highly melodramatic noir is a clear exception to that rule. Armendáriz is delightfully hissable a villain, so smug, so full of the kind of shitty pseudo-philosophy you’ll find in today’s manosphere, it does indeed become a joy to witness his eventual fall. Gavaldón never attempts to make the man likeable or give him even the tiniest redeeming quality (unless you believe “is good at sports” to be one, but the director clearly doesn’t). Marcos is simply the living embodiment of what’s worst in all of us, or at least us men, using and abusing his position, the perks his gender provides him with, and other people’s inability to believe anybody could be a scumbag of quite his dimensions.

Even once Marcos gets in trouble, the suspense here isn’t built on seeing him finding increasingly desperate methods to get away, but in the hopes for witnessing his eventual punishment. Though, the film even doesn’t leave him in peace even once he’s dead: the final scene shows a placard with Marcos’s name blown into the dirt on a streetcorner, a dog urinating on it (!), and a garbage collector carrying the whole mess off.

Gavaldón shoots all this in the all the black and white colours of the true noir, where heightened intensity is the norm, and suspense scenes happen to everyone.

Pandora and the Flying Dutchman (1951)

A Spanish coastal town that harbours quite a number of British expats, between the wars. The local lush living is dominated by beautiful Pandora Reynolds (Ava Gardner). Every man wants to destroy himself for her, every woman hates her (secretly or loudly), yet Pandora is mostly bored and disenchanted. Even when she convinces a race car driver to push his self-built vehicle into the ocean to prove his love, or gets her very own love suicide going, this only provides her with some flickering excitement for a minute or two. She’s not only lacking in human compassion but also all deeper human connection.

Things change when Hendrick van der Zee (James Mason) arrives om town on his yacht, and a mythic pull develops between these two. The old tale of the Flying Dutchman might have more truth to it than most people would expect.

Pandora and the Flying Dutchman’s director Albert Lewin was a very successful Hollywood producer, first for MGM, then for Paramount. From time to time, he directed a movie himself. These aren’t the films of a dabbler, but of a director and scriptwriter very consciously aiming for art in a deeply earnest and just as deeply bourgeois manner that should make them pretty much unwatchable in their serious, classics-quoting way. Yet somehow, this member of the educated classes showing off his education didn’t just strain for art but actually manage to reach it, perhaps in spite of himself.

Case in point, and Lewin’s best movie as far as I know, is this incredibly ambitious concoction of bohemian melodrama, ancient Greek myth and somewhat more modern European legend. Often, Pandora feels like Powell and Pressburger – this is nominally a British film - at their most melodramatic seen through the lens of Hollywood with arthouse aspirations.

There’s a sensually languid quality to the film’s look and feel that stands in stark – and pretty magical – contrast to its literary and (sometimes too) knowing dialogue, its allusions to culture and cultural detritus, and its palpable love for all manner of cultural production – be it music, Shakespeare, the poetry of Omar Khayyam or Ava Gardner’s face (though the last might be the point where culture and languidness meet). The film’s straining for the mythical qualities of Pandora (very much an embodiment of the old hat of the destructive force of female sexuality that makes quite a bit of European bourgeois culture rather awkward) and the Flying Dutchman is often a visible and palpable effort but it is that uncommon kind of strain that eventually reaches and envelops (is enveloped by?) what it wants to touch, until the overload of allusion and emotion becomes magical and hypnotic.

Part of this magic most certainly lies in Jack Cardiff’s lush photography and Lewin’s fearless – of ridicule, of too much emotion, of the wrong emotion, of overload – direction, but there’s also the brilliance of the performances that hit the unreal notes the material needs again and again, and the willingness of Lewin’s script to go to places scripts (certainly not one written by big shot Hollywood producers) in 1951 simply didn’t go – neither in theme, nor in eroticism, nor in frank honesty about the harshness of mythic love.

Elements here leave me uncomfortable: the film, like its male characters, seems unable to admit to the existence of a kind of love that isn’t based on destruction, death and sacrifice; Pandora’s commitment to being the belle dame sans merci is disquieting, particularly in a film that so clearly wants us to find her tragic. Yet, like with all capital-A art Lewin’s film is in dialogue with, feeling uncomfortable with it isn’t an argument against it.

Presence (2024)

A rich – sorry, upper middleclass to the Americans in the room – family moves into a new house they’ve acquired somewhat cheaply, which has never been a good sign in any movie.

While everyone’s playing out a family melodrama – Mom (Lucy Liu) is overprotective and clearly prefers her dumb-ass asshole son (Eddy Maday) to her daughter (Callina Liang) who is struggling with the death of her best friend, Dad (Chris Sullivan) can’t cope with this shit – some curious things begin to happen, as if the house were haunted by some unseen presence. Which indeed it is, for the whole film is shot from subjective perspective of this invisible thing.

Eventually, things climax in a ridiculously contrived finale.

I’m not the greatest admirer of Steven Soderbergh at the best of times, but Presence is at least a helpful reminder of how difficult formal experiments are: of course you can shoot your movie completely from the perspective of an invisible presence that haunts the characters’ new home, as Soderbergh does here with expected technical accomplishment.

But once you do, if you want to make a movie instead of a formal experiment to be studied in film schools and admired by a certain kind of critic, you also have to answer the question why you’ve made this formal decision. That, Soderbergh doesn’t do at all – the film never suggests why this perspective is the best choice to tell this specific story, or that taking a look at these specific characters and their lives is more than an afterthought to solving difficult technical and logistical problems, with a bit of extremely sloppy and unimaginative “escalation” tacked onto its ending.

As a matter of fact, there isn’t very much to the story at all. David Koepp’s script feels like an attempt to make some Bergmanesque family melodrama, but lacks the psychological insight as well as the emotional draw to pull this off. In the end, it never even asks what should be a central question to the set-up: why should the audience care about these neurotic people and their rich-people problems at all? They are neither interesting nor show any depth of personality, so what is their point or that of the movie they are in, apart from showing off Soderbergh’s technical abilities. Which is a rather boring and soulless reason to make a film, to my eyes.

Three Films Make A Post: Turn the darkness into light

The Secret of Kells (2009): I dare say there’s not exactly a load of animation out there that is highly influenced by the art of mediaeval illuminated manuscripts. It doesn’t fit too many narratives, I assume. Yet where would this be more appropriate than in a tale about a mediaeval illuminated manuscript?

Directors Tomm Moore and Nora Twomey made some interesting choices in other regards, as well, often slipping into the – to the modern eye strange – mindsets of their protagonists, while appearing to make a film that’s philosophically at once pagan, Christian and modern humanist. Which most of the time makes for a narrative full of surprising details, even when it hits a lot of the tired old Hero’s Journey beats. It’s also so damn beautiful I probably wouldn’t even criticize it (much), if it were only the Hero’s Journey stuff.

The Flowers of Evil aka Aku no hana (2019): This adaptation of a much loved manga and anime feels nothing at all like what you’d expect from a Noboru Iguchi film. If that’s a good thing or a bad one depends on one’s tolerance for melodramatic, pseudo-intellectual teenage bullshit with a wee bit of sexual deviance included taking the place of absurdist gore as an expression of all possible human feelings.

Mine isn’t terribly high, so I very quickly lost patience with these particular characters, their small town malaise and their inability to read Baudelaire without drenching their books in dramatic rainfalls; your disgust with misuse of books may vary.

Nightmare aka Nattmara (1965): Apparently, not only Jimmy Sangster over in the UK found himself thinking about what to do with the Hitchcock model of what we’d now call the domestic thriller. Arne Mattsson over in Sweden certainly thought along the same lines as Sangster with this tale of gaslighting. The resulting film is at times beautiful and moody, painfully obvious, crude and elegant, with a curious idea of how to time plot revelations running into moments of deep intensity.

Thus, the whole thing feels rather disjointed, though it is never without something interesting happening on screen.

Ghost With Hole (1981)

Original title: Sundelbolong/Sundel Bolong

Indonesia in the early 80s. Former prostitute Alisa (Suzzanna) has found love with ship’s captain Hendarto (Barry Prima) – apparently his only name. But just after they have gotten married, Alisa’s luck changes for the worst. On the day of their marriage, Hendarto is commanded to go on a voyage that’ll keep him away from home for nine months without any possibility of seeing or hearing from Alisa in that time apart from the occasional letter. I’d suspect Hendarto is Indonesian for Kirk, but we get to see his perfectly normal looking ship, so I have no idea what’s going on there.

Alisa is a bit bored and sad alone at home, but her job search meant to alleviate that only leads to an even nastier development. Her former madam Mami (Ruth Pelupessi) teams up with a sleazy fashion shop owner (Rudy Salam) to get Alisa back into the prostitution biz. When that doesn’t work, Rudy and some henchmen rape Alisa. Even though this is an even more difficult thing in Indonesia at this time and place than it would be today, Alisa goes through the horrors of a rape trial. Before that can end as badly for her as you would suspect, she realizes she is pregnant; attempts to get an abortion end with a judgmental preachy physician (who also informs us that miscarriages are the main cause of disability in children) and visions of disfigured children floating in the air around Alisa.

On her very last rope, Alisa tries to abort the foetus herself, and dies in the process. Because this woman clearly can’t catch even the tiniest break, and she died very angry and bitter indeed, she very quickly returns as a ghost, a so-called sundel bolong, a woman with no feet (unless she wishes to be seen otherwise) and a rotting hole in her back. In a somewhat more socially acceptable looking form, she spends half of her nights romancing the now finally returned Hendarto while, in an early Daredevil move Stan Lee would be proud of, pretending to be her own, actually dead, twin sister Shinta.

Looking rather more frightening, the other half of the night is time for taking vengeance on the rapists and human monsters responsible for her sad fate. Well, and for some comic relief when she terrorizes some night workers for reasons.

The villains are not going to take this lying down, so there are attacks on Hendarto that provide Prima with the opportunity to show off some of his screen fighting skills, and even an evil exorcist shooting a laser finger.

Ghost with Hole is one of the many cooperations between Indonesian horror maestro Sisworo Gautama Putra and the country’s great horror star Suzzanna. The film does a fine job when it comes to shifting the folk tales it uses as a basis into contemporary Indonesia. As in most of the director’s films I have seen, Indonesia becomes a kind of liminal place, where the very modern and the very traditional, as well as very Western and very – to my very Western eyes – traditionally Muslim ways of looking at the world and being in her collide. This liminality is not po-faced and intellectualised, thank the gods, but rather a side effect of what at its core is very traditional exploitation filmmaking of the kind where certain universal tropes – the rape revenge, the opportunity to show off as much female nudity as the censor allows, the love for crude and imaginative violence and so on – are seen through a more individual and local lens. This is a movie made mostly for the local Indonesian market but of course influenced by everything from the rest of the world that made its way there, leading to that joyful mix of the very universal and the very specific I love so dearly in a movie. As it should be.

The film’s early stages are somewhat heavy going. The melodrama is absolutely necessary for the ghost story to work, but tastes of the time and place do lead for this part of the film to drag on a little long, with ever more troubles and horrors ladled onto Alisa’s plate until it becomes a bit exhausting to watch; it’s also not exactly pleasant, but then, it’s not supposed to be.

I find it rather interesting how easy it is to read the whole movie, like many melodramas, as a feminist film. Sure, there’s the obligatory scene of Alisa getting prayed away at the end, but you couldn’t have sold this to the censors any other way. Otherwise, the film is completely on Alisa’s side – even the ranting doctor and the deformed baby visions don’t feel like an attempt at attacking Alisa by the movie, but rather like another moment when the melodrama hones in on the enormous pressure society puts on this woman, until she desperately breaks.

This does of course also cause the film’s horror half to be rather a lot of fun. Alisa dispatching the nasty bastards responsible for her death in increasingly surrealistic and imaginative ways (personal favourite: the flying four arms technique, though I’m also a fan of the googly-eyed half-rotten corpse look she sometimes shifts into) like a prettier and a lot less morally icky Freddy Krueger is a sight to behold, as are the scenes of her romancing Hendarto again; the latter as something of a bittersweet counter-argument against the basic meanness of the world its melodrama struggled against.

That Suzzanna is great in whatever form the film needs her to be in is a given, once you’ve seen her in a few movies, but let me again emphasise how wonderful she shifts between the serious and dignified sufferer, the angry ghost and the light-hearted lover, and how important she is for holding Ghost with Hole’s disparate elements together.

Three Films Make A Post: The girl you've been waiting for

The Unheard (2023): Other people’s mileage apparently varies considerably, but I had a lot of fun with Jeffrey A. Brown’s thriller about the auditory haunting of a deaf girl (Lachlan Watson) during and after an experimental procedure to regain her hearing. The whole “person encountering ghosts while regaining a formerly lost sense” thing is of course less than original, but the script by Michael and Shawn Rasmussen is tight, Brown’s direction solid, and Watson’s performance effective and likeable, so I didn’t mind this lack of originality in the least.

Whipsaw (1935): This melodramatic crime romance by Sam Wood about an undercover cop (Spencer Tracy) and a thief (Myrna Loy) he is attempting to pump for information about her colleagues in crime going on the road together is a surprisingly fun little thing, living off the considerable chemistry between Tracy and Loy – not something I would have expected going in, though Loy apparently had the ability to spark off everyone if she wanted to – and a sense of melodrama that never becomes too sappy or kitschy. There’s what feels like genuine heart to the story, so much so that, even under the conservative hammer of the Hays code, the cop seems to learn as much from the thief as she from him. That the film manages to contrive a way to not punish Loy’s character for past misdeeds and points at a happy end is an additional pleasant surprise.

Battle in Outer Space aka Uchu daisenso (1957): Leave it to the great Ishiro Honda (and of course writer Shinichi Sekizawa) to make a film about a space war between Earth and a superior alien force that have made their base on the moon to not go for the jingoist vein but emphasise the importance of international togetherness. It’s till rather refreshing; and a bit uncomfortable in that it makes a space war movie feel somewhat utopian.

If that alone doesn’t float your boat, you also get some wonderful miniature work from Eiji Tsuburaya and company, an ever wonderful Ifukube score, goofy yet awesome science, and even a bit of the old “mind-controlled by the alien menace!” paranoia. Though most of the latter could have been avoided if the powers that be had put any effort at all into guarding their heroic astronauts from alien abduction. But what can you do?

Three Films Make A Post: A simple trip to Mars will become the journey of a lifetime

Kung Fu Elliot (2014): Depending on one’s position this film about Newfoundland’s very own self-made action hero and delusional dreamer turned manipulative asshole is either a pretty dull mockumentary (for once, I like the this term for a movie), or a documentary made by filmmakers who are either manipulative sociopaths themselves or completely incompetent. The filmmakers seem to insist on this being an actual documentary, which makes them look terrible: either, they begin a documentary with no research whatsoever on a subject, or they know things they only disclose to some of their subjects later own for maximum cinematic impact while egging on a guy who certainly is a manipulative liar but also psychologically not well at all, only to turn on him with the most hypocritical moral outrage imaginable.

If I had made this, I’d insist on it just being a very dull fake variant on American Movie, but if people insist on looking bad, who am I to disagree?

The Housemaid aka Hanyo (1960): I’m rather less happy I didn’t find much to connect with in Kim Ki-young’s classic of South Korean cinema. This is, after all a highly influential film on many of my favourite filmmakers from the country. Sometimes, I can appreciate the subversiveness of the film, and nod sagely at its social criticism, but for much of the running time, I found myself appalled at the melodramatic gyrations of plot and characters, none of which ever rang true to me even in the heightened realm of the emotional eleven this takes place in.

On an abstract level, Kim’s filmmaking is clearly stylistically very interesting indeed, but at this point in my movie watching career not in a way that works for me.

Cocaine Bear (2023): Then there’s this thing, a movie about a cocaine snorting serial killing bear that somehow manages to contain more continuity problems and gaffes than any film not shot in a backyard has any right to have. Also there and accounted for are gratingly unfunny humour, acting that’s all over the place and a script that’s trite, in love with an intelligence that’s never actually on display, and full of amateurish pacing problems.

From time to time, director Elizabeth Banks stumbles upon a cool gore gag or two, or manages to get a decent character note out of a cast – Keri Russell, Ray Liotta in his final role, Isiah Whitlock Jr. and so on – that could and should do so much more. Of course, as weirdly as this thing is edited, I’m not convinced coherent and great performances haven’t been left on the cutting room floor.

Three Films Make A Post: The picture that is the sum total of all human emotions!

Leave Her to Heaven (1945): Often, John M. Stahl’s noir melodrama is listed among the very best noirs ever made, if not declared the very best. I don’t really feel that way about the movie, to be frank. I appreciate elements of it – certainly Gene Tierney’s and Cornel Wilde’s performances – but its very mild deconstruction of the femme fatale trope seems neither fish nor fowl to me, with much of what it does having been handled with quite a bit more depth in what we’d now call domestic suspense novels of its time. Some of the melodramatic business is over the top in a way that just doesn’t work for me, personally, as well.

Leave Her to Heaven does also walk into another one of my personal landmines, where the supposed climax of a movie takes on the form of a judicial trial, which to my eyes has always been and will always be what the less capable writer will use when they can’t come up with an actual dramatic climax. Which, to be fair, is my problem as much as the film’s.

Tora-San’s Cherished Mother (1969) aka Zoku otoko wa tsurai yo: In his second movie outing, as usual directed by Yoji Yamada, eternal grown-up child with aspirations on dignified manliness Tora (as always Kiyoshi Atsumi), is stumbling, drinking and blustering his way into an encounter with the mother he never knew. There’s room for a look on the further developments in the life of the rest of his family – Sakura (Chieko Baisho) is now married and still the sane one in the family – scenes of awkward drunkenness that end in embarrassment, an ill-fated crush, sentimentality that often feels rather real, and all the other elements of the series’ formula.

It’s a nice, simply fun but not simple place to visit, really, where human emotions and their ridiculousness are treated with kindness, and I’m still not surprised that there was an audience for the series in Japan for decades.

Children of the Corn (2020/2023): Kurt Wimmer’s Children update took three years to come out anywhere, and while it is certainly not a great movie, it isn’t the complete train wreck one might expect either. For the first half an hour or so, this even seems to be a very clever update to the franchise formula, playing on the very specific anxieties caused by very contemporary, ecologically-fuelled generational conflicts. The cleverness slowly dissolves over the course of the rest of the film, mostly because the film increasingly just handwaves its own themes away, favouring increasingly stupid set pieces and one of the worst monster special effects you’ll see in a film with a decent budget. And don’t get me started on the particularly egregious horror movie bullshit ending.

In short: Carmen Comes Home (1951)

Original title: Karumen kokyô ni kaeru

When her theatre closes for renovation, artistic dancer – or as most people would call her, stripper – Carmen (Hideko Takamine) and a dancer friend of hers return to Carmen’s old home in the country for a visit. Being a bit of a flake, as well as a someone who is clearly herself so totally, it becomes as admirable as it can be ridiculous, our heroine causes all kinds of chaos. She also opens up old family wounds in her deeply conservative father – Carmen herself, bless her, is clearly over that sort of thing – and does cause some hormonal troubles in parts of the local population.

When it came out, this comedy by Keisuke Kinoshita was an immense hit. In part, this is certainly because it was the first Japanese colour feature film. It never looks and feels like the first, though, for Kinoshita uses colour as if he’d been doing it all his life, studied what it’s good for in filmmaking, and is now calmly applying what he learned with the calm assuredness of a man who has worked in colour for ages. So visually, this is a pretty astonishing movie that makes wonderful use of the contrasts between natural country colours – this was mostly shot on location – and the joyous, colourful, artificiality of Carmen’s wardrobe and makeup.

The humour hasn’t aged quite as well, of course, so there are some stretches in the film that were probably very funny indeed when this came out but now simply feel old-fashioned and aged; at other times, things still work quite well, particularly whenever the film has its fun with the contrasts between Carmen’s overblown, paper-thin personality and her less flashy surroundings.

Pleasantly, particularly with this kind of material, the film doesn’t have a judgmental bone in his body: it sees and makes fun of the folly of Carmen as well as the conservatism and boringness of her former peers, but it does so in a way that lacks mean-spiritedness. Kinoshita is very willing to point things out and laugh at them, but he’s not here to humiliate anyone. In fact, whenever the film turns more melodramatic, it shows respect for the emotions of both sides of any argument, with less interest in one side being right but in people finding a way to live with one another despite their differences. Which is so much the opposite of 2023, I’m nearly becoming nostalgic for a world that never actually was that way.

Three Films Make A Post: On the other side of death, on the other side of regret, on the edge of mystery…

Children of the Mist aka They aka They Watch (1993): This Showtime TV movie by John Korty turns Rudyard Kipling’s delicate story “They” about the loss of a child and grief into melodramatic pap, and also features the least frightening child ghost I can remember seeing; it doesn’t help that it makes overdubbed owl noises.

Nobody involved really seems to want to bother putting effort in: Edithe Swensen’s script turns everything into a cliché, Korty mishandles melodrama and ghosts alike, and the actors mostly seemed to have checked out mentally. Vanessa Redgrave gives a non-performance quite below her usual level, and I’m not even sure what Patrick Bergin thinks he’s doing at all. He’s certainly not acting like anyone who has encountered a grieving human being before.

The Other Side of Hope aka Toivon tuolla puolen (2017): This Aki Kaurismäki movie about a Syrian refugee looking for his sister and a place to be, and a former salesman’s increasingly absurd attempts at running a restaurant does cover similar ground to Le Havre, made six years earlier. This one isn’t quite as optimistic about the kindness of the working classes anymore (shitty racist Nazi types have arrived in Kaurismäki’s world, though never unopposed), but it is also not as hopeless about it as it could be. There’s still solidarity, compassion and kindness to be found, as well as the small happinesses that keep us alive. Formally, this breaks up the heart-breaking story of the Syrian Khaled (Sherwan Haji) with Kaurismäki-style shenanigans, which never feels like the cop-out it could be, but like the statement of a guy who doesn’t really want to put a divide between tragedy and farce. Which sometimes means that the farce helps the character from the tragedy survive (see also, curiously enough, Ladyhawke).

The Scythian aka Skif (2018): Rustam Mosafir’s sort of historical adventure movie is quite the thing. Always willing to turn everything – non-plausibility, fights and men’s friendship, betrayal, and general craziness – up to eleven, this often feels like the grandchild of cheap Italian sword and sorcery movies in its wild abandon, just made with more money, and most probably talent. There’s little scepticism towards warrior cultures and manly men doing manly stuff on display, of course, so if you can’t or won’t cope with these things, this is just going to make you angry. On the other hand, the film also has an anti-imperialist streak a mile wide, clearly coming down on the Barbarism side on the Howard Barbarian versus Civilisation scale while it’s at it.

It’s also simply a great, riveting piece of adventure filmmaking full of clever and fun set pieces, craziness and awesome manly bullshit.

In short: I, the Executioner (1968)

aka Requiem for a Massacre

Original title: Minagoroshi no reika

A killer, a man going by the name of Kawashima (Makoto Sato) begins raping and murdering women belonging to a small clique of friends, for reasons which will turn out to make a lot of sense, at least to him.

In turns, we follow the exploits of Kawashima in his role as a killer, the police’s efforts at catching him – which means first realizing that the women he kills share a dark secret, and Kawashima’s romance with waitress Haruko (Chieko Baisho). Because this is not a Hollywood movie, that last part of the film will not collide with the first one in the most dramatically obvious way yet carry all the more dramatic heft and meaning for it.

I know that I, the Executioner’s director Tai Kato is well-loved as a filmmaker of various Yakuza and Samurai movie sub-genres; despite my interest in those genres, I haven’t seen many of Kato’s films, for some reason. Going by this film, I’m rather missing out.

At first, the I, the Executioner’s formal structure is somewhat confusing: the giallo-esque scenes of Kawashima as killer, the police procedural and the Japanese melodrama that takes over in the scenes with Haruko feel at the beginning only connected through Kato’s striking and individual-peculiar visual style. Kato nearly completely eschews long shots, prefers close-ups – sometimes of objects instead of people – and usually builds a frame within the frame of the screen by placing characters between or behind objects. He does this so intensely and continuedly, suddenly seeing a character’s whole body, or a shot that leaves space around characters takes on immense emotional weight. It’s a style so uncommon even in the world of brilliant stylists that was Japanese studio cinema of this era, it can’t help but suggest quite different ways our common filmic language might have developed and still be as emotionally affecting.

In the film at hand, this style at first causes a feeling of dislocation and claustrophobia, feelings Kawashima, his victims and the police share to various degrees. The longer the film goes on, the more it becomes clear that Kato also uses his style to connect the apparently disparate parts of the film, showing emotional connections nobody could tell; he’s also making subtle differences between the different strands – the murder scenes are the most claustrophobic whereas the scenes with Haruko suggest a larger, if not brighter world (that will of course eventually be drenched in rain).

Three Films Make A Post: VHS Goes to Hell

V/H/S/99 (2022): I was pleasantly surprised to find that even this epitome series of bro horror has become a more diverse project behind and in front of the camera. This apparently doesn’t change my traditional reaction to all VHS films, where I find all but one segment of any given movie insufferably uninteresting. It’s all epileptically wobbling cameras, overdone fake VHS artefacts, and tales of asshats I don’t care one whit about being killed off in not terribly interesting ways by not terribly interesting monsters. Until, finally, the last segment, “To Hell and Back”, by Vanessa and Joseph Winter (also responsible for Deadstream), stabilizes the camera a bit and goes on to create a preposterous and absolutely awesome low budget hell dimension out of very little but sheer creative force and the imagination most of the other segments lack; that imagination is overflowing enough to design monsters for one single shot. The narrative drive as ridiculous as it is inspired. Reappearing from Deadstream is Melanie Stone in another awesome over the top performance that suggests somebody has found her niche.

The Arrival from the Darkness aka Príchozí z temnot (1921): This Czech silent movie by Jan S. Kolár ends on the worst explanation for the supernatural known to mankind, but before everything was a dream, there’s quite a bit to like: the visuals are often more naturalistic than expressionistic – though there is a pretty great alchemist’s lair in the Black Tower – but it’s the reality of old and half-ruined castles, so the film still has a certain uncanny gothic power. It is also an early example of the trope where some kind of reawakened evil from the past decides some poor woman to be the reincarnation of the love of his life, features the very Czech combo of Rudolf II and alchemy, and is generally an interesting entry into the sadly sparse number of silent films of the fantastic we can still see today.

The Man Who Could Cheat Death (1959): This tale of an artist and mad scientist (Anton Diffring) who has become immortal thanks to gland transplantations is a usually ignored, and certainly very minor, bit of Hammer horror. It is still directed by Terence Fisher, shot by Jack Asher and written by Jimmy Sangster, so it’s certainly a technically well made film. There is even quite a bit of clever psychological business going on below the somewhat too melodramatic plot. Also of note are a couple of scenes of Diffring growing green in the face and a bit murderous as well as some pleasantly unpleasant business about his ideas about romance as exemplified by his relationship to a character played by Hazel Court, all situated between scenes of perfectly appropriate ethical deliberation between Diffring and an old friend played by Arnold Marlé. It is also interesting to see Christopher Lee in what amounts to a for him very uncommon role as the romantic lead – which is to say, he has very little to do in this one, in classic Hammer tradition.

Still, there’s just something missing that would turn this from “interesting” to “good” or “great”, though I can’t quite put my finger on what it is.

In short: Eye of the Needle (1981)

World War II. A highly ruthless and dangerous spy known to British Intelligence only as “The Needle” (Donald Sutherland) has been doing the bad work without being caught for quite some time, leaking important information and leaving a line of dead bodies behind.

The British side – chiefly represented by one Godliman (Ian Bannen) – is getting closer to the Needle just when he manages to make photos that prove that the Allied Invasion can only occur in Normandy. Fortunately for the Allies, for some contrived reason that makes little sense, the German spy must deliver this information directly to Hitler, and so has to catch a ride on a German U-boat. Thanks to a storm, his attempt at reaching his ride via boat is rudely interrupted and he is stranded on a small island, population 4. From here on out, Needle stumbles right into an early D.H. Lawrence novel about the unhappy marriage between Lucy (Kate Nelligan) and the husband who lost his legs and the opportunity to die in the Battle of Britain on their marriage day in a car accident (Christopher Cazenove). Lucy lets herself be seduced by the mysterious stranger before you can even say “why, this is starting to get a bit improbable, old chap!”.

Though things might not end up to happily for our spy once Lucy cops to having been emotionally manipulated, her husband getting murdered and her child threatened.

Richard Marquand’s Eye of the Needle (based on a Ken Follett novel) is generally highly regarded by mid-brow critics, but I can’t say the film does much for me, independent of today’s eye-brow position. Sure, there’s an obvious high level of technical accomplishment on display, Marquand using old-fashioned and brand new cinematic techniques in tandem to create an artificial yet highly effective sense of time and place, but the film’s emotional content, as well as its slow, slow pacing does not work for me at all. Its tendency to repeat beats that are supposed to convince us how ruthless and shitty Faber/The Needle is, does not help there at all. I really got it the first two times around, so repeating this with a different victim after that just seems like a waste of my time. There’s a lack of subtlety here, as everywhere else in the movie, that just doesn’t connect with me, particularly not in combination with the pomposity of the film’s tone that confuses the pose of having depth with actually having it.

As central as it is, I never found the D.H. Lawrence with more melodrama marriage crisis of the Roses convincing or involving, either. Despite the actors doing their very best (which is considerable), the film replaces believable humanity with melodramatic posturing. Worse, it isn’t actually terribly good at this posturing, forgetting that good melodrama isn’t just meant to perform heightened emotion but also to draw the viewer into these emotional with the characters. Eye of the Needle never does, at least for me.

Three Films Make A Post: Taking Them One Mishap at a Time.

Accident Man (2018): House favourite Scott Adkins stars in the adaptation of a Pat Mills/Stu Small comic I haven’t read, directed by frequent Adkins collaborator Jesse V. Johnson. Adkins plays a professional killer specialized in murders that look like accidents or suicide. Things go a bit out of control when he learns that his ex-girlfriend (who happens to be pregnant by him, too) is murdered by some colleagues. A whole lot of hand to hand fighting and murdering ensues. The film, typical for the Johnson/Adkins combo, goes for the pop-coloured and cynically humorous, with a load of pretty eccentric characters (played by beloved action movie character actors like Ray Stevenson, Ray Park and Michael Jai White) fighting it out in not always completely serious ways, in between scenes of often genuinely funny one-liners and dialogue that at least sounds of a piece with some of Mills’s writing.

That the action sequences are budget conscious yet also excellently choreographed and genuinely fun is rather par for the course for projects from this particular circle.

Meurtre à Montmartre aka Reproduction interdite (1957): Self-important whiny art dealer Marc Kelber (Paul Frankeur), falls in with a pair of art forgers to pay for stuff like his step son’s (whom he clearly despises) piano lessons. Because everybody is incredibly high-strung, and really bad at planning, things quickly go wrong.

There are moments when Gilles Grangier’s crime movie is visually effective and captivating, but it self-sabotages with a melodramatic streak as wide as the ocean, where everybody’s emotions are always at eleven, and no single character has ever seemed to have learned even the tiniest bit of self-control. Worse, the film clearly wants the viewer to sympathize with Kelber’s plight, but neither makes any effort to provide reasons for empathy, nor makes him interesting.

Run a Crooked Mile (1969): This TV movie by Gene Levitt aims for a twisty take of weird conspiracy (like The Prisoner minus the depth, the surrealism and the look) that’s mostly aimed at a viewer’s suspense glands. This works well for the first half or so, but once our hero (played by the seldom interesting Louis Jourdan) gets conked over the head and wakes up two years later in Switzerland as a polo playing playboy married to the yawn-inducing Elizabeth (Mary Tyler Moore), things become bogged down in exactly the things I’m least interested in: the marriage problems of two painfully flat actors, a conspiracy that seems to be run by complete idiots, and suspense plotting that misses out on the whole “suspense” thing.

In short: The Sell Out (1976)

Former US intelligence operative Sam Lucas (Richard Widmark) has retired to Jerusalem where he lives with another former spy, Deborah (Gayle Hunnicutt). Alas Sam’s peaceful life is going to end soon, for he’ll have to cope with the results of a rather peculiar partnership. Apparently, high level US spy Harry Sickles (Sam Wanamaker) and high level KGB boss General Kasyan (Peter Frye) have made a pact to get rid of troublesome and unloved members of their respective agencies by teaming up for absurdly public assassinations. And if that means blowing up Israeli children in a botched attempt to kill US traitor Gabriel Lee (Oliver Reed), so be it.

However, before he changed sides, Gabriel was Sam’s favourite spy pupil. Or even a bit more – Gabriel likes to call the older man “Papa”, so when he comes to Sam for help, the surprisingly honourable (for a spy) man has a hard time not trying to help, even knowing that it will probably cost him everything. Complicating things is the fact that Deborah was Gabriel’s girlfriend before he defected, and Sickles is clearly an old enemy. Add to this the Israeli security Major Benjamin (Ori Levy), who is really unhappy about the whole dead kid business, and you have quite the clusterfuck.

Which is also the proper word to describe the script (by Murray Smith and Jud Kinberg) of Peter Collinson’s spy action drama The Sell Out. When the basic set-up to your spy movie is less plausible than Blofeld’s latest attempt to shoot 007 into space, but you still seem to want to make a gritty, semi-realistic spy movie with actual human psychology in your characters, you are in trouble. The whole basic plan in which Sickles and Kasyan conspire to murder some of their own agents very loudly and in public makes little sense. Since when have spy agencies have had trouble to get rid of their own people quietly, and with less opportunity to create a major international incident or three? Why assassinate people in the least effective manner possible? Why push dangerous people into a position where they are bound to lash out at you just for basic self defence?

Character psychology doesn’t work much better either. It is clear the film is trying, and it certainly has a fine cast to do it, but no character relation here ever feels plausible or convincing. Everything is either plain stupid, or screeching, overwritten melodrama (particularly Hunnicutt has to go through literal contortions), or just plain pointless. Most acting choices are as inexplicable as the writing, but then what’s an actor to do when given material this incoherent?

Collinson attempts to muddle through whatever it is the script is trying to do, but there’s a lifeless quality to the melodramatic parts of the film, and little flair to the more general spy business. The Sell Out only ever truly comes alive during the action sequences. But a couple of good car chases and shoot-outs can’t save anything here.

Maru Maru (1952)

Salvage diver Gregory Mason (Errol Flynn) is living and working in the Philippines with his behind the scenes work partner and friend Andy Callahan (Richard Webb). Or really, former friend, for Mason’s exclusively commerce-driven (or really, money-grubbing) agenda with a ruthless streak fathoms deep seems to have put so much pressure on Callahan, he has fled into the life of a binge drinker. The friendship is certainly not strengthened by the fact that Callahan’s wife Stella (Ruth Roman) is a former girlfriend of Mason’s and clearly still has feelings for him, because we all know that hateful glowers in 50s movies always mean romantic and sexual passion, and she’s quite the glowerer. Though she also tends to defend Callahan against Mason. There’s really only one good point on Mason’s books at the beginning of the movie: that he’s basically adopted his “house boy” Manuelo (Robert Cabal) as well as Manuelo’s little brother, treating the kids rather more fatherly than you’d expect from the guy, or a white colonialist boss towards brown people.

Still, it is not a complete surprise that Mason is the police’s main suspect when Callahan is suddenly murdered. We the audience know he’s innocent though. Mason is the kind of bastard who still does have some things he won’t do, even for money.

For as it turns out, there’s a lot of money connected to Callahan’s death in form of a treasure sunk during the war. Various people shady (Raymond Burr in his patented screen heavy stage projecting an impressive amount of sleazy punchability) and not so shady (Georges Renavent) are interested in that treasure, obviously, and so will be Mason.

While most people who think about the director at all will connect him with great Westerns and the best US giant monster movie (perhaps of all time, most certainly the 1950s), Them!, Gordon Douglas was the kind of classic journeyman filmmaker who made all kinds of film in all kinds of genres, typically doing them very well indeed.

Sometimes, as in the case of Maru Maru, he even made films that collected all kinds of genres in a single movie. This is a colonialist diving adventure movie, mixed with quite a bit of noir, melodrama, and thriller tropes, culminating in a redemption with not very subtle religious overtones (which, on purpose or not, really fits the Filipino setting very well). It’s also a film made by a filmmaker who had no problems whatsoever to take all the bits and pieces of diverse genre tropes and make a coherent – sometimes exciting, usually at least interesting – movie out of them. As is only logical, Douglas does this by focussing on the overlaps between the genres he’s using here, finding the character types they share and letting them interact in a sensible manner, leading the audience through the plot via Flynn’s redemption arc.

Visually, there’s a lot of noir on screen here, so the Philippines become a place drenched in more shadow than light, populated (as is traditional in colonialist adventure and to me always suggesting a silent admittance to the hypocrisy of colonialist betterment rhetoric) by people who are haunted by mistakes, greedy for money and generally shady or at least morally ambiguous, quite independent of their skin colour. Douglas’s treatment of his non-white (who are mostly even played by actors of colour, if not always the exact right one) characters is better than you get in most of these films, at least in so much as he treats them as like everyone else on screen – characters that stop being complete genre tropes because director and script bother with giving them enough dimension to let them breathe like people.

Past Misdeeds: Qurbani (1980)

This is a re-run with only the slightest of edits, so please don’t ask me what the heck I was thinking when I wrote any given entry into this section.


Rajesh (Feroz Khan) leads the charmed life of a manly man Robin-Hood-like thief, a life that is more than a little sweetened by the existence of his beautiful nightclub singer girlfriend Sheela (Zeenat Aman, alas not allowed to do more than that description promises). Between random motorcycle riding and disapproving of Sheela's job (but hey, she disapproves of his job too, so they're on the same level here), there's not much that troubles him.

Until one of his jobs goes wrong and he meets his own private nemesis in the form of Inspector Amjad Khan (Amjad Khan, playing himself, but as a rather sleazy cop!?) and goes to jail for a bit.

While Rajesh is behind bars, Sheela meets single dad Amar (Vinnod Khanna), and befriends and nearly falls in love with this second hairy-chested piece of manliness, who comes with the bonus of being a widower with a highly decorative daughter. Sheela's taste in men is a little dubious, since Amar did also stand on the wrong side of the law once, working as a smuggler for Rakka (Amrish Puri), until he disagreed with his boss's personnel politic of shooting people who fail at their jobs and quit.

When Rajesh gets out of jail, he and Amar meet and fall madly in love with each other (well, the film calls it friendship, but isn't really fooling anyone).

This could be the beginning of a wonderfully progressive three person relationship with bonus child, but alas, Rajesh's jail acquaintance Vikram Singh (Shakti Kapoor) and his sister Jwala Singh (Aruna Irani and her mad contact lenses of doom) have other plans.

They really, really hate Rakka (or his afro), you see, so much so that Jwala has an illuminated portrait of the man on her living room wall next to her horse pictures.

What better method to take revenge on him could there be than to kill him and blame the deed on Rajesh whom they'll only need to rope into stealing all of Rakka's money? Rajesh isn't too enthusiastic about the whole thing - even without knowing about the scape goat part - because he has promised Sheela to give up on his wicked ways. But what is Amar's little daughter Tina (Natasha Chopra) good for if not for being kidnapped to press Rajesh into service?

Qurbani was edited, produced and directed by Bollywood's hairiest chest Feroz Khan himself and say what you will about his overly manly acting, he does handle his three other jobs very nicely indeed.

His direction shows a much finer eye for frame composition than was typical for some of Hindi cinema at the time, as well as a love for weird camera angles, and a more than a little dubious sense of fashion without ever overdoing it and getting so crazy as to be eyesight-destroying.

The obligatory musical numbers by Kalyanji Anandji are mostly Bollywood standard, not as mad as they sometimes get, but extremely useful to strengthen the emotional underpinnings of the film and delight its viewers with the lesser of Zeenat Aman's talents.

It has to be said that super macho Feroz Khan was an equal opportunity cheesecake director, and so friends of hairy, sweaty manliness will have their own moments of joy here.

Of course the film features the typically enthusiastic and slightly insane fight choreography of its time and place, with lots of jumping and kicking, a serious amount of back flipping and a friendly disinterest in physics or the way human anatomy functions. All of that is of course a good thing if you're like me and like your action scenes entertaining instead of realistic.

The whole film has a very fine flow to it that even the usual annoying scenes of comic relief (Jagdeep in the house, why does nobody burn it down?) can't disturb too much.

The plot consists of a merry randomness of incidents which are less bound by logic than by Qurbani's thematic core of male friendship and sacrifice (as the title promises). Somehow, Khan manages to tie up his plot threads satisfyingly enough to come to a tight and exciting finale and a surprisingly poignant ending that shows a spiritual connection to the brand of epics of manly friendship people like Cheng Cheh or John Woo traded in in Hong Kong.
Now, all this might sound like a million other action melodramas, and Qurbani is most certainly never original in the things it does, but the trick lies, as it often does, in the film's flawless execution of its tropes, and in the sure hand Khan shows in deciding when to use them.


There is something deeply satisfying about a film like Qurbani that knows which buttons a genre film has to push and then pushes them expertly and incessantly with a sort of relish that stops just shy of decadence.

Gunmen (1988)

Original title: 天羅地網

After he has returned from the Chinese Civil War (the part of it ending in 1936, I believe, but please correct me if you know better), Ting Kwan-pik (Tony Leung Ka-fai), his wife Cho Chiu (Carrie Ng) and their litter daughter make their way to Shanghai, where Ting becomes a policeman. Shanghai is a troubled place at the time, the French using the concession to make a mint in the opium trade, and a widely corrupted police force assisting criminal activity more than hindering it. Ting, of course, is incorruptible.

One man involved in the drug trade is Haye (Adam Cheng), who just happens to be an old enemy of Ting’s from the war, hoping to use his gains for further civil warring in the Northwest (which would make him a Kuomintang man, I believe).

Obviously, these two men will collide rather sooner than later, each eventually being responsible for the death of the other’s father figure. The film also finds time for Ting’s difficult love life, as well as a shouty new boss (Elvis Tsui!), to make matters more difficult for our hero.

At least, he’ll be able to re-team with his old war buddies Cheung (Waise Lee), Lau Fuk-kwong (Mark Cheng) and Cheung Cho-fan (David Wu) to do the appropriate manly violent things you eventually do in this kind of film.

Leave it to late 80’s Hong Kong cinema to pack the plot as well as all of the subplots of a 150 minute movie into 84. Not surprisingly, there’s a breathless quality to Kirk Wong’s Gunmen (produced by Tsui Hark, so who knows how much Wong actually had to say about anything here) that’s even more intense than usual for the city’s not exactly calm movie output from this golden era. Everybody here seems always on the verge of some sort of emotional or physical outbreak or breakdown, with momentous decisions taken at the drop of a hat, characters and their relations drawn and changed with great speed.

It’s somewhat exhausting to watch, but Wong actually has quite a bit of control over the intensity, going down from eleven to ten at the right moments, somehow managing to draw the proper melodramatic character relations with as much conviction as necessary, condensing the film’s huge amount of plot without it actually losing much of its effectiveness.

And really, despite being a bit rough around the edges, the film’s a highly effective machine, providing enough historical elements, melodrama, male bonding, and vengeance to fill two other movies, all the while filling every nook and cranny with the kind of insane action you expect from a Hong Kong movie from this era. Sure, there are much more extreme examples of the form, but there are still more mass shoot-outs with absurd body counts, chases through tight streets and properly nasty looking close combat sequences to make a boy woozy. Wong and action director Fung Hak-On seem to particularly love action that takes place in very tight spaces, giving many of the fights a claustrophobic edge. Eventually, everything culminates in a pretty incredible bloody finale that perfectly marries the violence with the melodrama of the plot; and uses a child in a way you really can’t see a film from the US ever doing.


For the connoisseur of Hong Kong cinema of the time, it’s also rather great to see Carrie Ng and Elvis Tsui in atypical roles as the always fully dressed wife in whose breasts the camera is not the least bit interested, and the shouty, possibly evil but potentially heroic new boss of Ting who is never involved in a horrifying sex scene or other. What more could I ask of a movie?