The Source of Woo's The Killer

 Just as John Woo's Bullet in the Head is a very obvious remake of Michael Cimino's The Deer Hunter (right down to its lighting setups), his The Killer is a less obvious remake of Teruo Ishii's An Outlaw and, of course, Melville's Le Samourai. I'd throw Nicholas Ray's truly amazing crime melodrama  They Live By Night into the fray also.


I've raved about Ishii before on this blog, usually having unreasonable cinematic orgasms about his freak-oriented material such as Horrors of Malformed Men, Love and Crime, and Orgies of Edo. But Ishii also directed thrillers, outrageous erotic comedies, and torture-themed epics.

An Outlaw, with Ken Takakura, is an Ishii thriller. Takakura plays a killer (very well) contracted to take out a scumbag; turns out the scumbag is a good guy. Angered by this betrayal, the killer sets out to expose the maggot-infested filth behind the ruse. Along the way, he becomes attracted to an innocent girl, helps a pretty prostitute with tuberculosis, and finds he shares a common sense of morality with a cop. At one point, he and the cop exchange gunfire with their common enemy.

Sound familiar? It screams familiar.

Yes, it's The Killer without the heavy stylization, but with the doubledecker trams and visually spectacular exploitation of Hong Kong's Victoria Peak. Mr. Woo must have been quite a fan of the film.

Thankfully, Ishii's bizarre trademarks rupture the film's surface now and then like welcome blisters. An old woman's wonderful facial scar (or is it a tattoo?) is a classic touch. Also true to Ishii is a bloody brilliant scene in which our hero saves a woman from vomiting on her own blood by deep kissing her and sucking the blood from her throat. It's super erotic, loving, and grotesque at the same time. I was in heaven!

I've waited eons to see this film and I was not disappointed.

Another triumph from Toei, the people who would one day bring you Battle Royale.

Caught Between A Killer And A Bullet

Between The Killer ('89) and Bullet in the Head ('90), John Woo co-directed (with Wu Ma) Just Heroes, easily his most underrated film.

A bloody, romantic actioner with a dense plot, it was made by a bunch of ex-Shaw luminaries such as David Chiang, Danny Lee, Phillip Ko, Lieh Lo, Ti Lung and Kuan Tai Chen; it was intended as a retirement fund for the great Chang Cheh, mentor to Woo and many others.

Legend has it that the elderly director took the takings and used them to finance another film.

Great directors never retire.

Personally, I think the film is exceptional, and it has one of the equal greatest musical scores ever written for a Hong Kong film; the other is Richard Yuen's score for A Fishy Story, an exquisitely beautiful romance.
The action sequences are of a smaller scale than, say, Hard-Boiled

...or Bullet in the Head (my favorite Woo film)

...but they are beautifully choreographed and unusually brutal.

The film's romantic subplot has a powerful impact on the viewer and is definitely not filler.

The original theatrical print was cut.

A shot of Chiang sliding across a factory floor and shooting a gunman at point blank range in the chest was excised. So were some additional dramatic sequences and a number of gory close-ups of the death of Shing Fui-On.

Happily, these censored sections are re-instated in the stunning French DVD from Christopher Gans' releasing company, HK Video (w**.metrofilms.com).

The film is buried inside the French DVD casing of Woo's Once A Thief (Les Associes); it has no English subtitles.