Screen on Fire

Last updated: 27/10/2006 - 14:19

The original inspiration for Quentin Tarantino’s Reservoir Dogs is an explosive Hong Kong crime thriller.

City On Fire

The original inspiration for Quentin Tarantino’s Reservoir Dogs, Ringo Lam’s City On Fire is an explosive Hong Kong crime thriller that utilises the always dynamic pairing of Chow Yun Fat (Bulletproof Monk; The Replacement Killers, Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon; Hard Boiled; The Killer; Tragic Hero; Rich And Famous, the quite superb Full Contact and far too many more to list…) and Danny Lee (The Killer; Tragic Hero; Rich And Famous) to devastating effect.

Chow Yun Fat stars as Ko Chow, an undercover cop assigned to infiltrate a gang of ruthless jewel thieves after the officer originally in charge of the case is brutally murdered when his cover is blown. Haunted by his own honour-bound betrayal that led to the death of a criminal friend, Chow wants out of the force but agrees to one last job, after which he has promised to marry his long-suffering girlfriend, Huong - played by Carrie Ng, star of such fare as: Naked Killer, Sex And Zen and Skinny Tiger And Fatty Dragon. As he gradually earns the respect of the gang members and their boss, Chow begins to develop a close friendship with one of the thieves, the charismatic Fu (Danny Lee), and is eventually trusted enough to take part in a carefully planned heist. But when the robbery goes horribly wrong, resulting in a bloody shoot-out with the police, suspicions are raised about who the traitor might be...

Chow Yun-Fat

Chow Yun-Fat was born on the 18th May 1955 on Lama Island off Hong Kong’s Victoria Harbour. Chow identifies two early childhood influences as being instrumental in creating the desire to become an actor: the Cantonese Opera, which he saw every year at the ‘Goddess of the Sea Festival’ and the classic Hollywood movies which he was able to enjoy under the patronage of one of his mother’s employers.

Consequently, after completing his education, he relocated to the Kowloon Peninsula in 1971, aged just 16, where he worked as a waiter and bell-hop before enrolling in the actors’ training programme sponsored by Hong Kong’s largest TV company, TVB. This led to over 300 hours’ worth of television appearances, including a featured role in the popular series Shanghai Town, which made him a household name throughout South-East Asia.

Chow’s first important cinema role came when Ann Hui, the respected director of short documentaries such as Wonderfun (1975) and Social Worker (1979), approached him to star in her second feature, The Story of Wu-Viet. The film, which paired Chow with the young actress Cherie Cheung for the first time, met with unanimous critical acclaim. However, despite numerous roles which followed in titles such as Dream Lover, The Executioner, The Postman Fights Back, The Headhunter and The Last Affair, the mass popularity and recognition which had resulted from his television career continued to elude him on the big screen.

True talent always shines through and in 1985, Chow received a ‘Best Actor Award’ at the Golden Horse Festival in Taiwan, and another Best Actor Award from the Asian Pacific Film Festival for his remarkable performance in Leung Po-chi’s harrowing and poignant wartime drama: Hong Kong 1941.

A Better Tomorrow

To this critical acclaim, Chow added broad commercial appeal with his blistering performance as Mark Gor in the 1986 action-drama A Better Tomorrow for visionary producer Tsui Hark and up-and-coming young director John Woo. Intended as a vehicle to re-launch the career of Shaw Brothers veteran Ti Lung, A Better Tomorrow was an instant hit, breaking all previous Hong Kong box-office records and firmly establishing the reputation of both director and leading man. The film’s huge popularity amongst Hong Kong’s teenage population, in particular, made a speedy and profit-motivated sequel inevitable. In A Better Tomorrow 2, Chow once again starred as Mark Gor’s twin, Ken, who returns to Hong Kong from New York, hell-bent on avenging his brother’s murder. Acclaimed producer/ filmmaker, Tsui Hark, then took up the directing reins for A Better Tomorrow 3 which also starred famed Hong Kong chanteuse, Anita Mui.

Chow continued to refine his on-screen gangster persona for a number of directors, most notably Ringo Lam in 1988’s masterpiece City on Fire (a major and readily acknowledged influence in the genesis of Quentin Tarantino’s 1992 worldwide hit Reservoir Dogs) for which he won Taiwan’s prestigious Golden Horse Award. The next few years saw Chow broadening his range dramatically in a variety of productions such as Stanley Kwan’s Love unto Waste and, perhaps Chow’s favourite of all his films, Mabel Cheung’s An Autumn Tale, where he again rekindled his on-screen chemistry with the beautiful Cherrie Cheung.

Triads: The Inside Story

1989 saw Chow once more in gangster mode for Taylor Wong’s factually-based action-drama Triads: The Inside Story. Towards the end of that year, re-united with Woo, his international reputation was finally cemented when he took the role of enigmatic assassin/anti-hero Jeff in The Killer, a deliriously filmed moral fable of guilt, honour and exculpation. The movie relies in no small part on the powerful rapport between actor and director and firmly established Chow as a ‘talent on the move’ with critics and audiences throughout the World.

Next came a tour-de-force performance as Do San, idiot-savant and eponymous hero of Wong Jing’s influential God of Gamblers, after which Chow again joined forces with Woo and Cherrie Cheung for the wildly successful heist-caper Once a Thief. The partnership between director and star re-established, the pair spent the following year completing their pyrotechnic shoot-out extravaganza Hard Boiled, which again received widespread and enthusiastic coverage in the West, as did Full Contact with maverick director Ringo Lam.

By 1995, when Chow starred in the last of his Hong Kong movies, Peace Hotel, he had appeared in an amazing 71 films. With such an impressive body of work behind him, it was perhaps inevitable that Hollywood would come knocking at his door. Thanks to positive support from up-and-coming directors such as Quentin Tarantino and Robert Rodriguez, and from his old friends John Woo and Terence Chang, who were already making names for themselves in Tinseltown, Chow began to get calls for producers anxious to secure his services.

Yun fat’s Hollywood career to date has involved a mixture of characterizations and genres, appearing on familiar ground in Antoine Fuqua’s The Replacement Killers and James Foley’s The Corruptor, before exercising his dramatic muscles as the legendary ruler of Siam in Anna and the King, and most memorably as swordsman, Li Mu-bai, in Ang Lee’s multi-Oscar-winning action-drama, Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon. That film went on to make him an ever greater star – particularly amongst Western audiences, who got to see him in greater numbers than ever before, performing at his best, in a great film in his own first language.
Following the familiar ‘heroic bloodshed’ themes of brotherhood, honour, loyalty and revenge, City On Fire is one of seminal examples of the genre – a hard-hitting thriller full of explosive gunplay, bone-crunching violence and incendiary action sequences.

City On Fire is out now on DVD.