A blog formerly known as Bookishness / By Charles Matthews

"Dazzled by so many and such marvelous inventions, the people of Macondo ... became indignant over the living images that the prosperous merchant Bruno Crespi projected in the theater with the lion-head ticket windows, for a character who had died and was buried in one film and for whose misfortune tears had been shed would reappear alive and transformed into an Arab in the next one. The audience, who had paid two cents apiece to share the difficulties of the actors, would not tolerate that outlandish fraud and they broke up the seats. The mayor, at the urging of Bruno Crespi, explained in a proclamation that the cinema was a machine of illusions that did not merit the emotional outbursts of the audience. With that discouraging explanation many ... decided not to return to the movies, considering that they already had too many troubles of their own to weep over the acted-out misfortunes of imaginary beings."
--Gabriel García Márquez, One Hundred Years of Solitude

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Showing posts with label Heroes Shed No Tears. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Heroes Shed No Tears. Show all posts

Friday, October 31, 2025

Heroes Shed No Tears (John Woo, 1984)

Eddy Ko in Heroes Shed No Tears

Cast: Eddy Ko, Lam Ching-ying, Philippe Loffredo, Cécile Le Bailly, Chau Sang Lau, Yuet Sang Chin, Ma Ying-chun, Doo Hee Jang, Lee Hye-sook. Screenplay: Peter Ho-Sun Chan, Chiu Leung-chun, John Woo. Cinematography: Kenichi Nakagawa. Art direction: Fung Yuen-chi. Film editing: Peter Cheung. Music: Tang Siu-lam. 

Aside from some of John Woo's characteristically volatile action scenes, his early film Heroes Shed No Tears is a fairly forgettable movie about an incursion of some mercenaries led by soldier of fortune Chan Chung (Eddy Ko) into the drug-running area called the Golden Triangle, where Thailand, Laos, and Myanmar converge. The mission is complicated when Chan is reunited with his young son (Ma Ying-chun) and the team is encumbered not only with the boy but also his pretty aunt (Lee Hye-sook) and a French reporter (Cécile Le Bailly). Along the way, they also join up with Louis (Philippe Loffredo), an American expat, and are menaced by a vicious Vietnamese colonel (Lam Ching-ying), who captures Chan and tortures him. The action is interrupted by some sex scenes at Louis's residence that are uncharacteristic of Yoo's work and which he claims he didn't direct, as well as some pointless comic episodes involving some of Chan's fellow mercenaries. In short, it's sort of a mess, and Woo has expressed regret that it's part of his filmography.


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