Registers of the melodramatic mode: the 1980s heroic bloodshed cycle in the history of the Hong Kong crime film

The heroic bloodshed (or hero) film of the late 1980s is one of the best known and most distinctive cycles in Hong Kong film history. Writing on this cycle, however, has focused disproportionately on the work of just one ‘auteur’, John Woo, whose Jinghung bunsik/A Better Tomorrow (1986) has inspired numerous imitators. Scholars have offered insightful analyses of the masculinity of Woo’s heroes, his action aesthetics, and the role of melodrama, Confucian brotherhood, and Hong Kong’s 1997 Handover in his films. But while local influences on Woo’s A Better Tomorrow – such as Patrick Lung’s Jinghung bunsik/Story of a Discharged Prisoner (1967) and Chang Cheh’s 1970s martial arts films – are sometimes mentioned, the broader genre history that preceded A Better Tomorrow has remained mostly out of view. Similarly, the variety within the heroic bloodshed cycle itself has gone largely unnoticed. To address these issues and to contribute to a revisionist genre historiography, this essay offers a new perspective on 1980s Hong Kong cinema by focusing on the broader category of the crime film. Taking the frequent discussions on the role of melodrama in Woo’s heroic bloodshed films as a starting point, I adopt Christine Gledhill’s and Linda Williams’s concepts of the melodramatic mode to argue that, while Hong Kong crime films in general can be said to operate within the melodramatic mode, they can also be seen to occupy different ‘registers’ within this mode. These registers, I posit, roughly correspond to the competing and overlapping modes of melodrama, realism and modernism, and are explored through an analysis of three important 1980s crime films: A Better Tomorrow (melodrama), 1984’s Gungbuk/Law with Two Phases (realism), and 1987’s Lungfu fungwan/City on Fire (modernism). Not only do these three films occupy distinctive registers within the melodramatic mode, they also represent the main crime film subgenres in Hong Kong during the 1980s and beyond – the gangster, the police and the undercover film, respectively.