![]() Woo doesn’t spare on the claret, his slow-mo-enhanced sword fights and early take on notions of honour and duty prefiguring his symphonic elevations of violence to come. His violent period piece Last Hurrah for Chivalry represents one of his better earlier efforts, offering more in its rehearsals for the thematic and aesthetic tics that would come to define his mature style than it does in its by-numbers narrative. Before he became the dove-bothering godfather of the new wave of Hong Kong action cinema in the 80s and 90s with the likes of A Better Tomorrow (1986) and The Killer (1989), Woo earned his stripes on the roster of Golden Harvest as one of the studio’s go-to guys, directing over a dozen features for the studio in its heyday. Last Hurrah for Chivalry (1979) poster Guns weren’t always ’s weapon of choice. Unifying the historical, cultural and philosophical preoccupations of wuxia’s literary antecedents with a progressive, slyly allegorical modernism, Hu’s cinema proves that genre and great art needn’t be mutually exclusive. ![]() ![]() One could discuss the evolution of the wuxia genre purely in terms of its approach to film editing, and critic David Bordwell has written brilliantly on Hu’s pioneering technique. ![]()
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