Last Hurrah for Chivalry: Long Live Chivalric Brotherhood

By Aaron Han Joon Magnan-Park

Essays—

Mar 14, 2023

<em>Last Hurrah for Chivalry:</em> Long Live Chivalric Brotherhood
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John Woo is a Hong Kong cinematic master who rose to global prominence on the strength of his distinct artistic flourishes in perfecting the gun-fu genre, which modernized the traditional kung-fu film to include hails of bullets. Born in Guangzhou, China, in 1946, Woo grew up destitute in the Hong Kong slum district of Shek Kip Mei. His family received support from the Lutheran Church, including funds for his education. To show his gratitude, he considered entering the clergy, but his ministers, recognizing a special affinity, advised him to stick to the arts. We can perhaps consider this an act of divine intervention.

Many of the influences on glorious display in one of Woo’s most pivotal early works, the martial-arts film Last Hurrah for Chivalry (1979), can be traced back to his meteoric rise through Hong Kong’s studio system. At the age of twenty-three, he began as a production assistant at Cathay, before moving on to become assistant director and script supervisor to Chang Cheh at Shaw Brothers. Chang, one of Hong Kong’s most successful directors of all time, had become famous for masculinizing the previously female-centered wuxia pian (the fantastical sword-fighting film genre); in contrast, his colleague King Hu preferred to continue the genre’s traditional practice of featuring nuxia (female knights) as protagonists. At one point, Woo’s colleagues attempted to shift him into acting, but Chang vetoed the move, stating that Woo’s future lay in directing. This gave him the self-confidence to develop his craft—and Chang’s mentorship proved crucial to the films that Woo would soon make, not least Last Hurrah for Chivalry.

In 1973, at the age of twenty-seven, Woo made his first feature film, the independently produced The Young Dragons; later that same year, Raymond Chow of Golden Harvest hired him as a contract director (eventually also agreeing to release The Young Dragons). This made Woo a Young Turk, since one typically had to wait until one’s forties to direct within the Hong Kong studio system. Chow recognized, appreciated, and supported Woo’s ability to transform, rather than merely replicate, film genres. At Golden Harvest, Woo quickly established a track record of box-office success and creative risk-taking. Wanting to break with the standard approach to film comedy, the most profitable genre at that time, Woo chose to create a humorous cinematic version of a Beijing-opera classic with Princess Chang Ping (1976), and to take a hyperbolic approach to comedy with Money Crazy (1977).

Though it was not one of the more commercially successful movies the director made at Golden Harvest, Last Hurrah for Chivalry stands as his first official wuxia pian—a genre that had already been overtaken by kung-fu films by the late 1970s. Chang had long dominated the wuxia genre by featuring heroic youxia (the wandering knights of pre-imperial China) in films such as One-Armed Swordsman (1967). There is much that Woo carried over to his own films from Chang’s oeuvre, especially the core concerns of friendship, chivalry, honor, and loyalty, along with the high body counts, elaborate fight sequences, and graphic injuries to the human body. Whereas Chang’s films tend to focus on individual, dual, or ensemble male heroes, Woo consistently favors heroic duos, as in Last Hurrah for Chivalry.

It is also important to note that, from the beginning of Woo’s career, the Hong Kong industry was not his only source of influence. Unlike many other directors who fall under the Hong Kong New Wave umbrella, such as Tsui Hark and Ann Hui, Woo did not have any overseas film-school training. Nevertheless, he shares with his New Wave colleagues an affinity for global cinema, including Hollywood movies, European art cinema, and experimental films—inspirations that these directors then channeled back to reinvigorate Hong Kong filmmaking. Woo has singled out a number of auteurs who influenced him greatly, including Jean-Luc Godard, Jean-Pierre Melville, Sam Peckinpah, and Akira Kurosawa—the last of whom was a significant point of reference for Last Hurrah for Chivalry.

Hong Kong cinema in the 1970s was dominated by “the fist and the pillow,” a phrase that encapsulates the box-office popularity of films imbued with violence and sex, respectively. Instead of combining both—as Chor Yuen did with Intimate Confessions of a Chinese Courtesan (1972)—Woo chose to focus on violence, albeit violence with a purpose. With the ideal of dignified heroism that he came to develop, centered on an unexpected bond of martial brotherhood, Woo put his own spin on the pre-Confucian chivalric ethos of the youxia.

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In a chapter of his Records of the Grand Historian, from the first century BCE, Sima Qian provides the first written account of the historical youxia. Sima honors the youxia as China’s original martial promise keepers, who were willing to fight for justice and go so far as to sacrifice their own lives to fulfill their promises. In short, they were always true to their word. Their willingness to use violence as a last resort was anathema to Confucianism, which prioritized the cultivation of cultural refinement and relegated to the state the exclusive right to exercise violence. The resulting Confucian orthodoxy, in which scholars disdained and surpassed generals, spanned more than two thousand years, starting with the Han dynasty in 202 BCE and ending with the abdication of the Qing dynasty in 1912. Soldiers served the state, and there was no place for individual warriors such as the youxia. During this extended imperial period, stories of the youxia were suppressed for fear of inspiring the peasantry to overthrow the emperor. Accounts of the youxia were also censored in Communist China, since they were viewed as unwanted feudal legacies of the pre-Communist past.

It was through the figures of Chang (Wai Pak) and Tsing Yi (Damian Lau), the dual protagonists of Last Hurrah for Chivalry, that Woo first established his interpretation of this legacy: the chivalric brotherhood of the sword that occurs when each youxia recognizes in the other his adherence to the highest ideals. This brotherhood surpasses all other possible human relationships because of its rarity, the thrill that is gained when it is formed, and its ephemeralness, since during battle the outcome is always unknown. Most important, the youxia brotherhood is shown to be something worth sacrificing one’s own life for—an ethos demonstrated at the very end of Last Hurrah for Chivalry, when Tsing Yi shoves Chang away from the falling Moonlight Sword only to be impaled by it himself. For Tsing Yi, this is the most honorable way to die.

This interpretation of idealized youxia brotherhood continues in Woo’s later gun-fu films, especially in The Killer (1989), but also in A Better Tomorrow (1986), A Better Tomorrow II (1987), Just Heroes (1989), Bullet in the Head (1990), Once a Thief (1991), and Hard Boiled (1992). These are the films that brought Woo international acclaim and inspired even Hollywood action directors to adopt his gunplay flourishes. Those who recognize the look of a John Woo action film will focus on the use of double firearms, graceful ballistic shoot-outs, Mexican standoffs, back-to-back poses by the protagonists as they face overwhelming odds, cool sunglasses and trench coats, flying doves, and religious interior settings as recurring motifs. Though many of these stylistic hallmarks are evident in the larger-scale films that Woo would go on to make in the U.S., the youxia ideal is not. Woo’s radical Hollywood transformation is most apparent in Face/Off (1997), where a brotherhood of opposites is an impossibility, with the FBI agent commanding his underground nemesis to die—a complete reversal of how Last Hurrah for Chivalry ends.

This youxia brotherhood matters even more since there are many who purport to be youxia but fail to adhere to the sacred secular promise that a youxia must make. Moreover, since the youxia ethos is widely known, unscrupulous individuals might set up scenarios to secure a youxia promise for unheroic ends. In Last Hurrah for Chivalry, the scholar Kao (Lau Kong) personifies such a bastardization of this ethos, willingly using money, manipulative stratagems, a magic sword, and betrayal as valid means to justify his ultimate goal of becoming a false youxia. While Kao begins the film celebrating his status as the son of a renowned youxia, he has neither the skills nor the will to become one himself. Kao’s lack of fighting ability becomes apparent in the opening scene, when Pak (Lee Hoi-sang) and his henchmen attack the villa where his wedding is underway, as a continuation of their family feud. Kao thus must charm Chang to exact his revenge against Pak, using his wealth to purchase expensive medicine for Chang’s ill mother and, upon her death, covering her funeral expenses. Not being manipulative himself, Chang is unable to realize that Kao views him as an ultimately expendable mercenary. Chang’s true youxia equal exists only in Tsing Yi, a wine aficionado who sells his sword for hire and feels deeply for those he has killed. It is Tsing Yi’s reconnaissance of Pak’s villa, entourage, and strategy that provides the youxia pair a chance at success. Meanwhile, Kao does not hesitate to kill his bride when she attempts to kill him; to murder his martial-arts master and steal his magic sword; and to kill the family servant who finally refuses to assist his vile endeavors any further.

Last Hurrah for Chivalry is full of cinematic flourishes and genre mixing, setting up many stylistic markers of Woo’s later “heroic bloodshed” films, a term that refers to the repetition of the words heroic and bloodshed across the Cantonese titles of many of his Hong Kong gun-fu films. Numerous bloody injuries on the battlefield represent a continuation of Chang Cheh’s yanggang (staunch masculinity) aesthetics, but Woo, unlike his mentor, forgoes dismemberment scenes. Transitional wipes, used a total of sixteen times in the film, stand as its most prevalent cinematic technique—an homage to Kurosawa that is especially prominent when Chang and Tsing Yi attack Pak’s villa. Woo often uses rack focus to highlight the mental, emotional, and ethical gaps between characters—perhaps most notably when Tsing Yi is with a courtesan (Ngai Chau-wah) whose romantic overtures fail to spark his heart. To present the elaborate fight choreography that his stars completed generally without stunt doubles, Woo employs zooms, long takes, wide-angle shots, slow motion, reverse motion, and offscreen space. Some fight sequences proceed for over twenty individual ripostes before Woo shifts to a new camera angle. While the addition of comedy is most pronounced when Chang and Tsing Yi fight against the Sleeping Buddha, the duel between Chang and Pray (played by Fung Hak-on, the film’s martial-arts choreographer), who wants bragging rights as the greatest swordsman around, is pure skill. You can tell that the actors trained diligently with the right sword masters, then trained for this particular sword duel, and performed it to perfection. There is even a disarming technique that is unique in sword-fighting films, from Hong Kong or elsewhere: as Pray presents a new move that involves switching his saber from one hand to the other, Chang intercepts Pray’s sword midflight, between hands, disarming him before slicing his right forearm.

In Last Hurrah for Chivalry, Woo goes against Hollywood’s special-effects-laden approach to screen action in presenting a Sinophone version of a martial paragon: the rare occurrence when chivalric brotherhood triumphs over impossible odds, with one youxia brother sacrificing himself to protect another, and thus enshrining this ideal in perpetuity. Last Hurrah for Chivalry endures not only as a great action film but also as a prototype for much of the director’s massively influential later work.

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Aaron Han Joon Magnan-Park is Assistant Professor in the Department of Comparative Literature at the University of Hong Kong. He received his PhD in film studies from the University of Iowa. He specializes in Hong Kong action cinema, contemporary South Korean cinema, sound theory, poly-Asian cinema, and the cultural dynamics of Hollywood’s engagement with Asia. He is coeditor of The Palgrave Handbook of Asian Cinema. He has contributed to journals such as Asian Cinema and Journal of Chinese Cinemas and anthologies such as Chinese Connections: Critical Perspectives on Film, Identity, and Diaspora and Hong Kong Film, Hollywood and New Global Cinema.

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