History favors a clean, simple narrative, which can sometimes mean shuffling contemporaries to the back in order to bring a Great Man to the fore. Posterity remembers Ingmar Bergman as the director who brought Swedish cinema to the American mainstream, while his countryman Vilgot Sjöman remains little-known outside cinephile circles; entry-level classes teach Akira Kurosawa as the standard-bearer for Japan’s mid-century output, and save Yasujiro Ozu for advanced courses.
Too frequently has “heroic bloodshed” cinema, the action boom that doused Hong Kong in fake blood during the ’80s and ’90s, been (hard-)boiled down to John Woo, leaving the rest of the movement to the hard-core VHS-trawlers. But last week, the great Chinese filmmaker Lam Ling-tung — better known by his chosen name, Ringo — died at age 63, giving sad occasion to revisit the work of a true genius never granted the crossover popularity of his peers. He, too, told stories of cops and criminals with a stylized, hyperviolent aesthetic that made him an idol to Quentin Tarantino and the generation of genre obsessives that followed in his wake. His work is singly his own, however, generally eschewing the dove-flutters and flying-pistol-kicks of the gun fu school pioneered by Woo. Lam situated himself one small notch closer to reality, couching a cynical perspective on inner-city society and law enforcement within an often outrageous style informed by his background in comedy and early training as an actor.
For those neophytes looking to learn more about Lam and his filmography, Vulture has put together a cursory primer on five of his finest efforts.
