Possibly one of the great gangster movies, looking at the young people around the edges of triads in a Hong Kong slum and the competing demands and pressures they are all under, every heirarchy is shown to be corrupt and corrosive, every relationship with authority abusive.
It's shown without any romance, with flashes of violence that have few things in common with most cinema violence and while staying rooted in character the whole time.
Like taking four or five of those wordless media changing Jim Steranko pages from different Nick Fury stories and making no attempt to provide any connecting material beyond a good soundtrack.
One of the most comic book of all comic book movies but also completing the circle linking those comic books and Feuillade or Mabuse
I guess I'm just going to watch this every few years for the rest of my life and keep finding different things to enjoy in it. This time it was finding Leiutenant Doyle more hilarious than usual and admiring everything Kelly brought to it.
Oh and the construction, the way the events in the other apartments are used to divert Stewart (and of course us) at key moments or to have him on the phone about lonelyhearts so he can talk straight to the police, a perfectly plotted movie.
But everything else was great too, is there a film Thelma Ritter doesn't elevate?
My opportunities for watching films are often quite limited, and often coincide with looking after my daughter and I have hundreds of films here to watch. So I tend to go for fairly short films and fit a few into my film watching days. Which means films like this, which I was always sure I would love, tend to sit unwatched for years at a time.
Which is a shame, as the long run time that makes me opt to…
