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Chow Yun-Fat

November 17, 2001 • Film, Profiles

Dashing and ebullient, Chow Yun-fat has been likened to all sorts of round-eye stars. The enlivening Cary Grant of the great comedies is a good place to start — the guy who always gets Katherine Hepburn because he’s such great fun to hang with. But Chow can also resemble the glamorously conflicted Alain Delon of the Jean-Pierre Melville gangster films, expiring from gunshot wounds in perfect evening clothes. (In the first of his soulful crook roles Chow wore Delon’s signature brand of sunglasses. When Hong Kong’sentire supply of the classy shades promptly sold out, Delon mailed Chow a “thank you” card.)

The breadth of Chow’s appeal has no equivalent in this country. No American star has ever been hugely popular as a clown, a lover and a fighter simultaneously. Imagine the most engaging qualities of Jack Lemmon, Robert Taylor and Steve McQueen somehow magically co-mingled, with a pinch of Al Pacino on the side, only Chinese, and you may begin to get the drift. In every kind of role Chow’s presence conveys boundless pleasure, and his exuberance is contagious. “When the people look at me,” Chow suggests, “they see themselves.”

Chow Yun-fat is a populist entertainer, not a self-styled pop aristocrat like most American stars. In all of his Chicago interviews he stressed the modesty of his birth in an island village, his blue collar employment as a cab driver and hotel porter, supporting his widowed mother and four siblings. Show business was a “miracle.” At 17, in 1973, Chow was ushered into a free training program offered by the HK-TVB television network, and a year later the network owned his services for three more, at the less than princely rate of HK$500.00 per month. Chow’s account of his training recalls the elegiac triple bio-pic Painted Faces, in which three boys are handed over to a Peking Opera Academy, with its free education and indentured servitude, because their parents can’t afford conventional schooling. (The boys grew up to be Jackie Chan, Sammo Hung and Yuen Biao.) The Peking Opera system may be fading, but its tutorial philosophy lives on at HK-TVB.

Chow was a TV idol until 1986, trading-in his initial three-year contract for a much more lucrative ten-year pact. He first achieved wide popularity in 1976, as the necessary young hunk on a prime time soap called Hotel. (“Mon emploi le plus courant etait celui de seductuer,” Chow told Olivier Assayas of Cahiers du Cinema.) He consolidated his winnings as a crime boss in a white tropical suit in the 1980 series Shanghai Bund, “un plagiat de Borsalino.” Chow worked incessantly in TV, and on top of his heavy video workload he began making features on the side, because he needed some extra money to buy his mother a new house. The first film he says he actually thought was good was Ann Hui’s The Story of Woo Viet in 1981.

By age 34, Chow Yun-fat had made hundreds of movies, 12 in1988 alone. “In the Hong Kong personality,” he explains, “once you get a hit you must earn quick money. If the bosses offer it, you just take. A big reason is 1997. Nobody knows what will happen when Red China takes over. Everybody is looking out for themselves, for a chance to make money that they can take away.”

Chow seems to have tried anything at least once. He has pranced around in drag in hambone sex farces like Johnny Ko’s Eighth Happiness and pined handsomely in love-death melodramas like Tony Au’s Dream Lovers. He has also turned in delicate naturalistic portrayals, his best work so far, in a couple of Hong Kong’s rare art movies. In Mabel Cheung’s An Autumn’s Tale he was a thin-skinned gypsy cab driver in New York, and in Stanley Kwan’s Love Unto Waste an eccentric cop investigating a senseless murder among HK’s fashionably bored youth set. His late entrance was a godsend, as if Lt. Columbo had suddenly slouched into the zoned-out atmosphere of Less Than Zero.

Chow Yun-fat reminds most people of the glossy American stars of the ’30s, but he weighs himself against current yankee heavyweights like Nicholson, De Niro and Duvall. “I mostly want to put real stuff into my movies,” he says. “Even wild comedy can be true, the characters can be real. I came from a very basic background and saw a lot of poverty. I worked with people in many different jobs. I wouldn’t be comfortable playing a university professor, you know, but if I’m playing a cab driver, I’m the real one.” Perhaps its this quest for authenticity that spurs Chow to post-dub his own dialog. All HK films are shot without sound — because the island is noisy, because it saves money, because the global Asian audience speaks so many different languages and dialects. Many of Chow’s colleagues feel that the lengthy recording sessions are a waste of time. They go straight on to the next project, leaving their regular “voice doubles” behind in the studio.

Chow has played at least one university type, however, puffing a pipe and pontificating in one of his loopiest pictures, The Seventh Curse, fending off spinal-cord-eating walking skeletons and other icky S.F.X. creations. It’s hard to imagine an American actor who could make movies this silly and still be taken seriously. But apparently in Hong Kong the occasional necessity of such efforts is understood. For film scholar Paul Fonoroff, at least, Chow Yun-fat remains “the best actor in Asia.” And Chow expresses regret that prior commitments prevented him from accepting the offered deaf-mute role in Hou Hsiao-hsien’s A City of Sadness.

—David Chute

Hong Kong Filmography:

1975 Learned Bride Thrice Fools Bridegroom
1976 Hunter, the Butterfly, and the Crocodile,The
1976 Massage Girls
1976 Reincarnation, The
1977 Hot Blood
1978 Miss O
1978 Their Private Lives
1980 Joy to the World
1980 Police Sir
1980 See-Bar
1981 Executioner, The
1981 Story of Woo Viet, The
1982 Postman Strikes Back
1983 Blood Money
1983 Bund Part II, The
1983 Bund, The
1983 Head Hunter, The
1983 Last Affair, The
1984 Hong Kong 1941
1984 Love in a Fallen City
1984 Occupant, The
1985 Why Me?
1985 Women
1985 100 Ways to Murder Your Wife
1986 Better Tomorrow, A

1986 Dream Lovers
1986 Hearty Response, A
1986 Love Unto Waste
1986 Lunatics, The
1986 Missed Date, The
1986 Seventh Curse, The
1986 Story of Rose, The ]
1986 Witch from Nepal
1986 You Will I Will
1987 Autumn’s Tale, An
1987 Better Tomorrow II, A
1987 City on Fire
1987 Code of Honour
1987 Flaming Brothers
1987 Prison on Fire
1987 Rich and Famous
1987 Romancing Star, The
1987 Scared Stiff
1987 Spiritual Love
1987 Tragic Hero
1988 Cherry Blossoms
1988 City War
1988 Diary of a Big Man
1988 Eight Happiness, The
1988 Fractured Follies
1988 Goodbye, Hero
1988 Greatest Lover, The
1988 Romancing Star II, The
1988 Tiger on Beat

1989 All About Ah Long

1989 Better Tomorrow III
1989 God of Gamblers
1989 Killer, The
1989 Triads – The Inside Story
1989 Wild Search
1990 Fun, The Luck & The Tycoon, The

1991 Once a Thief

1991 Prison on Fire 2
1992 Film Without Bounds
1992 Full Contact
1992 Hard Boiled
1992 Now You See Love, Now You Don’t
1994 God of Gamblers’ Return
1994 Treasure Hunt
1995 Peace Hotel

U.S. Filmography

1997 The Replacement Killers
1998 The Corruptor
1999 Anna & The King
2000 Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon

Ref. Hong Kong Cinema database (If anyone knows where this resource has moved to, please contact us.)

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