Weird Wednesdays: Eastern Condors

This screening was part of the Alamo Drafthouse’s Weird Wednesday series. For upcoming shows, click here.

Full disclosure: I did not attend this screening because sometimes cars decide not to start. Luckily I got hooked up with the Criterion DVD from my pal at Austin Cult Film Club, Regurgitated Guts. Yes, that is his real name.

Eastern Condors (1987) is one of an intriguing group of Hong Kong action flicks set in and around the US-Vietnam War. But unlike John Woo’s A Bullet In the Head or Tsui Hark’s A Better Tomorrow III: Love and Death in Saigon, Sammo Hung’s film is set in 1976, after the conflict’s end.

A classic riff on The Dirty Dozen, the film follows a ragtag group of undocumented Chinese-Americans who are offered US citizenship in exchange for dropping into the jungle to destroy a cache of American weapons before the Viet Cong can find them. Shot on location (with Canada subbing for the US and the Philippines for Vietnam), Eastern Condors is one of the last of its kind of Hong Kong blockbuster, before the industry contracted to focus on smaller-scale crime films shot in HK and Macau.

At this point in his career, director-star Hung was competing not just with his HK peers but Hollywood-scale international productions. Born into a showbiz family, he started his career as one of an elite group of child performers, the Seven Little Fortunes, along with Jackie Chan. As an adult, he graduated from choreographing to directing period kung-fu films.

As both filmmaker and actor, Hung developed a reputation for ceding the spotlight to other cast members. On Eastern Condors, he surrounds himself with a murderer’s row of HK stars, including his fellow Little Fortunes; Yuen Biao and Corey Yuen and frequent collaborator Yuen Wo-Ping. 

The most fascinating casting choice is Cambodian-born Dr. Haing S. Ngor, a survivor of the Khmer Rouge regime who won an Oscar for his role in The Killing Fields. Here, he plays a mentally ill villager hiding a secret. The story eventually drops him into a questionable Russian roulette scene modeled on The Deer Hunter, but with kids.

While the US-Vietnam conflict overlapped with mainland China’s Cultural Revolution, Hong Kong’s status as a British administrative state allowed for a unique Western-friendly climate. American soldiers were known to visit the region on R&R breaks, and its film industry flourished as mainland China’s regressed to highly regulated patriotic documentaries and “model operas.”

By the mid-’80s, Hong Kong action movies had become a global phenomenon due to their storytelling through pure physicality, not unlike early silent cinema. As explained by critic Tony Rayns on the Criterion commentary, Hong Kong films utilize a unique film syntax. Unlike the Hollywood method of shooting scenes repetitively in master shots and close-ups, these filmmakers created every shot individually. The resulting footage, when edited in sequence, creates a propulsive flow of visual storytelling, with little context needed to understand what’s going on. (I can vouch for this phenomenon after watching Bullet In the Head with no dubbing or subtitles on a sketchy streaming site.)

Eastern Condors features an interesting political subtext, with little love shown to either the spirit of Communism or the can-do imperialism of the US military. The story treats the VC hordes as pure cannon fodder, and the head baddy, the “Giggling General” played by Yuen Wah, has a goofy-yet-sadistic Bond villain intensity. But it’s the American military that Hung targets with outright mockery in the opening scene, in which the head of the Condors crew (Mr. Vampire’s Lam Ching-ying) shows off his moves in front of some slack-jawed grunts.

The ‘80s were a period of upheaval in Chinese politics. The repressive Cultural Revolution eventually led to Deng Xiaoping’s policy of “opening up,” which allowed for some criticism of the previous government’s excesses.  While communism had the last laugh when China retook Hong Kong in 1997, the mainland’s relaxed cultural standards led to its own film industry surge in the late ‘80 and ‘90s, fueled by art-house hits like Zhang Yimou’s Farewell My Concubine.

That said, Hong Kong films from this era reign supreme when it comes to pure spectacle. From the moment the classic Golden Harvest logo illuminates the screen, Eastern Condors is unfiltered, hardcore Hong Kong exploitation, light on realism and loaded with gut-busting action. Many of the stunts are painful to watch - there are countless roundhouse kicks to some poor stuntman's head, many of which look concussion-worthy. The common HK cheap thrill of small animal death (in this case a snake) is also gruesomely represented, and gratuitous as ever.

But Hung also creates beautiful shots composed with the same painterly care as any American-made war epic, and the whole film bursts with A-list creative energy. The ambiguous ending, with the survivors’ fates uncertain, lingers as the credits roll. This would have been a blast to see with a lit audience.

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