It’s a great time to be a John Woo fan. After years of being unavailable (because of the rights being held hostage by the now-defunct Weinstein Firm offshoot, Dragon Dynasty), the enduring Cinema Metropolis/Golden Princess movie archive has been newly liberated, with Shout! Manufacturing facility going again to the archives and re-releasing all the motion maestro’s classics. Just about all of them can be found digitally (The Criterion Channel is showcasing all of them this month), however Shout! has additionally been placing out 4K Blu-rays which are completely loaded with additional options. Most likely essentially the most elaborate set they’re issuing is the one for the A Higher Tomorrow trilogy.
If you happen to’re unaware of this collection, the primary A Higher Tomorrow movie was John Woo’s first heroic bloodshed film, introducing Chow Yun-Fats in a star-making position because the pistol-packing gangster Mark Gor. A sequel was made (regardless of Gor being killed within the first movie), in addition to a prequel, which Woo didn’t direct. All the trilogy is offered on this set, however what’s actually cool is that the second movie, A Higher Tomorrow 2, contains a newly found workprint that runs a full half hour longer than the unique.
The manufacturing of the second movie was notoriously fraught, with Woo’s closing lower of the film hacked to ribbons. Many believed it was misplaced perpetually, however Shout! found it within the Hong Kong Movie Archive, the place it was mislabeled as an English dub. Whereas in considerably tough form, the film was accomplished by Woo and printed from a legit 35mm copy. Whereas worn, it’s extraordinarily watchable, and it’s fascinating to see what was lower out of the movie.
It seems the enduring closing gunfight was closely edited earlier than launch, operating simply over ten minutes within the unique lower. Within the workprint, it runs twenty minutes. There’s a complete host of latest footage, together with a sword battle between Ti Lung’s character and the notorious murderer with sun shades, who later trades weapons with Chow Yun-Fats’s Ken. In actual fact, that scene itself goes on so much longer, with them additionally buying and selling ammunition and flipping a coin. It’s additionally much more violent, and the film has a completely completely different ending in comparison with the extra ambiguous one within the launched model.
Whereas the workprint is fascinating, arguably the unique lower is superior, however it’s nonetheless unbelievable to have this misplaced model included within the Blu-ray set. What’s notable is that even Woo himself had no thought this model nonetheless existed—he doesn’t point out it in his interview included with the set. In actual fact, within the interview he mentions how a lot he regretted slicing a scene the place Chow Yun-Fats’s Ken and his friendship with the black New York Cop who helps him out within the Chinese language restaurant scene is fleshed out. It’s current within the workprint. The interview itself is nice, with Woo freely admitting he had little interest in making a sequel. The explanation he made it was that his boss and good friend Dean Shek (who co-stars within the film) went right into a suicidal melancholy and moved to America. Woo and co-producer Tsui Hark had been terrified he’d kill himself, so that they flew to America to deliver him house, and so they used this as the idea for the movie’s story, the place Shek’s character has a breakdown. Woo additionally admits that new weapons had been popping out of the West that he needed to showcase within the movie, so he gave in, made the film, and says he really had fun making it since he cherished the solid and staging the motion.
So, in case you like A Higher Tomorrow 2 as a lot as I do (regardless of its flaws), this set is a no brainer. It comes out on November 18th, however you possibly can pre-order it HERE!
