Vengeance!

Released in May 1970, Chang Cheh's Vengeance! occupies its own, distinct, space between the halting nausea of John Boorman's Point Blank and the suited-and-booted vendetta powering a certain British crime film directed by Mike Hodges. Chang's film even seems to anticipate certain elements of that latter piece: both Vengeance! and 1971's Get Carter feature the immaculately tailored brother of a murdered man wading, almost effortlessly, through a nest of small-time crooks while pursued by a deadly sniper. Curiously, Vengeance's Hong Kong cinema release came just three months after the publication of the book Carter was based on, Ted Lewis' Jack's Return Home, so it's conceivable that someone at Shaw Brothers Studio was taking notes on the novel's broad plotting when outlining this feature. All that said, the crisp mod lines of David Chiang's buttoned-up suits - both black and a funereal white - definitively prefigure Carter's luxuriant three-piece. 

Chang uses these outfits to differentiate his stylish subject from the unbuttoned heavies that flank his enemies. They accentuate the actor's lither lines. The contrast is clear: David Chiang is a matinee idol in a sea of unremarkable slobs. Unlike the aforementioned Michael Caine classic, Vengeance! though finds space to detail the killing that incites such a bloody, single-minded response. The film spends time with Ti Lung's Guan Yu Lou, a theatrical performer who believes himself as tough (mostly with good reason) as the Chinese folk heroes he portrays on stage. After tangling with a local mobster over an unfaithful wife, Guan Yu meets a bloody end thanks to the small army of amoral retainers that the crime lord keeps on payroll. Chang and editor Chiang Hsing-Lung employ a sickly dreaminess to describe this killing, drawing a clear line between the death throes of this bloodied brother and the twirling acrobatics of his earlier, operatic, performance. When Ti Lung's character finally submits to the punctures stamped all over his body, Chang inserts a shot of the actor lying dead on stage, the curtains open and appalled before an unmoved audience. 

Revenge in this film then is demonstrably motivated by a collective indifference to the murder of a slighted individual, one who had found himself powerless when attacking the corruption that upholds the establishment. This grudge must then be resolved by the actor's younger, meaner brother. Vengeance!, much like Chang's previous hit The Wandering Swordsman, is comfortable literalising the thoughts that prickle across the minds of these dying men; the fantasies and flights of fancy that hint at a life beyond whichever suicide pact that have, willingly, sunken themselves into. Although Chiang's Guan Xiao Lou proves himself far more capable than his older brother - equalising a feud that, eventually, seems to encompass an entire province's worth of violent belligerents - the end result is no less fatal. Bleeding out, he imagines himself in the company of his older brother, a cheery connection perhaps missing in the lives these men actually lived. This hallucinogenic quality reaches out into the rest of film, even encompasses the depiction of violence. Pivotal maulings are slowed to a crawl, luxuriating in eerie music and ghoulish sound cues that seem to denote an episode of profound mania - an aesthetic flourish, incidentally, copied to great effect to describe the bloodlust felt by Bruce Lee in 1973's Enter the Dragon.