The film title A Better To- morrow turned out to be prophetic.

Before the release of the gangster drama in 1986, director John Woo had been struggling in the scene for more than 10 years without a hit, actor Chow Yun Fat had been box office poison whose goggle-box popularity had not translated to the big screen and Ti Lung was best known for his wuxia roles at Shaw Brothers in the 1970s.

What a difference a day – or a movie – makes. A Better Tomorrow set a new record in Hong Kong with a gross of more than HK$34 million, made Chow a star and revitalised Ti Lung’s flagging career.

Not bad for a movie made on a tight budget that was a remake of a 1967 Cantonese flick, The Story Of A Discharged Prisoner. (The Chinese title, though, literally True Colours Of A Hero, remained the same.)

Woo’s version was critically acclaimed and earned the distinction of winning Best Film honours at both the Hong Kong Film Awards and the Golden Horse Awards, arguably the two most prestigious accolades in the Chinese movie industry.

The stature of A Better Tomorrow has grown over time: In 2005, it was No. 2 on the Best 100 Chinese Motion Pictures list selected for the Hong Kong Film Awards, after Spring In A Small Town (1948).

More than two decades after its release, it has inspired a Korean remake of the same name. It opens in cinemas here on Friday.

The success of the film resulted in the creation of a subgenre that was termed “heroic bloodshed” by the editor of Eastern Heroes magazine, Rick Baker, in the late 1980s. He succinctly defined it as “a Hong Kong action film that features a lot of gun play and gangsters rather than kung fu. Lots of blood. Lots of action”.

Woo transplanted the themes of brotherhood, loyalty and righteousness from the wuxia genre into a mobster setting. Then he pumped up the volume on the violence with exuberantly explosive gun battles.

Often, the drama was found in brothers, in arms and in blood, torn between conflicting loyalties as they found themselves on opposite sides of the law.

A typical John Woo-esque entry in the “gun-fu” genre is Johnnie To’s A Hero Never Dies (1998), where Leon Lai and Lau Ching Wan are on opposite sides of a gang war until they are both betrayed by their bosses.

In the streets, A Better Tomorrow inadvertently sold countless pairs of sunglasses of the kind Chow wore in the film.

Woo used the shades from French actor Alain Delon’s eponymous lifestyle brand in homage to the star’s iconic turn as a perfectionist hitman in Jean-Pierre Melville’s stylish thriller Le Samourai (1967).

When the sunglasses promptly flew off the shelves in Hong Kong after the movie came out, Delon sent Chow a personal thank-you note.

Of course, teenage boys who wanted to look cool not only put on shades, they also wore the trenchcoats worn by the swaggering gangsters. They even came to be known colloquially in Cantonese as Mark Gau lau, literally Brother Mark’s coat.

Woo’s leap from sword fights in a little-known wuxia movie such as Last Hurrah For Chivalry (1979) to gun fights was not such an unlikely one given that his mentor was Chang Cheh, the so-called godfather of Hong Kong cinema who was behind martial arts hits such as The One-Armed Swordsman (1967).

The impact of these films went beyond Hong Kong.

Hollywood film-makers such as Quentin Tarantino, who made the violent crime caper Reservoir Dogs (1992), have openly acknowledged the debt they owe to the works of Woo, To and Ringo Lam.

The cultural impact of the film has extended far and wide into the unlikeliest of places, including hip-hop and Japanese anime.

The New York City collective Wu- Tang Clan name-checked the film in their album Wu Tang-Forever (1997) and the hit TV series Cowboy Bebop (1998-1999) referenced it heavily.

There were also, inevitably, the two sequels spawned by Woo’s film, A Better Tomorrow 2 (1987) and A Better Tomorrow 3 (1989), both of which starred Chow.

In fact, no actor came to be more strongly associated with this genre than him, as A Better Tomorrow was the beginning of a fruitful collaboration between Woo and Chow.

The two teamed up on action-crime classics such as The Killer (1989) and Hard Boiled (1992) in which a rakish Chow honed his gun-toting and toothpick-chewing skills to a fine art.

Woo continued to explore similar thematic ground after he headed to the United States in 1993 in action thrillers such as Face/Off (1997), his biggest American hit with a worldwide gross of US$245 million then.

But his stylistic touches were starting to turn into cliches and the flying doves, the Mexican stand-offs and the use of slow-motion and freeze frames were threatening to descend into self-parody.

One can even argue over how well A Better Tomorrow itself has held up, but what seems clear is that it continues to excite and inspire and this, perhaps, is its most enduring legacy.

(ST)