Country: Hong Kong
Genre: Bullet Ballet
Director: Chor Yuen
Year: 1990
Rating: 
TRASH CINEMA HIGHLY RECOMMENDED MOVIE
It’s a funny thing: the action in Blood Stained Tradewinds, while copious, is pretty routine for a Golden Age of Hong Kong Cinema bullet ballet, but that’s almost besides the point.
Director Chor Yuen has more on his mind than just thrilling us with crazy stunts and pyrotechnics.
Blood Stained Tradewinds has two main concerns: fate and the corrupting influence of power.
Cheng (Alex Fong), Xiong (the underrated Waise Lee), and Fang (Carrie Ng) are inseparable, and have been since they were kids. Xiong is the nephew of gang boss Uncle Long (Bao Fang). Fang is Uncle Long’s daughter. When Cheng’s parents were killed, Uncle Long adopted Cheng and raised him as his own son.
Both Cheng and Xiong are both romantically interested in Fang, but Fang clearly has her eye on Cheng. In fact, as the story opens, everything is breaking Cheng’s way. Uncle Long has decided to make Cheng the boss after his iminent retirement. Clearly, it’s Cheng’s fate to have everything handed to him on a plate. He’s one of life’s winners and poor Xiong is clearly one of life’s losers.
There’s only one problem — Cheng doesn’t want the position. It’s not that he’s a coward — he exhibits reckless bravery. Though it’s never spelled out, I think Cheng doesn’t want to disrupt his friendship with Fang and Xiong. He wants things to just keep on the way they’re going, with him and Xiong jointly running the gang.
Unfortunately, in bucking fate, Cheng sets in motion a string of disasters that threaten to destroy the gang, as much from within as from without.
These disasters comprise the secondary theme, as different factions within the gang form alliances and betray each other. Blood Stained Tradewinds is a cry of despair at the lack of solidarity among the Chinese people. Ben Song (Lam Wai), the leader of a gang of Yakuza interlopers, remarks that the Japanese never fight among themselves.
The uniformly fine character acting helps to put across director Chor Yuen’s themes. Aside from the leads, Lo Lieh and Ricky Yi as two of Uncle Long’s top lieutenants are especially noteworthy.
But in the end, the emotional heft and philosophical enquiry that elevates Blood Stained Tradewinds above the average Triad flick derives from questions implied from the narrative such as “Is it a flaw in the human character itself that causes men to struggle to attain absolute power at the expense of everything else?” And if the answer to that question is “Yes,” does that mean that the rare man who doesn’t desire this power is the only one qualified to wield it?
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