A Fresh Look at Alan Tang

Regular readers of this Electric Shadows blog may already know that for eight years, from 1979 to 1986, I worked as a movie projectionist in Boston’s Chinatown. My boss owned two theaters, the Star and the China. The Star Cinema was the local showcase for Shaw Brothers productions; after it was enlarged to two screens, around 1980, we also ran the Cinema City comedies, Jet Li’s Shaolin Temple series, and Tsui Hark’s early films. The China showed mostly films from Taiwan. Every once in a while, I think of a movie or actor or director who made an impression on me back then and wonder, “What ever happened to so-and-so?” There are a lot of talented people from that era, the 70s and 80s, who are unknown or forgotten now – unjustly so, in my opinion.

Take Alan Tang Kwong-wing for example. He starred in a gritty “heroic bloodshed” film from 1984 called YELLOW PERIL. It stood out from other modern action films for several reasons – it was partly shot in San Francisco and briefly focussed on the lives of Chinese immigrants in the US, it featured the wuxia bad guy Chang Yi as a corrupt CIA agent (in a rare non-costume role for this actor), and it presented Alan Tang as an effortlessly cool badass, an ex-Marine who is also tangled up, through his relatives, with a Chinatown gang. When government agents wipe out a Vietnamese gang in Chinatown and try to pin the massacre on Tang’s people, the ensuing cat-and mouse game sees Tang run to ground in Hong Kong, where he is aided by Walter Tso Tat-wah as his elderly uncle. The CIA uses his wife and son to flush him from hiding and sets a Vietnamese guerilla squad on his trail. YELLOW PERIL is unavailable on video now, but I recently dug out and re-watched my old Ocean Shore VHS copy. It holds up pretty well, and even anticipates Chow Yun-fat’s iconic work with John Woo a couple of years later. The scenes where Tang uses a motorcycle to stalk the Vietnamese guys through a forest and a chase sequence in a mall are particularly well done.

Alan Tang and Joan Lin in 1975.

(My other indelible memory of Alan Tang is as the lead in 1979’s THE WICKEDNESS IN POVERTY, a kooky comedy that was so eye-poppingly surreal a friend of mine thought she was having an acid flashback while watching it at the China. That one is also unavailable, and maybe it’s a good thing.)

Alan Tang was extremely well known to Hong Kong audiences long before YELLOW PERIL was released. He was born in 1947 in Guangzhou, China, and settled in Hong Kong. In 1963, while still in high school, he was discovered by a film company looking for a new face to star in a film called THE STUDENT PRINCE. He continued to work steadily in youth-oriented melodramas and comedy, charming his fans and earning the nickname “The Prince.” He began to work in Taiwan around 1970, playing the romantic lead in dozens of films opposite actresses like Brigitte Lin, Joan Lin, and Chen Chen. It was around this time he also began to branch out into action films and tried his hand at producing. In 1973, he co-starred (with Timothy Brown and James Hong) in the English-language exploitation film DYNAMITE BROTHERS.

Still from DYNAMITE BROTHERS (1973).

In 1977, Alan Tang partnered with his brother Rover Tang to set up an independent production company (at first known as Wing-Scope and later as Hi-Gear), producing over two dozen films between 1977 and 1994. Many of these were action films, films that paralleled to a certain extent the type of films that John Woo was making with Chow Yun-fat. The physical elegance that made female fans swoon when Alan played a lover was increasingly put to service in stylish action scenes that saw him taking on armies of goons with fists, kicks, and guns. John Woo and Chow Yun-fat have gone on to international acclaim, but Alan Tang remains unknown. The best of his films from the latter part of his career – YELLOW PERIL (1984), FLAMING BROTHERS (1987), RETURN ENGAGEMENT (1990), GUN ‘N ROSE (1992) – definitely deserve a second look.

FLAMING BROTHERS and RETURN ENGAGEMENT were written by the celebrated arthouse director Wong Kar-wai, who early in his career was a protege of Alan Tang. Tang also produced Wong’s earliest films, AS TEARS GO BY (1988) and DAYS OF BEING WILD (1991). Alan Tang is well regarded in the Hong Kong film community as a stand-up guy, even though he retired from filmmaking in 1993 to go into the restaurant business. He was in the news a couple of years ago when he gave a eulogy at the funeral of his good friend, actress Lydia Shum, and used the occasion to lambaste her ex-husband for ill-treating her. Just last summer, The Standard, a Hong Kong newspaper, reported that Tang was the mastermind behind “Operation Yellow Bird,” a clandestine rescue mission that smuggled student activists out of China following the crackdown at Tiananmen Square in 1989. (Read the article here.) Hmm – sounds like a great idea for a movie!

Alan Tang (left) with Leslie Cheung and Wong Kar-wai at the Hong Kong Film Awards in 1991. The award was for Cheung’s performance in DAYS OF BEING WILD.

I’ll be looking at Alan Tang’s collaborations with Wong Kar-wai soon.

Watch a clip from YELLOW PERIL here.

Watch a clip from GUN ‘N ROSE here.