The Brothers [差人大佬博命仔 or 龍兄虎弟] (1979)
Starring Lau Wing, Danny Lee, Chow Lai-Kuen, Ku Feng, Nam Hung, Chiang Tao, Ricky Wong Chung-Tsu, Harada Riki, Chan Shen, Alan Chan Kwok-Kuen, Wang Han-Chen, Yang Chi-Ching, Wong Ching-Ho, Hung Ling-Ling, Cheng Kei-Ying, Ng Hong-Sang, Fung Ging-Man
Directed by Hua Shan
Expectations: Not much, I don’t even know if there’s much martial arts in this one.
The Brothers is a remake of the 1975 Indian classic, Deewaar, which was apparently one of the first Indian films to feature martial arts sequences inspired by Hong Kong movies. I know very little about Indian film, but from what I understand this became a huge trend going forward; the HK-style martial arts were certainly in full effect in 1995’s Alluda Majaka! So The Brothers is a Hong Kong film inspired by an Indian film inspired by HK cinema! Due to this, it has a different feel than your standard ’70s Hong Kong movie, with more of a focus on interpersonal melodrama.
I racked my brain trying to come up with anything else quite like it in the Shaw Brothers catalog, fusing melodrama, martial arts, and gunplay in such a way (presumably like Deewaar before it). At its heart, The Brothers is a modern-day drama, but it also just so happens to feature action on-par with a straight-up action movie. Obviously Chang Cheh and others had crafted films delivering side-by-side drama and action, but The Brothers feels like an entirely different approach to storytelling. I’m not sure how to express it, honestly, but my assumption is that this a carried-over element from Deewaar. The action is also so varied that it feels at times like a proto-Jackie Chan film, or a proto-John Woo heroic bloodshed sort of thing, with the specific Shaw elements of the production tying it to older Chang Cheh genre experiments like Vengeance and The Singing Killer. The closest thing might actually be Hua Shan’s earlier film To Kill a Jaguar, as while that film is a more modern-day take on wuxia, it mixes in gunplay and martial arts in a similar way.