Hardboiled

Hardboiled (or hard-boiled) fiction is a literary genre that shares some of its characters and settings with crime fiction (especially detective stories). Derived from the romantic tradition which emphasized the emotions of apprehension, awe, horror and terror, hardboiled fiction deviates from that tradition in the detective's cynical attitude towards those emotions. The attitude is conveyed through the detectives inner monologue describing to the audience what he is doing and feeling.

The genre's typical protagonist is a detective, who witnesses daily the violence of organized crime that flourished during Prohibition, while dealing with a legal system that had become as corrupt as the organized crime itself. Rendered cynical by this cycle of violence, the detectives of hardboiled fiction are classic antiheroes. Notable hardboiled detectives include Philip Marlowe, Mike Hammer, Sam Spade, and The Continental Op.

Origin of the term

The term comes from a process of hardening one's egg; to be hardboiled is to be comparatively tough. The hardboiled detective—originated by Carroll John Daly's Terry Mack and Race Williams and epitomized by Dashiell Hammett's Sam Spade and Raymond Chandler's Philip Marlowe—not only solves mysteries, like his "softer" counterparts, the protagonist confronts violence on a regular basis leading to the burnout and the cynical (so-called "tough") attitude towards one's own emotions.

Hard Boiled

Hard Boiled (Chinese: 辣手神探) is a 1992 Hong Kong action film written and directed by John Woo, and starring Chow Yun-fat as Inspector "Tequila" Yuen, Tony Leung Chiu-Wai as Alan an undercover cop, and Anthony Wong as Johnny Wong, a leader of the criminal triads. The film features Tequila, whose partner (Bowie Lam) is killed in a tea house gunfight with a small army of gangsters. One of the mob's high ranking assassins is the undercover cop Alan, who must team up with Tequila for their common pursuit of taking down Wong's crime syndicate. The film leads up to a climax in a hospital, where the two must rescue innocent civilians and new born babies from the maternity ward while fighting off dozens of mob hitmen.

Hard Boiled was John Woo's last Hong Kong film before his transition to Hollywood. After making films that glamorized gangsters (and receiving criticism for doing so), Woo wanted to make a Dirty Harry styled film to glamorize the police. After the death of screenwriter Barry Wong, the film's screenplay underwent constant changes during filming. New characters such as Mad Dog and Mr. Woo were introduced, while the original plotline of a baby poisoning psychopath was cut.

Hard boiled (disambiguation)

Hard boiled or hardboiled may refer to:

In media:

Music