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.

John Woo

John Woo SBS (Ng Yu-Sum; born 1 May 1946) is a Hong Kong film director, writer, and producer. He is considered a major influence on the action genre, known for his highly chaotic action sequences, Mexican standoffs, and frequent use of slow motion. Woo has directed several notable Hong Kong action films, among them, A Better Tomorrow (1986), The Killer (1989), Hard Boiled (1992), and Red Cliff (2008/2009). His Hollywood films include the action films Hard Target (1993) and Broken Arrow (1996), the sci-fi action thriller Face/Off (1997) and the action spy film Mission: Impossible II (2000). He also created the comic series Seven Brothers, published by Virgin Comics. Woo cites his three favorite films as David Lean's Lawrence of Arabia, Akira Kurosawa's Seven Samurai and Jean-Pierre Melville's Le Samouraï.

Early life

Woo was born Wu Yu-Seng (Ng Yu-Sum in Cantonese) in Guangzhou, China, amidst the chaos of the Chinese Civil War at the end of October, 1946. Because of school age restrictions, his mother changed his birth date to 22 September 1948, which is what remains on his passport. The Christian Woo family, faced with persecution during Mao Zedong's early anti-bourgeois purges after the communist revolution in China, fled to Hong Kong when he was five.