The Romanian film The Last Bullet was released in 1981.
The protagonist of the film is Sheriff Roman, and this film was preceded by a prequel, "Innocent Hand", but "Innocent Hand" was not screened until the last year of the eighties, and somehow when it was introduced at that time, the Roman Sheriff series was not introduced in the order of film shooting, according to the relationship between before and after.
In "The Innocent Hand", Miklovan, a friend of Sheriff Roman, is killed by the bandits, leaving the last bullet. In this episode, Sheriff Roman has been hiding his comrade's weapon in his arms, carrying the heart of revenge for his comrades, and finally eliminating the murderer who has been exposed in the previous episode.
In this way, when "The Last Bullet" was screened that year, the Chinese audience had no idea what happened to Sheriff Roman's comrade-in-arms, Sheriff Mikrovan, who died at the beginning of the film, nor did they understand what the last bullet that Sheriff Roman killed the ultimate bandit meant in the end.
It is worth noting that "Innocent Hands" is also one of the three films exhibited in the "Romanian Film Week" held in the last year of the 1980s, which shows that this film entered China and was also recommended by Luo Fang.
However, it is conceivable that when "The Innocent Hand" was screened in China, it was far less amazing to the Chinese audience when "The Last Bullet" was screened that year.
Today we can see a more complete "Last Bullet" film source from the Internet, when we compare the content of the film translated by the Translation Factory, we will find that when it was released in China in 1981, the film still cut off a lot of shots.
The cut shot focused on a dance scene in a nightclub. At that time, the bandits realized that Sheriff Roman was threatening him, so they sent their cronies to snare the killer and negotiate to kill Sheriff Roman.
In the nightclub, the bandit's cronies had a secret business with a killer, and the cronies took out a photo of Sheriff Roman, saying that the man had a personal vendetta against him, and asked the killer to kill him.
In this murderous scene, dancers in bikinis are there to throw their arms and thighs, fully demonstrating the talent for limb flexibility.
In the early 1980s, when China's reform and opening up had just started, such a lens was indeed a little out of the ordinary. The setting of this set of shots is a bit imitating the meaning of "Lenin in 1918". Because in the Soviet Union's "Lenin in 1918" movie, the place where terrorists plotted to assassinate was also in a luxurious ballet hall, and the ballet fragment of "Swan Lake" was performed on the stage, and surprisingly, when this film was screened in China, the Chinese audience had a special love for this "Swan Lake" episode full of artistic beauty, and the repressed nature of pursuing art made some Chinese audiences never forget this beautiful little swan dance.
Therefore, "The Last Bullet" arranges a scene of murder and overstepping goods in a dance scene with a rich artistic atmosphere, which can use the feminine atmosphere of art to dilute the fear of killing brought about by murder, and at the same time, it also makes people feel a kind of awakening, in this kind of body art exhibition with bare chest and bare arms, there is a conspiracy to stifle life, which highlights the strong contrast between this acura life and extinct life, resulting in a unique warning, vigilance and vigilance effect of "Three Words" and "Two Beats" involving this situation.
But when this kind of shot entered the Chinese theater, it did not hesitate to encounter the scissors of the Cheng bite gold blow, and the Chinese audience at that time did not have the opportunity to see what kind of scene the assassination plot was in.
The translation contains only this bokeh shot
We can now see in the previous translation that the only thing left in the release version at that time was two well-dressed bandits there to exchange heads and ears, conspiring to discuss, and the dancing girls in the background could not be seen at all if they did not pay attention. The few shots that escape the editing knife are the blurred backs of the conspirator's foreground, and you can see the dancing girl's soft willow-like body, and the details of the body are obscured by the camera.
Of course, the advantage of such a cutout is that it allows the audience to pay better attention to the foreground gunfight story, avoiding extraneous branches and interference from irrelevant elements.
The sequel to "The Innocent Hand", "The Last Bullet" is still influenced by the previous episode. The Battle of Ideas between two sheriffs is highlighted in "The Innocent Hand", with Roman believing in the law and his comrade-in-arms Miclowan believing in justice in the dark and advocating violence against violence. This is the theme of propaganda common to almost all cop films.
In "The Last Bullet", Sheriff Roman had to accept the idea of attacking poison with poison that his comrades had preached. At Microvin's grave, he uttered the words in his heart: "Or are you right?"
Later, in the film, Sheriff Roman gradually tended to violent law enforcement, he also punched and kicked the captured bandits, forcing the other party to confess the truth, and in the final face of the ultimate bandit, he did not stick to his legal bottom line at all, but pulled out a hidden gun, and a shot resulted in the life of the bandit.
Notice that his method of killing the bandits was exactly the same method used by his good friend Mikrovan at that time. Surrounded on all sides, Miclovin handed over the gun in his hand, but he still had a gun hidden in his trouser waist, and when he turned around, he quickly pulled out his gun and aimed it at his paralyzed opponent, and the sword made a strange move, killing him with one shot. This operation of his is exactly the trick of Roman to destroy his opponent in "The Last Bullet", which shows that Roman not only accepted the creed of his comrades, but also imitated Miklowwan's way of accidentally killing the enemy. He used the last bullet of his comrades-in-arms, which was material, and even more so, he used the concept of his comrades-in-arms to complete the final annihilation of the enemy.
Therefore, the tribute to the comrades in "The Last Bullet" is very profound, and the ceremony and tribute to the comrades are completed from two levels.
The audience who did not see the previous episode of "The Last Bullet", "The Innocent Hand", obviously could not see the profound meaning hidden in "The Last Bullet".
In terms of plot design, "The Last Bullet" is also a sublimation and deepening of the previous episode "Innocent Hand".
In "Innocent Hands", the target opponents of the police are a bunch of pure bandits, while in "The Last Bullet", they are hard-wired into international spies. In fact, this conversion of "The Last Bullet" is very blunt, from the plot point of view, the story line of "The Last Bullet" should have followed the story direction of "The Innocent Hand" and brought the bandits in the previous episode to justice, but this interpretation is only the dull end of the story in "The Innocent Hand", and there are not many clues to enrich the content of an episode, so in "The Last Bullet", there is another clue, that is, the robbers in the previous episode, involved in a spy case.
The bandit leader in the previous episode, Semarka, is involved in the espionage case in this episode, and Semarka's opponent also says, "We've got involved in politics." From this, we can see where "The Last Bullet" is upgrading "The Innocent Hand". In the future, in the Modowan series, it is more directly related to the political theme, far from being the opening "Innocent Hand" as a purely criminal issue.
In "The Last Bullet", a former German spy was arranged, this person was Romanian, who had been serving Hitler during World War II, and could be called a living archive of the German spy agency, and these spy secrets in his hands were still a hot and important source of information in the "Cold War" era that had been opened after the end of World War II, so the Allies also sent a colonel to contact him, intending to get this German spy in hand, from the Legacy of the Nazis, to obtain the odds of the upcoming Cold War.
This plot, in fact, is very blunt, and is a new addition to "The Last Bullet". How to make this clue intertwined into the tracking of the bandit Semarka in the previous episode is the key to convincing "The Last Bullet". In the film, it is specifically stated that the Allied colonel makes a deal with Semarka, and from the film's narrative, the Allies hope that Sebaka will help them find the German spy and then flee abroad together.
Through such a plot connection, the Semarca bandits in the previous episode were finally pulled into the international espionage case. Then in the monastery, a dark war that occupies nearly a third of the film begins, and Sheriff Roman also goes deep into the enemy's nest and infiltrates the monastery, where he finds semarka's accomplices in the hijacking case committed in the previous episode, which consolidates Semarka's guilt, and at the same time, also finds the whereabouts of the German spy, and finally captures the two newly added political enemies in this episode when the German spy escapes with the Allied colonel.
After capturing these two enemies derived from the extraneous branches, the film returns to the theme of catching the murderer in "Innocent Hand", and Sheriff Roman receives a notice from his superiors and goes to the fireworks alley to arrest Semarca, where the criminal is terminated and the film's punishment target is completed.
It can be seen that "The Last Bullet" is the same as the previous episode, the plot clues in the movie are introduced through the peripheral information provider to cut into the window, report the information, and then follow the vine to touch the melon, track all the way down, and find the ultimate murderer. Therefore, "The Last Bullet", like "The Innocent Hand", is different from Holmes's reasoning line, but the "whistleblowing mode" of coming and going without a trace starts the development process of the story.
In "The Last Bullet", at the beginning, it is the brother of the thief who provided important information to Sheriff Roman in "The Innocent Hand" Who gave Roman an important piece of information, reporting that his owner was hiding weapons, and this owner was the brother of the ultimate bandit Semarca that Roman had been chasing, so that a fortuitous plot inadvertently helped Roman to track down the real murderer, and there was no reasoning from the clues to interpret it, so, In this kind of film routine in Romania, there is no trace of the reasoning film, but through a clue that it highlights itself, it opens the pursuit path of the film, and then shows the hot gun battle in the movie on this story chain that extends all the way.
In this film, it can be seen that the film deliberately shows the gunfights on the train, the car chase scenes on the winding mountain roads, the gun battles on the snowy fields, etc., and arranges these scenes into the various story line periods in the movie, which completes the plot direction of the film's ups and downs, dazzling, and tight, which has made the film have enough attractive elements. In fact, aside from a firefight scene launched every once in a while in the movie, the story of the whole movie is actually very concise and clear, and there is no esoteric reverse conception and profound analysis of human nature.
And this kind of hot scene, when the Chinese audience in the eighties unfolded in front of the eyes, obviously has enough horror and astonishment, so that the Romanian film once became the leader in foreign entertainment films, in fact, from today's point of view, its firefight scene, the head of the shooting is more disordered, the camera is also shaking, the character's psychological activity in tit-for-tat confrontation did not make a follow-up portrayal, so although the film is dubbed by the translation factory, the lines in the movie, However, it is rare to see the lines in "The Hunt", which is also from the translator's hand, and the words are full of pearls, which cannot but be said to be the lack of awareness and skill of Romanian entertainment films in portraying characters.
In the film screening environment of the 1980s, too many naked body shots were still the focus of the film editing knife to wait for the rabbit object. The cut-out dancing scene in "The Last Bullet" follows the same deletion principle as the fragrant scene of the dancers' group dance deleted in the romanian film "Oak Tree, 100,000 Fires".
When we are accustomed to such shots showing women's bodies today, and then visit the hidden little secrets that seem like tidbits and anecdotes in the process of the introduction of our Chinese translation and production, perhaps we can feel the changes and progress of the concept of the times more personally and realistically.
This article is original by "literary private secrets", exposing the hidden intentions of culture, highlighting the key points of creation, grasping the meaning of human nature, and penetrating the truth of the soul, please correct. If you want to reprint, you must obtain your consent and please indicate the source.
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