Wen 丨 Kaiyin
Two days ago, at TVB's annual "Thousand Stars Awards Ceremony", David Jiang received the trophy of the Thousands of Brilliant Performing Arts Awards from his brother Qin Pei, and Dillon, the screen partner who had been close to him in his early years of fame, stood next to him.
Although before Jiang David took the stage, Dillon, who looked a little old, talked a lot of emotionally on the stage, but as soon as Jiang David came on the stage, he retreated to the side to remain silent, and the two people did not really communicate on the stage. Just as David Jiang raised the trophy above his head to thank his deceased mentor Zhang Che, Dillon also fell into contemplation.
It can be clearly seen that the feud between the former golden partners has not been completely resolved, although the friendship will last forever, but the heart knot is still there. This is also an old thing in the film industry that has made countless Hong Kong film fans sigh.
From today's point of view, Jiang Di and his wife in the 1970s are the best golden CP in the history of Chinese films. Even in the context of world cinema, in non-comedy genre films, such a pair of stars that produce a huge commercial effect in just a few years is very rare.
It should be said that the original success of the two of them contained a deep mutual borrowing factor, and this was also closely related to the screen aesthetic style pursued by Zhang Che, the master of martial arts films who selected and cultivated them.
Dillon and David Jiang both debuted on the screen in the form of a beautiful child, but their endowments and temperaments are not the same.
Dillon's family is cold, he has not been educated by art since childhood, but he is tall and beautiful, with a handsome and masculine atmosphere, Zhang Che picked him to star in "Dead End" at a glance from more than a dozen auditions. Jiang David was born in an acting family, appeared in movies since he was a child, although the family fell in the middle, but he always carried a rich family's untamed temperament. He was a little thin and thin, but there was always a hint of "bad" smile hanging from the corners of his mouth, which gave him a rebellious temperament that was rare among Hong Kong actors at that time.
"Dead End"
In "Dead End", director Zhang Che once borrowed Dillon's mouth to describe him as The James Dean of Hong Kong, which is a very appropriate positioning. The stage name "Dillon" is taken from the Hong Kong translation of Alain Delong's name, which also shows the target of Dillon's inner goal when he debuted.
Since the late 1960s, Zhang Che has been immersed in the genre innovation of new martial arts films. He was not satisfied with the fact that female stars dominated the Hong Kong screen at that time and male actors could only play supporting roles, which was intended to reshape the dominance of male actors in action movies, and thus had the intention of portraying male friendship through action movies.
At this time, Zhang Che's royal xiaosheng Wang Yu fled because of the internal contradictions of the Shao company, and when no one was available, he found Di Jiang and the two at almost the same time. A masculine and a feminine can just replace the male and female combinations that the audience is accustomed to and form a dual protagonist with contrasting temperaments. Maybe this is slightly unfair to David Jiang, but Zhang Che's original underlying intention was indeed to "squeeze" the screen display space of female characters with a certain neutral feminine temperament similar to James Dean of Jiang David.
Revenge
This is particularly evident in the triangle of "men and women" and "men" that Zhang Che strives to portray in "Dead End": many fans interpret the friendship between David Jiang and Dillon characters in the film as the same-sex emotions that can overwhelm the love relationship between Dillon and Li Jing.
However, the personal screen temperament image of Di Jiang and his wife was not fixed from the beginning. In the first film they collaborated on, "Dead End", Dillon played an unruly young man in the shape of a wandering skeleton, challenging social ethics with a rebellious personality; instead, David Jiang's character was characterized by loyalty and deep affection.
The film actually adopts a setting supplemented by Dillon as the main Jiang David, but it is not so ideal in "Dead End", Dillon's own personality's generous and straightforward endowment and rebellious character personality do not completely match, and Jiang David does not fully play his free and free charm.
Zhang Che quickly adjusted their role settings, and in the subsequent "Bodyguard", the two had a drastic change: Jiang David was a maverick with a seemingly weak but explosive chivalrous, Dillon was a simple and brave bodyguard with a straightforward personality, and the focus of the film was obviously biased towards Jiang David's side.
The Bodyguard
This setting immediately plays a role in finishing touches, and the tone of the film unfolds smoothly at the level of contrasting and unifying the yin and yang of the character image. Di Jiang and his wife starred in more than a dozen films with such a configuration in the following two years, whether it was a martial arts film or a Republican action film or a fashion youth film, Zhang Che continued this setting in the general direction.
The film may differ slightly in tone —such as the frivolity in "Unsung Heroes," the bloody cruelty in "The Great Duel," or the youthful heroism in "The Young Man"—but Di Ginger's performances have always followed a similar logic internally, so they complement each other and quickly become the audience's favorite superstars.
"Young People"
"The New One-Armed Knife" is undoubtedly the peak of the duo's cooperation at this stage, and their performance skills in this film have improved a lot compared to the previous works. Dillon is no longer blindly strong and brave, and shows a certain unique magnanimity and gentleness in the opponent scene with David Jiang, which makes him a tragic death in the duel with perfect heroism.
The New One-Armed Knife
The one-armed knifeman Lei Li in the film is the most emotionally complex role since Jiang David and Zhang Che cooperated: there have been comments that "broken arms" have the intention of "male root breakage" in Zhang Che's martial arts films, and this complex and indescribable sense of humiliation is not obvious in the "One-Armed Knife" starring Wang Yu earlier, but it is interpreted by Jiang David in "New One-Armed Knife" - his feminine temperament and physically mutilated anger are reflected in his tight brows and melancholy and sad eyes.
In particular, the tearful expression standing in front of Dillon's tombstone at the end makes the relationship between the two have an insincere deep meaning. In fact, before the arms were locked and stared at each other as brothers, Dillon's Dunhou and Jiang David's affection were hinged together, and the female character Li Jing on the side had become completely redundant. This complex and obscure implantation of meaning relies entirely on the unique temperament and excellent character-building ability of Di Jiang and his two people.
At this stage, although it seems that David Jiang is active and scheming on the screen, and Dillon is handsome, strong, loyal and righteous, and slightly second, they are actually highly dependent on each other's existence to exert their charm.
Zhang Che actually tried to let them stand alone, such as David Jiang starred in "Ranger" at the beginning, and Dillon also got the opportunity to play a leading role in "Eagle King". But the actual effect is that the young Jiang David always appears light and lacks weight when he appears on the screen alone, while Dillon's expression is heavy and lacks the changes it should have, and only when they appear in the same frame in the film will they suddenly produce a subtle yin and yang harmony and temperament balance, which is actually a wonderful combination of red flowers and green leaves.
The Eagle King
However, Dillon may not be satisfied with always taking the second place in the cooperation between the two (which is likely to be the reason why the two did not disperse because of their appearance in Li Hanxiang's "Falling into the City" a few years later), and he proposed to Zhang Che to play Ma Xinyi, who is also the male number one and the main villain in "Thorn Horse", which is also his most careful role since the film.
Sure enough, as soon as the film opened, the weight of the roles of Di Jiang and Di Jiang changed qualitatively, and Dillon's final appearance among the three main characters showed the confidence of "crushing" the other two. The role of Ma Xinyi has a clear evolution curve in the film: he has evolved from a reckless hero who fights with his brothers in the country, to a traitor who is seduced by a female sex and is recruited by the imperial court and is obsessed with fame and fortune, and finally evolves into a traitor who betrays his brother's treachery.
Thorn Horse
In the Hong Kong commercial films of the 1970s, the facial treatment of the role was the common performance criterion, and if Ma Xinyi's role was played by another person, it would inevitably be hung up from the beginning. But Dillon cleverly used his own thick and calm personality characteristics, so that the character with a good and evil indistinguishable internal temperament, so that his every step of the transformation is unexpected but reasonable, unconsciously in the action film to create a Shakespeare "Macbeth" like character.
Dillon's performance in the film was widely recognized, and Ma Xinyi's classic role won him the "Outstanding Acting Special Award" at the 11th Golden Horse Awards and the "Excellent Acting Award" at the 19th Asia-Pacific Film Festival.
In the first half of the seventies, the personal friendship between Dillon and David Jiang was almost universally known. When Zhang Che had the heart to promote the two to become directors, they promised each other that they would play a leading role in the films directed by each other, which was Dillon's "Afterlife" and Jiang David's "Drug Addicts".
"Later Life"
Both of them did not hesitate to "destroy" their popular screen images to fulfill each other's shooting intentions - David Jiang played a small person struggling to survive at the bottom of society, and Dillon changed his previous healthy image to become a drug addict.
The Addict
It is said that their real mustard originated from the proportion of role distribution in "Falling into the City", the eunuch Kou Liancai played by David Jiang was originally only a supporting role, but was repeatedly added, while the protagonist Guangxu played by Dillon was a thin character.
"Falling into the City"
It can also be seen from the finished film that Kou Liancai's role is flexible and changeable, while Guangxu's role setting is very superficial and lacks room for expansion.
After "Falling into the City", Di Jiang and his wife fell into a decades-long "cold war", even if they appeared in the same film, they were also in different frames of the same scene, and even on the set, they never took pictures. It was not until more than ten years later in the gangster film "Righteous Courage" that David Jiang said to Dillon: "This is my good brother for more than ten years", which is a superficial reluctance to resolve this grudge.
"Righteous Heroes"
However, after the breakup, the acting careers of both of them have come to a standstill. This is especially evident in David Jiang, who gradually lost his status as a protagonist and turned to television in the late 1970s and tried to be a director, but could no longer restore the infinite scenery on the screen in the early 1970s, and became a "gold supporting role" in TVB in the mid-to-late 1990s.
Dillon made some interesting changes in Chu Yuan's fantasy martial arts films "Chu Liuxiang" and "Lu Xiaofeng" series, and he brought with him a polite and bookish temperament that he had never had before, becoming the most eye-catching symbol of this series of Gulong film adaptations.
Chu Liuxiang
However, as Shaw's production focus shifted in the 1980s, he received an employment termination notice that would not be renewed. Wu Yusen and Xu Ke's "Hero's True Colors" series allowed Dillon to shine again for a short time, winning a Golden Horse Award for Best Actor trophy. But then he fell silent again.
The True Colors of Heroes
Looking back at the glorious and shining acting career of Di Jiang and his wife in the first half of the 1970s, one thing that cannot be ignored is that the rise of new martial arts films and the formation of the aesthetics of Hong Kong action films have provided them with valuable opportunities to become superstars.
Objectively speaking, although both of them are talented and perform hard, they have not yet formed a truly complete system in terms of skills, and many times they are in the state of "Cheng Biting The Golden Three Plates Axe" gorgeously makes no moves available.
But on the other hand, the new martial arts films have their own unique aesthetic expressions. Hu Jinquan once said that the actor is part of the expressionist form for him, and the actor's posture, action and expression can be extracted separately as part of the film form (just as we see in the famous bamboo forest battle scene of "The Heroine" is only a four-frame actor motion capture), which is actually the aesthetic characteristics of martial arts movies that emphasize form and light content.
"Chivalrous Girl"
Zhang Che, as a martial arts film master, is equally proficient in this principle, and when he uses Dillon and David Jiang as the protagonists, he does not expect the two of them to have excellent acting skills, but values the core appeal that their innate personal temperament brings to martial arts films that focus on formal performance.
When their faces, postures, and temperaments are paired with appropriate character settings, the work of building the aesthetic framework of martial arts films is completed.
From this perspective, the success of Dillon and David Jiang has obvious regional characteristics of Hong Kong films, and it is the unique film culture here that has bred their dazzling personal hero image.
Like shooting stars, they crossed the wide screen of the Shaw brothers, becoming an eternal moment in the memory of the vast number of Chinese people in the 1970s.