Action

Vintage Cinema presents

Action film

Introduction - General Overviews

A hybrid genre that fuses the moral landscape of the western and the urban settings of film noir and police procedurals, the action film as we know it today is a relatively new genre, having taken shape in the late 1960s and early 1970s and become a fully recognized and immensely popular cinematic form in the 1980s.

Action films are a film genre where action sequences, such as fighting, stunts, car chases or explosions, take precedence over elements like characterization or complex plotting. The action typically involves individual efforts on the part of the hero, in contrast with most war films. The genre is closely linked with the thriller and adventure film genres.

Because physical action and movement have always been a fundamental part of the cinema—they aren’t called “movies” for nothing—for decades there was no explicit recognition of a separate “action genre” among either producers or audiences. When the term “action” was used as a generic descriptor prior to the 1970s, it was typically conjoined with “adventure” to describe a range of films, particularly exotic types such as swashbucklers and jungle adventure films that were either set in the past or took place in a distant and unfamiliar locale. Although not labeled as such at the time, recognizable action films stretch back to the course comique or “comic chase films” of the 1910s, while for marketing purposes, the term “action-adventure” can be traced back to at least 1927 when Film Daily used it to describe a Douglas Fairbanks film called The Gaucho.

Historical Overview of Action Film Genre:

This film genre actually began with the silent era's serial films around the time of Edwin S. Porter's classic action-western The Great Train Robbery (1903).

During the 1920s and 1930s, action-based films were often "swashbuckling" adventure films in which actors, such as Douglas Fairbanks, wielded swords in period pieces or Westerns. Indian action films in this era were known as stunt films.

The 1940s and 1950s saw "action" in a new form through war and cowboy movies. Alfred Hitchcock ushered in the spy-adventure genre while also establishing the use of action-oriented "set pieces" like the famous crop-duster scene and the Mount Rushmore finale in North by Northwest (1959). The film, along with a war-adventure called The Guns of Navarone (1961), inspired producers Albert R. Broccoli and Harry Saltzman to invest in their own spy-adventure, based on the novels of Ian Fleming.

The phenomenal success of the James Bond series in the 1960s and 1970s, helped to popularise the concept of the modern day action film in more recent years. The early Bond films were characterised by quick cutting, car chases, fist fights and ever more elaborate action sequences. The series also established the concept of the resourceful hero, who is able to dispatch the villains with a ready one-liner. According to Guinness World Records, the most profitable film series of all time is "James Bond" - although it has since been superceded (by the Star Wars and Harry Potter films). It is the longest continuing series of English language films.

During the 1970s, gritty detective stories and urban crime dramas began to evolve and fuse themselves with the new "action" style, leading to a string of maverick police officer films, such as Bullitt (1968), The French Connection (1971), Dirty Harry (1971)and The Seven-Ups (1973).

In the 1970s, martial-arts films from Hong Kong became popular with Western audiences and inspired big budget films such as Bruce Lee's Enter the Dragon (1973). Chuck Norris blended martial arts with 'cops and robbers' in films such as Good Guys Wear Black (1978) and A Force of One (1979).

From Japan, Sonny Chiba starred in his first martial arts movie in 1973 called the Karate Kiba. His breakthrough international hit was The Street Fighter series (1974), which established him as the reigning Japanese martial arts actor in international cinema.

The action film did not become a dominant form in Hollywood until the 1980s and 1990s, when it was popularized by actors such as Arnold Schwarzenegger, Bruce Willis and Sylvester Stallone. The 1988 film Die Hard was particularly influential on the development of the genre in the following decade. In the film, Bruce Willis plays a New York police detective who inadvertently becomes embroiled in a terrorist take-over of a Los Angeles office block. The film set a pattern for a host of imitators, like Under Siege (1992) or Air Force One (1997), which used the same formula in a different setting.

Action films tend to be expensive, requiring big budget special effects and stunt work. As such, they are regarded as mostly a Hollywood genre, although there have been a significant number of action films from Hong Kong which are primarily modern variations of the martial arts film. Because of these roots, Hong Kong action films typically center on acrobatics by the protagonist while American action films typically feature big explosions and modern technology.

Current Trends:

Current trends in action film include a development toward more elaborate fight scenes in Western film. This trend is influenced by the massive success of Hong Kong action cinema, both in Asia and in the west. Asian martial arts elements, such as kung-fu and karate can now be found in numerous non-Asian action films. Now, a distinction can be made between films that lean toward physical, agile fighting, such as The Transporter, and those that lean toward other common action film conventions, like explosions and plenty of gunfire, such as Lethal Weapon, although most action movies employ elements of both.