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The Aimless Bullet (1961, S. Korea)
(aka Obaltan, or The Stray Bullet)
In Hyun-mok Yoo's tragic, bleak, noirish and gloomy
drama - an expressionistic social realism film (similar to Italian
Neo-realism) about a dysfunctional, working class extended family
- they were trapped and living in the shanty town of Liberty Village
(within the city of Seoul) in post-war Korea - it has often been
rated as the best Korean film ever made:
- the despairing family of seven included tooth-ache-suffering,
struggling to survive accountant Cheol-ho (Kim Jin-kyu) and his
pregnant wife (Moon Jung-suk) (who eventually died giving birth),
his two young children, his shiftless younger brother Yeong-ho
(Choi Moo-ryong) - a scar-faced, unemployed war veteran, their
crazed, senile bedridden PTSD-suffering mother (Noh Hae-sin) (who
spoke the film's oft-repeated refrain: "Let's get out of here!"),
and Cheol-ho's unmarried sister Myeong-suk (Seo Ae-ja) - an ex-nurse
turned prostitute servicing US soldiers
- in a significant sequence,
the desperate Yeong-ho, after foolishly turning down a film job
that exploited his war injuries, planned an armed robbery of the
South Gate Bank; after the robbery was botched, he was chased by
police (he paused along a line of fortune tellers, ran through
deserted streets, entered an underground area filled with water
where a woman had hanged herself with her crying baby still tied
to her back, and scampered through a workers' labor protest rally
- where the protesters shouted: "Pay us more!
We are hungry!"); he was slowed down when his actress friend
Miri (Kim Hye-jeong) approached and begged him to give himself up;
he threw his bundle of money at her and into the air, fired his gun
upward as he climbed a ladder, and surrendered while sobbing
- in the follow-up scene - the paperboy son Min Ho
hawked newspapers of Yeong-ho's bank robbery ("Papers! Papers!")
- the cover-story ("Bank Robber Captured After 10 minutes of
chase") was the crime committed by his uncle Yeong-ho
- in the film's conclusion, the tormented Cheol-ho
was transported in the back seat of a taxi-cab, as blood dripped
from his mouth (from a dentist's recent tooth extraction);
he was dazed, indecisive and aimless about where to go - he directed
the driver to Liberty Village, then to University hospital, then
to the police station, and finally to "anywhere";
the driver and his companion thought they had picked up a real drunken
loser: ("He's just a dud, like one of those wild shells that
fired aimlessly")
Cheol-ho's Concluding Taxi-Cab Ride
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"I've tried so hard to be a good son, a good
husband, a good father, a good brother, a good clerk..."
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"Let's get out of here!"
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- the ending sequence was comprised of Cheol-ho's
thoughts - in voice-over:
"Aimlessly -- I've tried so hard to be a good son, a good husband,
a good father, a good brother, a good clerk. Why are there so many
good things I have to be? (He collapsed sideways onto the seat) You
might be right. Did God send me out like an aimless bullet with no
place to go? But I should be going somewhere, in some direction,
now, somewhere"
- he ultimately told the driver, echoing the
words of his mother: "Let's get out of here!" - the film's
last words were of the paperboy son still running through the streets
selling newspapers:
"Papers, papers!"
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PTSD Mother: "Children: Let's get out of here!"
Yeong-ho's Bank Robbery Attempt
Flight After Robbery and Capture
Headlines: "Bank Robber Captured After 10 minutes
of chase"
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