Hong Kong, 1960s, the "New Wuxia Pian": Five Swordplay Classics
GreenCien's Guide to Wuxia Pian wrote:Wuxia is a Mandarin-language term that literally means "martial arts chivalry" and pian simply means "movie." Wuxia itself represents a uniquely Chinese variety of storytelling that dates back long before the advent of filmmaking, at least as far as the Tang Dynasty (618-907). It is defined by stories that combine China's wushu (martial arts) tradition with deeds of heroic chivalry performed by men and women. During the Ming Dynasty (1368-1644), these tales became epic novels such as Outlaws of the Marsh and Romance of the Three Kingdoms. Protagonists were often sword-bearing warriors of great virtue, who, like Robin Hood or King Arthur, would apply their fighting skills to vanquishing injustices with the edge of their blades.
Within these wuxia novels, a fictional realm developed that blended elements of fantasy with history. This became the jiang hu, or martial world, in which Chinese knight errants living by a code of honor could perform superhuman feats, channel chi energy into magical palm blasts and battle mythical beasts. This essentially became China's version of what Western culture defines as fantasy, where fighting sorcerers, elves, orcs, and halflings live....
As the cultural and commercial center of China in the early part of the 20th century, Shanghai quickly became home to China's burgeoning film industry following its birth in 1913. During the 1920s, predominately fantasy-oriented wuxia pian became very popular. Over thirty film companies filled silent movie screens with purely populist martial arts features that experimented with animation, trick photography and wirework to create their fantastic action... By the end of the 1920s, wuxia pian had reached a commercial peak, with over 250 movies released within two years alone. But the genre soon suffered a setback. Concerned with the effects that wuxia pian and other less-socially responsible movies were having on audiences, an increasingly hard line nationalistic Chinese government created the National Film Censorship Board in 1931 to ban works deemed inappropriate for public consumption. This began a migration by wuxia filmmakers to Singapore, Taiwan and Hong Kong to carry in on their trade. Japan's invasion of Shanghai in 1937 and the Chinese Revolution of 1949 would drive more filmmaking talent out of mainland China
The era of wuxia filmmaking in Shanghai was over, but in Hong Kong it was slowly gearing up for greater success. From roughly 1935 to 1960, Hong Kong put out a nearly steady stream of Cantonese-language wuxia movies like The Lady Protector (1947) and A Sword against Five Protectors (1952), where stunt work using trampolines, wires and fantasy special effects continued to evolve. But it wasn't until the mid-1960s that wuxia pian made its first real advancement since the advent of sound.
Essentially, by the 1960s,
wuxia made it to the screen in two forms. One, made by the major Mandarin-language studios (essentially Shaw and MPGI/Cathay) were Huangmei Operas. Opposed to their later form, they were musical, they were romantic, the "fighting" were not action scenes but displays of ballet and acrobatics. More importantly, the films were female-dominated, with female stars and a large female audience. The other variant, mostly produced by the Cantonese-language indies, were the cheap B&W action films, typified by the long running Wong Fei-Hung series. These were in some respects closer to what we'd see later, but they were sillier and more fantastic, and the majors largely turned their nose up at the genre, much in the same way I imagine the major Hollywood studios looked down on poverty-row serials.
But the time they were a-changing, and the writing was on the wall. The 60s was the emergence of the action film, and soon Shaw couldn't ignore the popularity of Samurai films, Westerns both Hollywood and Spaghetti, Men-on-a-Mission films, James Bond, etc... After cornering the lucrative Taiwanese market with their Huangmei Operas, they decided their next step was to revamp the
wuxia as a decidedly modern, action film genre. The beginning is arguable. Late 1965 saw the release of
Temple of the Red Lotus, generally considered the first of the "
new wuxias". However, many of the late Huangmei Operas already allowed a certain a level of violence and action, for example
The Butterfly Chalice earlier that year, which had a whole middle section directed by Chang Cheh. Likweise, a year earlier, Chang Cheh made his experimental b&w
Tiger Boy, but the perplexed Shaw Bros. kept it on the shelves for over a year, until they eventually released it to fairly big success. Plus, a lot of the early
wuxias still had many fantasy and romantic elements owing to the Opera films (Ho Meng-Hua's
Journey to the West tetralogy is a perfect example). There are three films that are really categorized as cementing the future potential of the genre: King Hu's
Come Drink With Me, Hsu Tseng-Hung's
King Cat, and Chang Cheh's
The One-Armed Swordsman, none of which are my favorites, but worth a look. The last, especially helped establish the "yanggang" ("staunch masculinity") style, which was the ultimate rejection of the female-centric domination of the genre. These are the ultra-macho, ultraviolent films which would quickly morph into the Kung-Fu films of the Seventies. Of course, that transformation didn't come complete until around '72/'73, and the appeal of the "
new wuxia" is precisely in seeing people mess around with the form, mixing the old and the new.
This list is undoubtedly skewed toward Shaw Brothers Studios, because, well, 'dem be the breaks. These are by and large the films that are available and, to be fair, they were the trendsetters; it was this genre which allowed them to ascend to domination of the "Chinese" box office. While the explosion of the genre was one of the deathblows against MPGI/Cathay Studios, which folded in the early 70s, they tried playing catch-up, and it's my understanding they have more than a few worthwhile films. Likewise, the late 60s was the period that Taiwan put forth an effort to build its own industry and prevent Hong Kong films from cornering the market. One of their responses was to copy the popular genre, but beyond King Hu, you find very little writing on this period. Also, while it would take for the formation of Golden Harvest in 1970 to revive the HK indie studios and producers, many were still holding on during the period. However, good luck finding most of these films: Celestial has serious problems in their handling of the Shaw Legacy, but they've at least put these films out in editions which mostly honor their original form.
I'm not stating these five films are the "Five Greatest", simply that they are five excellent films which provide a strong entry point for those who don't know where to begin, and which I hope give an overview of what exactly was going on with the genre during the second half of this decade.
If you want to dig further, I'd highly recommend the Silver Emulsion blog, where Will has taken up the ridiculous task of watching
EVERY Shaw Bros. Martial-Arts film. He even has a
decade top 10 which has some surprising overlap with mine.
The Invincible Fist (Chang Cheh, 1969)
While critics and historians spill all their ink over Chang Cheh's collaborations with Jimmy Wang Yu, this obscure box-office flop is the shining masterpiece of Chang's early Swordplay films, perhaps the greatest film produced by Shaw Brothers in the Sixties. Its narrative is deceptively simple. During the opening credits, a group of bandits pull off their most recent, bloody robbery. As a response, Lo Lieh's titular character - equal parts police constable and bounty hunter - is given the task of bringing them to justice. And that's pretty much it: a cat-and-mouse film with the lawmen hot on the heels of the gang of thieves. The narrative doesn't get much more complicated than the two groups coming together for the occasional skirmish before pulling apart again to continue the chase. The extent of character development comes in establishing whether a person is a cop or criminal. Even melodrama is kept to a minimum in what amounts to a surprisingly barebone and taciturn film. So what's the big deal? This is the Swordplay film stripped of everything superfluous, a film of remarkable economy and skill. In parring down his narrative to only the most basic of pieces, Chang is able to attend to each piece with laser-like precision, imprinting them with a flair that's uncommon even for this groundbreaking stylist. Such a cool and reticent film may seem a departure for Chang Cheh, the auteur of melodramatic excess, where the outpouring of viscera is only matched by that of macho sentiment. But this isn't some film devoid of emotion and passion; it's there, suppressed behind a veneer of glowering intensity, like a coil pulled back so tight it seems likely to violently spring back at any moment. For this task, he's helped immeasurably by Lo Lieh. In a largely silent, stone-faced performance, he is able to give his character depths of smoldering fury, world-weariness and even a sense of profound sadness, all of which is simply not there in the narrative or dialogue. He's almost what would happen if one of Chang's angry young men didn't die young: now older, wiser and disillusioned by the violent life of the "hero". He carries the weight of the film in a way I can't imagine Wang Yu ever could, and he gives the film a poignancy as it reaches the final stretch, which, given Chang Cheh's Nicholas Ray influence, may very well have been inspired by
On Dangerous Ground. Furthermore, in boiling down the Swordplay film to its essence, he has unlocked its universality, the way it corresponds and overlaps with such genres as the Western and Samurai film. Brian at
Cool Ass Cinema go as far to conflate it with the Spaghetti Western, although I feel it has more in common with the life-and-death bullring-exactitude of Budd Boetticher. More accurately, for a director heavily influenced by Japanese cinema, it may be the single most
chambara-esque film of his career. During an early standout scene - a swordfight in a field of overgrown reeds, one of the many amazing fight scenes in the film - you may be convinced you're watching a genuine
jidaigeki. More than any of his other films, this film could easily, with only the slightest of changes, be transplanted into a Samurai film. What's more, even in an absolutely stacked decade, it could hold its head as a classic of the genre. The film's failure was an early disappointment for Chang, leading him to, among other things, abandon Lo Lieh as a leading man (the two never worked together again) and perhaps reinforcing his impulse to stick to tried-and-true formulas (an exhausting trait of his nearly hundred films). A shame, as it's not only one of his crowning achievements, but a masterpiece of 60s action cinema.
Availability: Unfortunately, still only available through Celestial/IVL. Its soundtrack's been remixed to 5.1, as usual, and there's some odd mixing of background-foreground levels, but thankfully, the music sounds original, and the added foley sounds are fairly inconspicuous compared to the original sounds. Also, to my eyes, it seems to have been DNR'ed a little less than usual.
Dragon Gate Inn (King Hu, 1967)
Come Drink With Me may be the easier film to see, but I've always had serious problems with the way it peters out in an anti-climactic thud. Not King Hu's fault: the meticulous craftsman instantly butted heads with the brothers Shaws over that film, and it should have been no surprise when he made the sudden leap over to Taiwan, which was quickly emerging as the most lucrative market for Chinese cinema, even as its filmmaking infrastructure was still primitive. Among that fray, King Hu released this, one of the major and most influential blockbusters of its era, and a film that for many defined the emergence of Taiwanese cinema. In true
wuxia fashion, it finds King Hu mixing the historical with the fictional. A little Google-friendly primer for those who can't keep up with the opening narration: Emperor Zhu Qizhen was a Ming Dynasty emperor who was captured and held captive by the Mongols. In his absence, his brother was installed emperor by the minister Yu Qian. When Zhu Qizhen returned, he was immediately place under house arrest for years by his brother. When he finally managed to seize control again, his set out to purge his enemies, making use of a eunuch-led secret police, and executing Minister Yu as a traitor. That brings us to where the film begins... Yu's children are exiled to beyond the borders of the empire. Fearing a future reprisal, the eunuch Tsao Shao Chin (Pai Ying) and his "Eastern Agency" are sent to clandestinely execute them. The plan: to intercept them at the frontier, at Dragon Gate Inn. However, owing both to happenstance and design, several chivalrous swords(wo)men arrive there at the same time. And so the intrigue and battle of wits begin...
I always felt you could rename the traditional
wuxia pian (as opposed to the ultra-masculine and violent "yanggang" variant, that Chang Cheh and co. would soon morph into the Kung-Fu film) as the "Roads & Inn" genre, as they invariably alternate between those two settings. You could also divide them into two types, depending on which of the two they emphasize.
Invincible Fist, while "yanggang", is clearly a "Road" film, as the characters are constantly journeying forward, the inns serving as nothing more than pitstops. Despite its opening, however,
Dragon Gate Inn settles into clearly an "Inn" film. It's almost as he took the opening tavern duel from
Come Drink With Me, easily the best scene of that film, and decided to expand and design this whole film around it. It's a place with special privilege in King Hu's cinema. Like Ford's stagecoach, it's a special cross-section where the rich and poor, good and bad, corrupt and heroic can meet on seemingly equal footing. As a place on a borderland, it marks a crossroad between the peaceful and chaotic, the oppressive and the free. At times, it's the last refuge among the unrest on one side of the border (think Rick's in
Casablanca), at others it's ground zero for that chaos (think the remote hotel in
Five Graves to Cairo). More importantly, here it represents a cross-section between Chinese culture new and old, as Hu weaves the action cinema of the
wuxia pian which dominated cinemas of the time with the pageantry and balletic form of the traditional Beijing Opera. It doesn't just find the meeting point between history and fiction, but between history old and history new, as this real chapter of Ming Dynasty subterfuge is loaded with modern day references to the Cultural Revolution, the White Terror, the Chinese diaspora, and even Western espionage (this
brns article establishes its historical context). As the film outlines nothing more than the uniting of several people, for a variety of reasons, against a force of political oppression and evil. In fact, it is this communal, even democratic aspect that may be most surprising touch here. As the heroes at Shaw Bros. were increasingly turning into one-man-armies, Hu's heroes, as skilled as they are, ultimately have no choice but to stand united if they intend to prevail. But none of this does justice to the pure gracefulness with which King Hu tackles everything. Everything here - the unfolding of the narrative, the choreography of the action, the camera movements and framing, the rhythms of the editing - are as clean and pure as the landscapes that dwarf his characters. It's a movie that's simply told, but complex in its implications and bountiful in its pleasures.
Availability: This, like nearly all of Hu's have been completely mistreated by the DVD format. The Taiwanese Hoker and German New Entertainment are your best bets: both are non-anamorphic, but with English subtitles (I suspect they're the same transfer). They are also, from what I can see, OOP. Be warned that there is also a dubbed, pan-and-scan German release. The PanMedia is a bootleg, right down to the fan-generated subtitles. In all honesty, given its sorry state, this is the sort of film you can probably torrent with few pangs of conscience.
Bells of Death (Griffin Yueh Feng, 1968)
While it's easy, while writing on the topic, to focus exclusively on the two auteurs above, the fact is, given their factory line approach, Shaw produced nearly four dozen "
new wuxias" within the first five years of the genre. Many are fairly routine (or worse), but among them is the occasional jewel. This is one of them, and probably the most readily accessible one. A trio of bandits terrorize and slaughter a rural family, unknowingly allowing the eldest brother to survive. Five years later, after mastering the martial arts, Chang Yi sets out on a path of revenge, his only memorabilia being his mother's bracelet, the titular "bells of death". In short, this is one of the most fierce and violent of all those early Swordplay films. Perhaps
too violent - as a handful of jump-cuts attest - but it rarely wavers from its grim tale for any romantic interludes, comic asides or scenes of fantasy commonly found here. Like
Invincible Fist, it's a simple film, but one whose simplicity allows for economy and precision, each of its parts tackled with an uncommon flair. And like
Invincible Fist, there's a certain universality to the film: if that film struck me as the most
chambara-esque of all the early
wuxia pians, this film could easily be transplanted into a Spaghetti Western. (Perhaps unsurprisingly, Yueh's previous film was a riff on
A Fistful of Dollars.) I even have the title:
Three Men from Now. The film is essentially divided into three chapters, with Chang finding and stalking a different culprit in each. Appropriately, each chapter ends with a fairly impressive fight. In 1968, the genre was still novel enough that most filmmakers still felt they could get away with simple fights with a lot of flaying swords and gobs of blood. Not Yueh: here he goes out of his way to stage each fight in a unique manner. One fight takes place in a bamboo grove, the Bavaesque quaility of the lighting and the "disembodied" sound design giving the whole segment a ghostly quality. A later fight takes place in alternating light and darkness, the fighters largely unseen, all with a premise that makes you wonder if more Tarkovsky films should have ended with a swordfight (you'll get it when you see it...). If anything, the film starts to run out of steam in the final chapter. It doesn't do anything particular wrong, it just gets a little too pat and conventional to satisfyingly cap all that came before, even as the film reaches for some tragic significance. What may be most impressive is that the film came out of this director in this year: Chang and Hu were seen as young turks whose relative youth made them especially appropriate for this new genre. Yueh Feng, on the other hand, in his sixties, was a veteran reaching the twilight of his career. To see him respond to this new sudden wave of action films with such savage gusto is unexpected, even as it is this very assured professionalism, the mark of a veteran, that distinguishes the film. While I've yet to see another Yueh Feng film as satisfying as this, it has me interested enough to keep looking, both before and after the '65 kung-fu divide. Revenge films are rarely as satisfying as this, and I have no doubt this established something of a standard at the studio, one which the genre's many ensuing entries aspired to.
And for those taking score: I have no doubt whatsoever that the opening of this film was a major inspiration on
Inglorious Basterds. Likewise, a later turn of events call to mind similar happenings in
Django Unchained.
Availability: Originally released by Celestial/IVL, it has since been ported over Image. However, it seems some pressings had problems with the aspect ratio/anamorphism that I'm hoping were cleared up. Be warned. They have, however, restored the mono soundtrack.
The Sword of Swords (Cheng Kang, 1968)
If Chang Cheh and King Hu were the two superstars of Shaw Bros. first phase of martial-art films, the lesser-known Cheng Kang, for consistency alone, can comfortably slide in at an easy third place (And considering how abbreviated Hu's stay was at the studio, you could argue he's #2). A workman-like professional who'd quickly be assigned many of Shaw's big
wuxia epics (before the initial bubble burst on the genre), he's certainly less idiosyncratic than those two. Nonetheless, in his films I've noticed both a certain relentless pacing (his films often begin
in media res), as well as something of a grim undertone that unexpectedly permeate his seemingly populist films. No undertone here; I can't imagine Shaw Bros. produced a single crueler film this decade. Jimmy Wang Yu stars as Lin Jenshiau, a disciple who is given the unenviable task of protecting the titular sword, a supernatural blade powerful enough it can make nations rise and fall. Appropriately enough, a group of barbarians seek the blade, and after giving his sifu his word of honor to protect the sword, he immediately has that promise challenged. Obviously meant to cash in on the Chang Cheh/Wang Yu collaborations, Cheng Kang responds not only by adopting those films' tone of extreme melodrama and violence, but also by one-upping them for plain downbeat brutality. Chang Cheh's ultraviolent, tragic cinema still has nothing but awe for his men of action, and that is where this film precisely deviates. The film's theme is a common, nationalistic one, as Wang Yu sacrifices seemingly everything for the higher purpose of preserving the "empire". There's a near-allegorical simplicity to the tale, with Wang Yu put through the wringer like a kung-fu Job. Yet, these slings-and-arrows become so overbearingly numerous and awful, Wang Yu's character is dragged to such a sorry and pitiful state... you can't help but feel that Cheng Kang is calling such blind idealism into question. Just when you think he can't sink any lower, the film comes up with another plague-like torture to visit upon him. Some may feel the film gets a little long in the tooth near the end, when it starts to more openly mimic the
One-Armed Swordsman films. But, it's to Cheng's credit that, by this point, we're so disgusted by the villains, so traumatized by Lin's suffering, that we
have to to stick around for some sort of meting of justice. The fights, done with Chang Cheh's team of Lau Kar-Leung/Tong Gai, are among the most impressive of its era, with a special care given to one-on-one duels; one fight in particular, a classic duel in snowfall, stands out both for its technique and its cruelty. Yet, Cheng is careful to not adopt Chang's troubling relationship to violence; it's telling that in the final duel, when Wang Yu should be privileged for some well-deserved vengeance, he suddenly finds himself victim to perhaps the most sadistic act of deception in the film. Make no mistake: this films unrelenting nasty streak can get to be
too much. I wouldn't be surprised to find it's Lars Von Trier or Michael Haneke's favorite kung-fu film. But in refashioning the
wuxia into pure tragedy, the film sticks with you, and even the last few seconds of studio-imposed happiness can't erase the film's near-unbearable grim power.
Cheng Kang's son, Ching Siu-Tung, would later become a major director in Tsui Hark's Film Workshop stable, gaining credits for such modern
wuxia pians as
Duel to the Death and
A Chinese Ghost Story.
Availability: Originally put out by Celestial/IVL, the R1 Funimation is the one to get. Both progressive and with the original mono. It's too bad Funimation seemed to get the leftovers after Dragon Dynasty and Image, since they've done the best job in getting these films out there.
Dragon Swamp (Lo Wei, 1969)
Now for something completely different... While many of the highlights of the initial genre are precisely those that broke the mold by being especially brooding and violent, it's easy to forget that the
wuxia pian genre's not all angry young men and blood spurts. While it's nice to categorize the
wuxia as China's equivalent to the Western, that's to overlook that it's just as much it's answer to the fantasy genre, to dime-store adventure fiction, and to even the mythological. What we have here is the old-school of the old-school, a martial-arts film taking place in the traditional
jiang-hu world, where good and evil are easily distinguishable, where fights are done with broad swords, and where supernatural feats of strength and agility are possible. It's also a surprising triumph for Lo Wei, who is notorious among kung-fu fans as something of a sub-Corman huckster and opportunist. While hardly a director who's praises are often sung, something must be said that his mercenary approach of following popular trends and imitating established hits - in this case, the films of King Hu and Ho Meng-Hua - pay off when he's backed by the very professionals behind said hits.
Come Drink with Me's Cheng Pei-Pei pulls double duty as both mother and daughter in this convoluted, lighthearted fantasy wuxia, which finds various factions once again squabbling for a mythically powerful sword. Don't come in expecting Hu's balletic elegance or poignancy; in fact, Lo's directing style is nothing to write home about here. But that's fine; the story moves quick enough and is dense with enough twists and novelty that he mainly just has to get out of the way. He's also helped by a more than able cast, led by the always charming Cheng Pei-Pei and frequent co-star Yueh Hua, and filled with pleasing familiar faces in roles big and small, from Lo Lieh to Simon Yuen. Even some of Lo Wei's worst habits pay off: the single best scene in the film is nothing more than a rip-off of
Come Drink with Me's iconic tavern fight, right down to using what looks to be the same set. It's to the credit of the well-oiled machine being ran here that not only does the movie not suffer from the comparison, it pulls it off deftly, with some wonderful tension as Cheng slowly-but-gracefully ascertains the danger she's in. And despite being the sort of light-hearted, low-stakes film that I imagine children must have flocked to on a Saturday afternoon, it's still unafraid to introduce more than a touch of the violent, tragic and morally ambiguous by the time the film ends. The film even, surprisingly, manages to stick to a coherent theme, namely that of damaged families torn apart by evil deeds.
Dragon Swamp belongs to a lineage of a films that would take years to be picked up again: starting vaguely with Chor Yuen's re-popularization of the "chivalrous swordsman" film in the late Seventies; more pronounced in the FX heavy fantasy films of the Eighties,
Zu Warriors,
Duel to the Death, etc.; and only making it overseas with
Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, with which it shares more than a few traits. This film isn't likely to make anyone decade's list - it probably won't be anyone's favorite of these five
wuxia films - but in embodying a traditional, populist, even feminine side of the genre that would quickly get swept aside by the ultra-macho
yanggang films, it's a very pleasant place to dip your toes in.
Availability: Celestial/IVL. Soundtrack, naturally, is a remix, and HK Digital seems to think it has some added foley sounds, but I can't say I noticed anything out of the ordinary. Subtitles, however, are a little wonkier than usual.
