DVR Diary: MARCO POLO (1975)

The first time I saw Chang Cheh's historical epic, before I knew who Chang Cheh was, it was called The Four Assassins. I saw it on some local independent channel's kung fu theater time slot, and it was memorable for me because it was the first time (that I can now recall) I saw the sort of baroque training sequences that typified kung fu movies from the mid Seventies through the early Eighties. To me and my friends it was all laughably absurd, but on seeing it again recently (in the proper aspect ration on the El Rey channel) I found the training bits some of the most dramatically effective I've seen in the genre. The four Chinese heroes of the story, rebels against Kublai Khan, who has appointed the famous Venetian trader (American-Italian star Richard Harrison, who'd end up in more martial arts movies than he could ever imagine) a constable to hunt them down, are rusticating on the friendly estate of a former kung fu master. They hope for training but as the Mongols have made martial arts illegal, the best the old man can do is give them jobs as manual laborers. Some of these jobs can't be done in the conventional manner because the tools that are normally used have also been banned, since they can be used as weapons. In the worst case, one of our heroes must harvest bamboo without a blade; he must twist the tough branches between and around his legs until they snap, shredding himself in the process. Another hero has to sift some very coarse grain with his bare hands and arms; the stuff scratches even worse than iron failings. The others aren't technologically limited but are heavily burdened just the same; one must clear a field of heavy boulders, while the last gets comeuppance for peeing in Marco Polo's soup earlier in the picture by having to empty some open-air latrines. In what was the funniest bit for me, his boss -- all the heroes have taskmasters who clearly were  fighting masters in their day -- warns this guy not to fall into the pisspits. Our hero's not worried; he boasts that he could leap right out if he fell in, not realizing until the boss throws him in that the urine comes up to his ribcage. It is now his regular job to practice jumping out of the pit until he graduates into jumping straight from one pit into another, and from that to another. The long-term payoff for the story is that each hero develops extraordinary abilities from their labors. Jumping, obviously; Samson-like strength for the boulder guy; devastating hand strength for the grain guy, who also has to work the mill's whetstone with his hands until it's smooth; and a powerful, near-invulnerable lower body for the bamboo guy -- an aid to his "pugilism," which for this film doesn't seem to mean what we think it means. The short-term payoff is a great scene in which the heroes reunite after their first day at work and are utterly exhausted -- and in the case of the latrine guy, vile smelling. The four actors do a great job selling their exhaustion and initial bafflement at their new condition, and the separate chores do a lot to individualize them, as is often the case in Chang Cheh's tales of collective heroism. Those scenes stuck in my memory for thirty years or more not just because they were absurd, but because they were good.

The first time around I had no idea of when The Four Assassins was made or even of who Richard Harrison was, much less Chang Cheh. Watching Marco Polo now and knowing when it was made, I can't help seeing it as a critical allegory from Hong Kong of the west's detente with Communist China. While American Marco Polo movies often portray Kublai Khan as a wise, almost lovable old ruler, Marco Polo portrays him unambiguously as a despot whose Mongol repression of the Han echoes Mao Zedong's Communist repression of Chinese traditions. Bedazzled by the power and pomp of the ruler's court, the foreign trader-diplomat almost unconsciously becomes a collaborator. Did Chang Cheh and co-writer Ni Kuang mean to warn that a western rapprochement with the People's Republic would likewise further consolidate the tyranny that westerners claimed to deplore? If so, they also close on a hopeful note after the four heroes awaken Polo to the truth of Mongol tyranny as experienced by ordinary Chinese. Would you like it if the Mongols took over Venice and did the same thing? they ask. Marco gets the point and aids the good guys, albeit passively, in their final showdown with the Mongol enforcers who are the film's real villains.  The four-way climax is a nicely paced job of direction and editing punctuated by epic feats of strength from the boulder guy. I remember finding it hilarious decades ago how his weightlifting left him able to punch holes through and push down thickly mortared walls before taking dozens down with him Samson style. There's still a certain naivete to the effects but now that I'm more in the spirit of martial-arts cinema I recognize and respect the patriotic exuberance of all the heroic destruction. As a veteran of peplum (or "Hercules") films maybe Harrison gave the Chinese some pointers. It's unlikely the ostensible star -- the Venetian's transliterated name is the film's original Chinese title -- had much or any creative input but in a manner befitting his presence there's a peplum quality of virtuous heroism that fits nicely with Chang Cheh's typical concerns. One could argue, after all, that the kung fu genre was the true global heir of the peplum after Italy abandoned musclemen for amoral spaghetti westerners, and Harrison's presence here is like a belated acknowledgment of the torch having passed to worthy successors.

DVR Diary: LADY WITH A SWORD (Feng Fei Fei, 1971)

Kao Pao Shu was a veteran Shaw Bros. actress who moved behind the camera to make her directorial debut with Feng Fei Fei. So is it because she was a woman that this is one of the more tearjerking martial arts pictures? Hard to say, since a man, the prolific I Kuang, wrote the screenplay. But I still wonder whether the prevailing unhappiness of the picture reflects a feminine touch. Lots of martial arts films end unhappily, but usually that's because all the characters are dead. There are plenty of survivors at the end of Lady With a Sword, by comparison, but they're all very unhappy. It's hard to blame them, though.

I wonder whether writer or director saw the American western Last Train From Gun Hill. In that picture Kirk Douglas destroys his old friendship with Anthony Quinn because he, a lawman, has to take Quinn's son to prison. Feng Fei Fei escalates the emotional stakes of the basic situation to an almost unbearable level. The title character (Lily Ho) goes into action when her young nephew staggers into the family compound to report that his mother, Fei Fei's sister, has been raped and murdered. She learns that the culprit (James Nam) is the scion of a family, the Jins, who've long been friends with hers. Worse, he is her childhood friend and the man everyone considers her destined husband. He's fallen under bad influences, egged on by his retainers, one of whom calls in his brother, a formidable bandit with a small arsenal of weapons, to protect his master. The brother is a bigger villain than anyone; he murdered Fei Fei's brother-in-law and seeks to exploit the deteriorating situation, with his younger brother's help, to destroy both families. Meanwhile, the Jin family is coming apart at the seams. Dad (Li Peng-Fei) is ready to wash his hands of his wayward boy or hand him to Fei Fei, but Mom (Ching Lin), whom Dad blames for spoiling the boy, is protective to a fault. She's the Anthony Quinn character in this story, and pretty much the woman who wears the sword in the Jin household. When Fei Fei manages to strongarm Jin Lian Bai out of the compound to deliver him to the magistrate, the mother pursues with the untrustworthy retainers in tow, and they see a golden opportunity to escalate the feud between Jin and Feng....

Novice director Kao makes impressive use of a small town set in early fight scenes when Fei Fei and her nephew (Yuen Man Meng) are a team. Fighting with Lian Bai's buddies, Fei Fei fends off several attackers at one end of town while the kid struggles to escape another in a restaurant and stable. Commanding overhead shots sweep across town establishing the good guys' relative positions as they battle for their lives. The nephew has a story arc that might trouble western viewers. There's almost always an element of slapstick to the little guy with the silly tuft of hair on top as he falls on his face repeatedly trying to dismount his horse. Some of his escapes in the fight scene I mentioned are silly, including teeter-totter gags that were old before talkies. He meets cute with a young girl on a caravan, but any hope of a happy future is dashed when Lian Bai kills him during an escape attempt. Some people may be uncomfortable with such a traumatized child being used for comedy relief only to get brutally killed -- the film ends with Fei Fei weeping over his corpse -- but I suspect most people around the world are more ready to laugh or weep on short notice over the vicissitudes of life. The overall sadness of the picture may well reflect a more humane spirit in this particular director; Kuang wrote so much that it's hard to credit him with any singluar sensibility. Another director might have ended the picture with the deaths of the evil brothers; in a charming touch Fei Fei's mom and dad both ride to her rescue, while Lian Bai's dad doesn't buy the brothers' attempt to blame everything on the Fengs. Many martial arts films end with that sort of violent catharsis (see Lady Assassin in particular). Kao seems more interested in the emotional consequences for the survivors. If that's a personal touch then more power to her.

DVR Diary: THE LADY ASSASSIN (1983)

My cable guide told me I was going to see a 2013 Vietnamese film, and while that wouldn't be impossible on the El Rey network, it was still unlikely. It was, more predictably, Another Shaw Bros. Production, one of several "Lady" pictures the inclusive action channel scheduled recently to mark International Women's Day. The original Chinese title translates to something like "Palace of Revelations," but it does have a lady assassin, and several other female fighters besides, as well as a female producer, Mona Fong. The real auteur is writer-director Lu Chin-Ku, whose most important collaborators were editors Chiang Hsing-Lung and Liu Shao-Kwang. They give this tale of dynastic intrigue an increasingly frantic quality as the drama accelerates toward an over-the-top climax. This later Shaw release apparently never got a wide U.S. release, so El Rey showed it with English subtitles. I always appreciate this despite my nostalgia for the corny accents of dubbed films because you see (and hear) that the Shaw performers could actually act. Since Lady Assassin takes it dramatic plot quite seriously -- it really is an ambitiously made picture -- I was glad that some awkward voice didn't take me out of the story. The subject is the rivalry of two princes, sons of a dying Emperor of the Ching (aka Manchu) dynasty. "Fourth Prince" (Tony Liu) would seem to have a built-in advantage over "Fourteenth Prince" but the younger man is the more virtuous and gets promoted to general, making him the favorite for the succession. In fact, the decision has already been made, but Fourth Prince thinks he can change the Emperor's words if not his mind. This is where the lady assassin, Lui Si Niang (Leanne Liu) comes in. Her skills as a thief and acrobat are truly useful to Fourth Prince. After a bit of Raiders-inspired business to determine where the imperial succession decree has been located, she and her assistants steal it out of a high ceiling panel. Fourth Prince is then able to edit the document so that it proclaims him the next emperor. The decree in doctored form is read aloud while the emperor is on his deathbed, but he's too feeble, and Fourth Prince is too close, to correct the error. Fourteenth Prince makes the mistake, not knowing any better, of acknowledging Fourth as the new rightful Emperor Yongcheng, thus undercutting his ability to raise a resistance to him. Meanwhile, Fourth Prince had won the support of Lui Si Niang and other heroes of the martial world with a promise to end the Manchu policy of discrimination against indigenous Han Chinese. His intentions are good at first, but his Manchu advisers find it all too easy to change his mind with warnings against a Han uprising. In general Yongcheng doesn't like to feel dependent on anyone. When a warrior he promoted to General makes a big, humiliating show of his exclusive control over his army, the Emperor acts quickly to break him. His estrangement from Lui Si Niang and the other fighters eventually puts all their lives in jeopardy.

Lady Assassin works just as well as a historical drama as a wuxia film. The ruthlessness of the intrigue and its violent results might appeal to Game of Thrones fans, and the production values are often quite impressive. The art direction by Chen Ching-Shen and the cinematography by Ma Ching-Chiang often enhance the mood with expressive framing and lighting. I liked the acting as far as I can appreciate it with no knowledge of Chinese, the standouts being the two princes. Tony Liu is fine as the weaselly Fourth Prince, while Max Mok pulls off the more thankless task of conveying the tragic weakness and ultimate cluelessness of Fourteenth Prince. The martial arts might not appeal to purists. Lu Chin-Ku depends heavily on editing to assemble fight scenes but what he may sacrifice in verisimilitude he makes up for in pace and dramatic momentum. Some of the effects he tries don't work, especially the rapid-fire repetition of fighters' entrances. But when Lu and the editors really get going the fight scenes have the dynamic pictorial energy of the better superhero comics. They sometimes edit so rapidly that watching is like reading a comic from panel to panel. The team goes into overdrive for the final battle, when Lui Si Niang leads an attempt to assassinate the Emperor. As the editing gets faster than ever, the violence gets still more extreme. In the end, Lady Assassin is the sort of kung fu film I remember from my childhood that ends abruptly with an exhilarating kill. In fact, this film has two such moments within seconds of each other, with one villain cut in half after an exhausting battle and another cut in half lengthwise at the very last moment by the heroine's virtual orgasm of righteous murder. I admit that I was in suspense partly because I was afraid the film was going to run past the length of my DVR recording, but I suspect that audiences not operating under my time constraint would share my bloodthirsty exhilaration at the stunning finish. Lady Assassin wasn't the film I expected, but I suspect I'm better off for that.

DVR Diary: THE WEIRD MAN (1983)

The English title pretty accurately describes what you'll see in Chang Cheh's film, the last the legendary martial-arts director made for the Shaw Bros. studio, but I had a feeling the original Chinese title wouldn't be so tantalizingly prosaic. I ran the original through a couple of online translation programs and discovered that Shaw Bros. intended some sort of play on Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid. Google produced "Theurgy and the Sundance Kid" while Bing offered "Avatar vs. Cassidy." Since The Weird Man is not a buddy movie, the studio may have hoped to convey the dual nature of its protagonist, but that's just my desperate guess. After some perfunctory court intrigue, featuring bad acting by the dubbing artists I heard on the El Rey broadcast, we're introduced to Yu Ji, a Taoist priest with the power to heal. The picture sets him up as a Christlike figure, or else people from the Christian world are likely to see him that way. The powers that be scheme to destroy him, while he tells his five disciples that he's destined to die so he can be reborn. He is challenged to produce rain for a drought-stricken city or die on a pyre. He refuses to perform on demand, but the skies open up just as his pyre is lit. The people demand that Yu Ji be spared, but he's decapitated instead, smoke billowing from his neck. This, apparently, is just what he planned.

Yu Ji's disciples are under strict instructions on how to treat his body. They manage to snatch the head and body and reunite them in a mystic pool, the corpse floating toward the head until it reattaches. The hirsute priest is restored and assumes a meditative pose as his new body literally springs to life: a younger, clean-shaven figure in a loincloth. If anyone in the picture is a Weird Man, it's this guy. Yu Ji has gone to all this trouble in order to become an omnipotent mischief maker. He can possess other people's bodies -- actor Ricky Cheng Tien Chi dons drag when he takes over women -- and use them to fight the bad guys. Try to slice him and he strikes back with silk scarves, soap bubbles, balloons, etc. His only vulnerability is that he must touch base with his old body once each day, once a disciple has tapped old Yu Ji's forehead three times. That done, he can promptly return to wherever he was making mischief before. If it is not done, is that the end of the Weird Man? Unfortunately, we never really find out. Chang Cheh apparently expects us to find the title character's cavorting hilarious or else, at the end of the line with Shaw Bros., he doesn't give a damn anymore. I found it all too reminiscent of bad sci-fi comedies where aliens have all sorts of wacky powers, usually including telekinesis so they can levitate people, just because ... you know .. they're advanced! In the title role, Ricky Cheng Tien Chi and his perpetual smirk are pretty insufferable, but I must admit that the film as a whole has the same sort of allure that a trainwreck has. It was terrible, but I couldn't look away. That may be a recommendation for some people, and it's definitely as close to one as you're going to see here.

DVR Diary: DUEL FOR GOLD (1971)

It's so uncommon to see a Chinese martial arts picture without any sympathetic characters -- one in which all the principal characters are rats -- that it's still shocking to find one, for me at least. And here's a Shaw Bros. production directed by Chu Yuan that seems heavily inspired by westerns -- not just contemporary spaghetti westerns, as you might expect, but the darker American "adult" westerns of the 1940s and 1950s. Duel For Gold reminded me of Duel in the Sun, not just for the title but also with its spoken prologue foredooming all the characters and its no-survivors climax, and it reminded me of the less well-known Lust For Gold, possibly the most amoral American western of its era. Whoever gave the film its English title (if it isn't a literal translation of "huo bing") may have had exactly those films in mind. There's a little bit of caper movie in it, too, if your idea of a caper is for a protagonist to massacre all his or her accomplices. The general idea seems to be that people are evil, and martial arts make them worse.

It opens playfully enough with a sister act giving an open-air show of their martial prowess. The ladies have incredible balance and superhuman strength; one can hold the whole weight of her sister's body, upside down and sword out, on the point of her own sword. The crowd's wonder turns to horror as the girls inexcusably fail to clear the prop blocks they chopped to show off their swords' sharpness out of their way as they tumble. One of the sisters manages to fall on her own sword and is taken to the local treasury for first aid. However, security guard Wen (Chun Chen) finds this accident suspicious. In China's martial world these security guards are like freelance marshals of the Old West, tough men entrusted with the wealth and property of others. Wen quickly exposes the sisters' trick; they'd staged the accident in order to case the place, where they most likely know a big stash of gold will be waiting for a big merchant. It's a good thing Wen's around, because his small army of assistants is useless against the sisters' fighting skills, while he seems capable of handling both of them at once. He drives them away, but they're only the start of his problems. Lurking in town is Teng Chi Yan, the "Long Shadow" (Lo Lieh), who simply radiates menace. Meanwhile, the sisters have help for whatever their plan may be, but they have to keep an eye on the interloper Teng Chi Yan as well.

The crooks manage to lure Wen into another fight and to injure him enough that he's out of action while the big merchant paints the town red. The merchant turns out to be an impostor, however, and one of the gang. Invited to tour the mint by obsequious officials, the impostor takes out a bunch of guards, signalling an all-out attack by the crooks' own small army of all-too expendable minions. Those the guards don't kill, the lead thieves eliminate themselves. The fewer to share the loot, the better; that principle is carried out mercilessly until lovers and sisters -- not to mention one unexpected contestant -- fight a round-robin battle in a cemetery, each fighter in turn offering a deal to his or her antagonist,only to have it rejected. And of course, we've already been told how it all turns out, though there is one blackly ironic twist left for the narrator to relate.

The final fight is a brutal affair in the "kill 'em all" fashion then prevailing around the world, and the carnage effects seem less cartoonish, more bluntly brutal, than they often appear in more heroic fare. That's some sort of tribute to Chu Yuan and the overall production design. The action is well directed and choreographed. In one impressive shot, one of the sister knocks a guard out of the frame to the right, but the camera follows his tumble and catches the other sister routing more foes. The actors are as good as English dubbing permits -- I saw this on the El Rey network -- while Lo Lieh is effortlessly good as the threatening mystery man regardless of his surrogate voice. Duel For Gold might be best described as a slapstick black comedy. Like much slapstick, it revels in transgression but makes sure to punish the transgressors at the end, lest the audience regret their thrills. It may think itself dark, but it's really fun to watch if you don't judge the characters too harshly, as fate already has.

DVR Diary: THE CHINESE BOXER (1970)

Jimmy Wang Yu is probably the most underrated master of martial arts cinema in proportion to his contributions to the genre. Personal problems and business conflicts have kept him from being recognized as a peer to Bruce Lee, though at age 70 Wang Yu appears to be enjoying a late-career renaissance, having received Best Actor nominations for his latest film, Soul. He beat Lee to the punch, so to speak, in several respects. The Chinese Boxer, for instance, was Wang Yu's debut as writer-director as well as star, setting him on a course that led to the epic Beach of the War Gods and the cult milestone Master of the Flying Guillotine. More importantly, Chinese Boxer is credited with establishing the kung fu film -- though the magic words are never used in the English dub shown on the El Rey channel -- as something distinct from the weapons-oriented wuxia pictures Wang Yu had starred in since his breakthrough in One-Armed Swordsman. A sense of novelty pervades the project, as for the benefit of a Chinese audience the auteur has a doomed teacher explain what Chinese boxing is -- and, for that matter, what karate is. Wang Yu was thus self-consciously blazing a new trail, but the funny thing is, while he's credited with practically inventing a new style of movie, he may have thought he was making a western.

There's no doubt that he was influenced by westerns. He stages one fight, his own character with throwing knives in his shirt pocket against a shuriken-tossing Japanese, exactly in the manner of a gunfight in the middle of a street, down to his "holstering" of his knives as a challenge to his enemy's "fast draw" with the throwing stars. Chinese Boxer is also thematically reminiscent of westerns. Wang Yu's character becomes a sort of town tamer, driving evil gamblers from his home. The initial villain is a crooked Chinese fighter (Chao Hsiung) who wants to destroy the local martial-arts school so he can make the town wide-open for gambling. The linkage between martial arts and gambling -- it isn't entirely clear whether our hero's master forbids gambling in town or controls it himself -- puts me in mind of Wyatt Earp, though who exactly the Earp figure is in Chinese Boxer depends on what you think of Earp. In any event, the master deals with Diao Erh fairly easily, but makes the mistake of letting him limp away to fight another day. Instead, he calls in a contingent of Japanese fighters -- Diao Erh is a karate enthusiast himself -- led by the glowering Kitashima (Lo Lieh). Establishing a Wang Yu motif we'll see again in Master of the Flying Guillotine, Kitashima demonstrates his ferocity by launching himself through the roof of a building, though in this early case he only goes partway through. He wants to stay inside to watch his minions kill one of the master's students who was spying on Diao Erh. Kitashima has a habit of demonstrating his ferocity and then ordering a minion to fight for him. But when it counts, Kitashima is a beast, killing the old master in a mid-air collision, kicking him through a wall. That climaxes a massacre of the old school, during which Wang Yu himself is clobbered and taken out early. We know he's not dead, however, because we don't see him cough up blood; our auteur presumably gets credit for establishing this method to sell death by punch.

Writer-director Wang Yu does more to embed his fight story in a social setting than many subsequent kung fu filmmakers. Before the action begins, he treats us to slices of life in his little town to illustrate its traditional normalcy. After the master's school is destroyed, he shows how Diao Erh and Kitashima have turned it into a Pottersville of vice. While our hero recuperates, we get a tragic tale of a man whose lucky night turns sour when the casino management accuses him of cheating. The man's wife pleads for his life and gets raped for her trouble. In his sickbed, our hero learns that husband and wife have killed themselves from shame. Gamblers as the serpents in Eden are a familiar motif in U.S. westerns, but I suppose Wang Yu is also protesting against perceived Japanese economic and cultural hegemony over Asia, their revenge for losing the war. That this film is Nippophobic goes without saying, from the master's condemnation of karate as inherently aggressive and destructive to the identification of Japanese with social or cultural corruption.

This news about the suicidal couple is the last straw for our hero, who finally rises from his sickbed to train for revenge. For the first time, presumably, we get the training montage characteristic of kung fu cinema, as our man toughens his fists and forearms in a cauldron of iron filings and jogs and jumps with iron weights on his legs. Ready at last, he adopts a costume, going into battle wearing a surgical mask and oven mitts. Japanese are the disease, and he's the cure.

As a director, Wang Yu falls somewhere between the visual poetry of King Hu and the kinetic efficiency of Chang Cheh. He indulges in self-consciously artistic compositions that have nothing to do with fight choreography. He shoots from the ceiling as the master lectures his seated students about comparative martial arts, because it's a nice-looking shot. He establishes the moral delirium of gambling by opening the casino scene with the action as seen and distorted in a high mirror. Wang Yu was an ambitious director who readily acknowledges stylistic and genre influences while striving to film fighting in exciting new ways. He's fond of long horizontal tracking shots with extended group choreography. He uses physical destruction as punctuation, whether the Japanese are punching holes in the school walls or Wang Yu and Lo Lieh are breaking trees in the final fight in a wintry forest. And there's the coughing up of blood, of course. He also has the advantage of a charismatic hero in himself and a classic villain in Lo Lieh -- that man's face was a national cultural treasure. As an overall auteur, circumstances kept Wang Yu from being as prolific as Chang Cheh or as popular as Bruce Lee. But there's something persistently unorthodox in his direction that keeps his work fresh, based on the few films of his I've seen. Despite his reputed innovations he was eclipsed by many other figures, but when all is said and done, given his multiple skills, Jimmy Wang Yu may well go down as the greatest creative talent in kung fu cinema.

DVR Diary: THE DRAGON MISSILE (1976)

Ho Meng-hua may deserve a place in the pantheon of directors as the patron of decapitation. He gave the world The Flying Guillotine, and if that wasn't enough, he followed that milestone of mayhem a year later with another exotic head-cutter. The "Dragon Missile" isn't a rocket but a sort of boomerang, one of a pair used by Ssu-ma Chun (Lo Lieh), the enforcer for a tyrannical local governor. The trick is to keep both in the air at once to keep your enemy confused. As he ducks one, the other swoops in to take his head off. Like many a cinematic superweapon, the dragon missiles defy physics. Chun likes to throw them into walls and trees, perhaps because he enjoys the sparks given off when his weapons strike solid objects. He works on the assumption that he can carom them violently this way to get just the right angle on his target, and while you'd think that those impacts would sap the missiles of all momentum, at least as Ho shows them with his limited effects technology, the magic of cinema spells death for our antihero's intended victims.

Chun's master is dying painfully of a rare skin cancer that manifests in nasty boils on his back. The cure is rarer still: a root that can be acquired from but one herbalist in the territory. The root must be burned, its ashes having the real therapeutic effect -- unless they get wet. After having Chun kill the diagnosing physician, the governor orders him to find the herbalist and get the root. It's important not to tell the herbalist who the root is for, since the governor is widely hated and, there being no Hippocratic oath that I know of in China, the herbalist might let the bastard die. It sounds like a simple and non-violent task, but an ambitious chamberlain decides that Chun needs an escort. His idea actually is to have his picked escort kill Chun and put the root in his hands so the chamberlain can take credit for saving the governor's life. Chun takes a "whatever" attitude toward the escort -- Lo Lieh just has that look on his face naturally -- until one of the idiots fubars the mission by telling the herbalist that the root is for the governor. Of course, Chun now has to kill the herbalist, but he won't get to kill the knucklehead that deserves it until much later in the picture. And for his trouble he earns the enmity of the herbalist's daughter, a martial artist in her own right of course.

Things go from bad to worse when a seeming bandit snatches the saddlebag Chun carries the root in. The bandit is actually the virtuous boyfriend of the herbalist's daughter, and he soon enough gets on the vengeance bandwagon when Chun kills his mother -- a martial artist in her own right of course -- after the lad stashes the saddlebag at her place. It's going to be a long trip back with the two avengers breathing down his neck and his alleged buddies waiting for a convenient time to kill poor Chun. And wouldn't you know? He has to swim part of the way.

The Dragon Missile is a preposterous picture that stays watchable thanks to a steady flow of fight scenes with a variety of styles and weapons, as well as Lo Lieh's surly charisma. But the title weapon lacks the crackpot inspiration of the flying guillotine, and as noted above, despite Ho's best efforts the missiles look silly in action. The best I can say is that the climactic fight scene features nice choreography as the actors dodge genuinely dangerous looking dragon missiles by close margins. On the other hand, the missiles are finally made hopelessly ridiculous when the heroes figure out that you really can stop the momentum of these head-cutting, branch-breaking weapons by hanging nets in their path. I saw it on El Rey so the film's own momentum was probably blunted a bit by numerous and lengthy commercial breaks, while the actors probably weren't well served by the English dubbing. Still, I think it's a treat that someone can watch TV in the daytime and see something like this, the way you could much more often when I was but a lad. At any given hour there's a lot worse you could see on TV than this film.

DVR Diary: HEROES OF THE EAST (1978)

Expect to see more Asian martial arts pictures in the Diary now that I've discovered El Rey, the new cable channel founded by Robert Rodriguez. It will make its first impression for many people later this month when the From Dusk Til Dawn TV series debuts, but I'm already impressed by its admittedly predictable selection of authentic grindhouse entertainment. Rodriguez has the rights to run Shaw Bros. movies, and while El Rey is a commercial channel, it's also an HD channel that runs movies letterboxed. While I watch Shaw films subtitled on DVD, I don't mind El Rey's understandable preference for English dubbing, since it reminds me of the good old days when your local independent station would run "Kung Fu Theater" on weekend afternoons. The dubbing doesn't often put the original actors in the best light, but that's okay for an essentially goofy, good-hearted picture like this comedy from the late Lau Kar Leung, whose more serious fare includes the classics Executioners From and The 36th Chamber of Shaolin. Heroes features Lau's favorite collaborator Gordon Liu, albeit uncharacteristically mop-topped and Nehru-jacketed as an amiably arrogant martial artist introduced on the verge of a long-arranged marriage. His father's an international businessman who years ago decided that his boy should marry the daughter of one of his Japanese colleagues. That was awfully cosmopolitan of both fathers, considering that Chinese and Japanese people are usually portrayed as sharing the sort of regard for each other that Ukrainians and Russians have. Actually this is pretty much a one-sided feud, since I've seen little evidence of Sinophobia in Japanese film, while in Chinese cinema Japan may as well be the Great Satan. Fortunately, Lau and his writers want to eat their (wedding) cake and have it too, both pandering to and sending up Chinese Japanophobia.

While our hero starts out a reluctant groom, his mood brightens when his wife (Yuka Mizuno) proves pretty. His mood darkens when she also proves to be a rival martial artist and a stereotypically arrogant proponent of Japanese fighting styles. Her karate practice damages walls and wrecks statuary, reflecting her contempt of all things Chinese, from food to fashion. The marriage turns into a running "anything you can do, I can do better" battle as husband and wife attempt to demonstrate the superiority of their respective martial arts. Inevitably, our hero usually prevails, though he's shaken by wifey's demonstration of ninjitsu and her gentle reminder that, had she not been playing, the scratch she inflicted on him from ambush would have proved fatal. At last their mutual chauvinism renders them incompatible and wifey flies back home to Nippon, where her old martial-arts instructor (authentic Japanese star Yasuaki Kurata) hopes to catch her on the rebound. Our hero hopes to win her back, but remains so buttheaded about martial arts that he opens his love letter with yet another assertion of Japanese martial inferiority. When the instructor intercepts the letter, he takes our hero's remarks as an insult to all Japanese martial arts and assembles a team of experts -- he is a ninja himself -- to avenge the slur. This team, now trailed by a repentant wife who wants to avoid bloodshed, heads to Hong Kong to challenge our hero to a series of duels, pitting his versatility against every Japanese fighting art except sumo and kamikaze flying.

Few in the audience, whether in Hong Kong or elsewhere, could be obtuse enough to miss the subtle ways in which Lau has Chinese hero exacerbate the cultural conflict with his own arrogant chauvinism. To drive the point home, he has the hero unwittingly snub a kendo specialist who, admitting defeat, offers him his sword. Given a huge opportunity to defuse the situation, our hero's ignorance exacerbates it instead. Meanwhile, Lau shows Chinese viewers something they apparently didn't see very often in movies: Japanese as honorable fighters. Appropriately for a comedy, they are not out to kill our hero. In keeping with their own cultural practice, they are as ready as chess masters to concede defeat when they realize they can't beat our hero. Some of the Japanese play dirtier than others; a hulking karate master abuses the stipulation that our hero fight one man a day by demanding to fight at the stroke of midnight, while the ninja is, of course, a ninja. But even the ninja, with perhaps the most selfish reason to destroy our hero, respects excellence and ends the film on friendly terms with him. I don't know how exceptional Lau's fantasy of reconciliation was in Hong Kong cinema, but it's definitely a good-hearted breath of fresh air compared to the virulent hate toward Japan in many movies. Gordon Liu makes a charming comic hero and, of course, a virtuoso martial artist, best demonstrating the combination in a sequence where he learns drunken boxing by having his flunkies provoke a genuinely drunken master and imitating the old man in parallel pantomime while he beats up the flunkies. Much of the comedy is less graceful, particularly the pratfalls and whining of the family servant, but the overall good nature of Heroes of the East helps you forget its flaws. It isn't really the funniest martial-arts movie, but it works as a comedy as long as you feel good by the end.

The Lady on the Roof: KISS OF DEATH (1973)

As a female-revenge picture Ho Meng-Hua's movie for Shaw Bros. is closer in spirit to Burt Kennedy's Hannie Caulder than to contemporary pieces with similar subject matter like Act of Vengeance/Rape Squad. Like Raquel Welch's heroine in the western picture, Chen Ping needs to learn from an ambivalent master how to avenge herself, and her ability to do so always remains open to question. Chen plays Chu Ling, a textile factory worker cornered in the stairwell of an oppressive looking apartment block by a criminal gang of grotesques. They drag her to the roof to gang-rape her. Ho shoots the sequence with a blend of brutal objectivity in the location work, crass detail in the action and delirious abstraction as Chu Ling sinks into delirium and unconsciousness.

While dealing with rage issues -- she takes out her shame on some innocent textiles -- Chu Ling learns that one or more of the gang has effectively murdered her by infecting her with "Vietnam Rose," an especially virulent venereal disease. That makes it all the more imperative that she take revenge on the rapists. She takes a job as a bar girl in a sleazy district, hoping her enemies may come in at some point. It isn't really her kind of work but she has an indulgent employer. As Wong Ta, Lo Lieh sports a limp and a sword-cane, not to mention a compellingly noirish world-weary attitude, but with his kung fu skills he's a crippled master. Since getting a gun and shooting the rapists doesn't seem to be an option, Chu Ling begs Wong Ta to teach her kung fu. He's reluctant but increasingly sympathetic; in fact, he's falling for her, not realizing at first that she has but a short time to live. If the kung fu lessons aren't enough, head hostess Hung (Chen Ching) teaches her how to use razor-tipped playing cards as throwing weapons. They aren't lethal but they're pretty annoying and they'll buy you time in a fight.

As in Hannie Caulder, Kiss of Death emphasizes the inescapable limitations of the heroine in a nod to realism. While Chu Ling as a kung-fu avenger is a far less exceptional figure in Hong Kong cinema than a female gunfighter was in westerns, she hardly compares to the fantastical superwomen usually seen in martial-arts films. If outnumbered she's in big trouble until Wong Ta can bail her out so she can focus on her real targets. Initially she goes after them one by one, each kill a kind of set piece that also arguably makes Kiss of Death a reverse-giallo. In the most elaborate sequence she takes out a pimp -- he's even called "Pimp" -- who specializes in getting girls drunk and high, filming amateur porn without their knowledge, and blackmailing them into whoring for him. Like the others, he gets Chu Ling's specialty coup de grace -- a pair of scissors to the groin. In the most intense bit, she has it out with another rapist with a pickaxe in a graveyard.

An air of tragedy hangs over the seedy proceedings, since we know that Wong Ta's hopes of romancing and redeeming Chu Ling are in vain. Worse, Hung gets herself killed as collateral damage, having lent Chu Ling her deck of cards, when the surviving rapists invade their shared apartment. It's just more to avenge, for what it's worth, and I suppose it's to Ho's credit that he does little to romanticize revenge. Chu Ling's revenge is a punishing ordeal, and the film's blunt ending may leave you questioning whether there was a point to it all. It's definitely not your typical kung fu movie, and it's actually something more than that. It may still be unforgivably exploitative for some, but it's also uncompromising trash in perhaps the best possible sense of the term.

BEACH OF THE WAR GODS (1973)

As an actor, Jimmy Wang Yu is probably best known for his roles as a one-armed fighter, whether as Chang Cheh's One-Armed Swordsman or his own One-Armed Boxer. As a director, he's certainly best known for his cult epic Master of the Flying Guillotine. But his earlier Beach of the War Gods may well be the best action movie you've never heard of. It's a pretty simple story and a typical Chinese-language exercise in Japanophobia, this time reaching back to the 16th century CE. With the Ming dynasty collapsing, Japanese pirates are preying on the Chinese coast, taking plunder and exacting tribute. They make demands of a certain town, only to find one man willing and able to defy them. Wang Yu plays Hsia Feng, nephew of a defeated, captive general and a leader of men in his own right. He realizes that he might manage to drive out a small force on his own, but with more pirates certain to come, the villagers need to learn to fight, and they need good fighters to teach them.

 

Yes, it's basically the magnificent seven samurai gladiators beyond the stars again, though Wang Yu falls slightly short of a quorum, recruiting four only warriors: a strongman with a big sword; a knife thrower with an arsenal for a vest; a spear fighter and his sometime antagonist, a dude that uses two shields for weapons. Fortunately, the villagers prove apt pupils who are soon able to give the pirates all the fight they want. Unfortunately for them, the pirates are led by one Shinobu Hashimoto (Fei Lung), who may be even more of a one-man army than Hsia Feng. The stage is set for an incredible battle in the village that lasts for nearly a half-hour of screen time. It's a tour-de-force of composition, choreography and editing by Wang Yu, his stunt coordinators and cinematographer Yao Hu Chiu.

 

 

The costume designer Li Kai-yuan deserves credit as well for making the action easy to follow. The rank-and-file good guys are in white, the rank-and-file bad guys in black. The Japanese in red have special skills or weapons that make them dangerous, while the five heroes and the main villain have distinctive costumes and features. Wang Yu holds his shots so you can follow the action, and indulges in some amazing lateral tracking shots as first Hsia Feng and later Shinobu march through opposing forces like swords through butter. A generous auteur, he builds Fei Lung up as an awesome antagonist who manages to take down two of the heroes during the main battle. The heroes all get big, picturesque heroic moments of their own, of course. Wang Yu also makes judicious use of slow-motion, particularly to highlight Hsia Feng's defeat of a particularly nasty red antagonist. This guy fights with a hook on a chain. Missing our hero, his hook gets embedded in a post. While he strains to release it, Hsia Feng throws another enemy into the extended chain. That serves to yank the weapon loose and propel the first bad guy into the path of our hero's sword. Shinobu gets some slo-mo highlights of his own to further build anticipation for the inevitable one-on-one showdown.

 

 

 

The final fight is a night battle fought at the foot of a windmill. You get the impression that Wang Yu is yet another filmmaker profoundly influenced by James Whale's Frankenstein from the way Hsia Feng dangles awhile from one of the turning windmill blades and the way he and Shinobu gaze at each other through a turning wagon wheel, as Whale's Frankenstein and Monster do through the gears inside their windmill. This closing showdown can't hope to top the epic battle that preceded it, but it makes a good denouement after the climactic carnage.

The Golden Harvest studio promoted Beach of the War Gods as the manliest of pictures, boasting of a total absence of women from a cast of thousands. It probably helps to be in a manly mood to appreciate its magnificent mayhem, but what made me appreciate it more was a film I'd watched just before -- a very recent wuxia picture I'll probably be reviewing shortly. That picture used modern wirework and CGI to let its heroes and villains leap about in ways impossible for Wang Yu forty years ago. But the CGI and green-screen moments were almost always painfully obvious and distracting in the newer movie, and while it was more progressive than Wang Yu's in at least one sense -- there were nearly as many prominent female warriors as there were males -- Beach had all the advantages otherwise. Wang Yu's film has a visceral immediacy and a committed intensity that was mostly missing from the more recent and more fantastical picture, and it had a director and all-around creative team that had clearly thought hard about maximizing the visual impact of the action they staged. The result is a kind of crazed masterpiece of epic violence that any fan of martial arts cinema must see sometime.

Here's a rather awkward English-language trailer, uploaded to YouTube by montrealflickers. Definitely see the picture in Chinese if you can.

LIFE WITHOUT PRINCIPLE (2011)

 
There's a storm coming....
 

Johnnie To may be the premiere crime-film director of the present time. His films about Chinese triads have a reputation as slick, sleek thrillers with a classical gravitas beyond the B-movie material. For his most recent film he keeps one foot in the gangster milieu but expands his scope to sweep across Hong Kong society, showing how everyone -- crooks and cops, bankers and brokers -- gets caught up in the maelstrom of a global economic crisis. Almost inevitably, his story -- the work of five writers -- takes a Tarantinian non-linear form. That is, it's only well after we're introduced to new characters that we learn that their story intersects with that of the characters previously introduced at the point in time when we left those characters. Some find the concept tired by now, but To and his writers keep it fresh by luring us to expect something to happen and surprising us with something else.

Life Without Principle features four primary characters in three storylines. The first we meet are actually the least developed, a cop and his wife who are arguing over whether to close on a high-rise apartment. From them the spotlight shifts to Teresa (Denise Ho), an investment broker under the gun. She's last on the sales chart and the office gossip is that whoever finishes last loses her job. She works late trying to scare up business but she seems to lack the gift for sales. She finally finds a prospect in an elderly woman impatient at the interest rate in her current plan. The old lady is rated a low-risk investor but Teresa pushes the high-risk package on her, promising huge and rapid profits. This section culminates in an ingeniously excruciating scene in which Teresa is obliged to record the old woman acknowledging and consenting to the risk. Teresa has coached her to say "I understand completely" whenever prompted, but as Teresa goes through her script questions keep arising. Twice over, Teresa has to scrap the recording and start over again after reassuring her client. Finally, her boss witnesses the transaction and the old woman explains her reason for risky investing: "I want more money."

Teresa is kept off-balance by Yuen (Lo Hoi-pang), a loan shark who's made a timely cash withdrawal just before the markets take a dive. Greece is on the brink of defaulting on its debt and dragging the entire global financial market with it, and people are panicking while Yuen gloats at his own cleverness, taking calls constantly. He learns that he doesn't need as much ready cash as he thought and gives several million back to Teresa, telling her to re-deposit it. He doesn't have time to do the paperwork himself and rushes off, leaving his cellphone behind. Noticing this when she hears his Peking Opera ringtone, Teresa rushes after him, reaching the parking garage to find cops converging on his car. The man appears to be dead, slumped against his windshield with blood streaming down his face.

The spotlight shifts again to small-time gangsterdom. We now follow the misadventures of Panther (Lau Ching Wan), a rumpled fixer who seems to get along by the seat of his pants. He makes a big show of delivering payments to his boss and arranging for a banquet, without necessarily knowing everything on the menu. The banquet is disrupted by the arrival of the West Kowloon Police, who arrest Panther's Boss Wah. It's now up to Panther to scare up bail money, which isn't as easy as  you might assume. Money seems scarce everywhere, and our man has to spend a lot of time buttering up a junk man who taunts Panther, claiming that he makes more money collecting cardboard than he does as a criminal. He finally coughs up some money just to be rid of the earnest and increasingly hapless-seeming gangster. In any event, Boss Wah makes bail, but moments later the East Kowloon Police show up to arrest him and Panther needs to find more bail money.

Panther looks up another "sworn brother" who runs some sort of underground day-trading business. Brother Lung (Phillip Keung) boasts of his success and urges Panther to learn how to play the market, leaving him a chart of trends to study while he steps out briefly. Dutifully Panther studies the chart until Lung bursts back in, desperate to log on and sell some rapidly depreciating assets. It's too late; Lung has been shut out of his accounts and faces ruin. So now Panther needs to find money for Lung, and a loan-shark they know seems the most likely target. At this point, since we recognize their quarry as Yuen from Teresa's story, we can guess what will happen as Panther breaks into the man's car in the parking garage. But as he lies in wait, someone else entirely attacks the loan shark while Panther huddles helplessly in the back seat. The two men brawl, the mugger bashing the loan shark over the head with a tire iron. The older man is tough, though. He gets up and bashes his attacker from behind, finally beating him to death and stomping back to the car before the effects of his own injury catch up to him. Panther finally slips out with a few millions before the cops and Teresa arrive at the scene.

While Teresa faces a simple, classical moral dilemma -- with no paperwork indicating that the loan shark left any money with her, and with the carjacking apparently explaining any loss, should she take the money and run? -- Panther's adventures become a regular day from hell. He and Lung are soon accosted by one of the bigger players in the clandestine market, someone whom Lung owes big time. Panther puts himself in danger simply through his inability to keep his mouth shut, but the big man seems more amused than angered by him. Lung's another story, however, and the guy takes some sort of floral-design icepick and drives it through Lung's breast. The good news, he tells Panther, is that Lung might live if Panther gets him to a hospital in time. He lets them go, and Lung takes the wheel as they head off for help. But Lung remains more interested in getting money than in keeping alive -- he seems to think money will save him. After almost getting trapped in a converging circle of police detours -- these are related to a suspense storyline involving Inspector Cheung -- Lung drops Panther off outside another brokerage with desperate instructions to bet their remaining loot on the market continuing to drop.  Inside, Panther promptly forgets the instructions and has to rely on his own hunch. He bets that the market will rise. In a blackly comic climax, the market continues to fall as an unwitting and dying Lung roots the trend down in his car and Panther despairs in the brokerage. Then, improbably, the market reverses -- Greece will be bailed out -- and as Panther rejoices a horrified Lung, not realizing his good fortune, stumbles into the street to make a final cry for help, only to be ignored as the cops focus on the hostage situation nearby.

To ends the film on an unnecessary note with Teresa (I'll leave her decision unspoiled) and Panther almost crossing paths on a crowded street, but with uncertainty still hanging over the city. Where will Teresa go from here? After his ordeal, does Panther remember that he still needs to bail out Boss Wah? The English-language title doesn't necessarily clarify things, especially when Panther seems to be the most principled person in the picture in his doglike devotion to too many bosses and sworn brothers. To the extent that Teresa is a sympathetic character -- I expect audiences to empathize with the worker on the firing line with an impossible goal imposed on her -- I wonder whether To wants us to root for her to take the money or not. It may be one of those situations where the idea is to implicate the audience; if you root for Teresa and/or Panther to take the money, aren't you involved in a life without principle? Or do you apply survival logic and assume that in a world without principle people had better look out for themselves? These moral complications only enhance the picture, and the performances by poker-faced Denise Ho and frantic Lau Ching Wan are pillars that keep the whole structure aloft, with support from a fine ensemble, several of whom (along with Lau) have won awards for their work here. Life Without Principle is one of the best films so far to deal with the ongoing economic crisis, and possibly the most entertaining of them.

YES, MADAM (In the Line of Duty 2: the Super-Cops, 1985)

As far as most Americans are concerned, the history of martial arts cinema consists of whatever happened before Bruce Lee, then Bruce Lee and endless badly dubbed imitators fighting each other over their masters' deaths, followed by Jackie Chan's more comical, stunt-oriented movies, and finally today's CGI-enhanced fantasies. Chan didn't break into the U.S. mainstream until the mid-1990s, but a decade earlier Hong Kong action films reflected his influence. What we were taught to admire about Jackie Chan was that he did his own stunts, but on the evidence of Corey Yuen's film the stunts themselves mattered more to some directors, if not to audiences, than who actually did them. I hadn't watched a film like Yes Madam in a while; most of my recent martial-arts viewing had been more oldschool. I had been used to an evolution over the 1970s toward a virtuoso standard of martial-arts skills reflected in the movies' increasing emphasis on training sequences, however fantastic those may have been. Watching Yuen's movie after watching a lot of Seventies kung fu is like watching a modern musical after a diet of Fred Astaire. Astaire wanted to show off his skills by having directors showcase his full body in long takes, while in later musicals directors often assert themselves by conspicuously editing dance numbers. The fight scenes in Yes, Madam are all about stunts and editing, but there's more point to the practice than there is in many modern musicals. The individual shots could be compared to the panels of a comic book. Every set-up is framed for the maximum impact from a short burst of action. Individual blows are more devastating than in oldschool fight scenes, as wirework often sends a stuntman flying after a powerful kick from one of the heroines. Slow-motion is employed liberally to emphasize the reality of certain stunts. As a whole the fight scenes are more dynamic and more cartoonish than what you might have seen a decade earlier, and that seems to fit the cartoonishness of the picture as a whole.

Michelle Yeoh is armed and dangerous

Yes, Madam is a cop movie of confusing lineage -- billed on screen as a sequel to a picture that, according to IMDB, actually came out a year later, the two having in common Michelle Yeoh, then still using her original nom d'ecran of Michelle Khan, in early starring roles. What struck me about this particular cop movie is how like a Lethal Weapon picture it was in its overblown goofiness and rambling narrative. It's more like a later Lethal Weapon to the extent that comedy relief characters are allowed to try to steal the movie. A viewer expecting an action-chick apotheosis, since the film teams Yeoh with American karate champion and future B-movie star Cynthia Rothrock, will be surprised and probably appalled to learn that they have no more, really, than an equal share of screen time with three male criminal buffoons, each named after some popular pain reliever: Strepsil, Aspirin and Panadol. They're thieves and counterfeiters, constantly whining at and bickering with each other while earning money to subsidize the retirement of their old master (powder-haired co-producer Sammo Hung). They accidentally acquire frames of microfilm that could expose a vast criminal network after an old Scotland Yard mentor of Inspector Ng (Yeoh/Khan) is killed by gangsters in a hotel they intend to rob. In the confusion the comedy crooks make off with the film inside the victim's passport book -- the real prize as far as they're concerned.

Ng wants to track down her mentor's killers, with the aggressive assistance of British detective Morris (Rothrock), while the killers are trying to find the microfilm that the crooks don't realize they even have until relatively late in the proceedings. Add an angry fugitive who buys the doctored passport from the crooks only to have a shitstorm of hard-kicking justice descend upon him, a pool hustler and his personal band of enforcers, etc. etc. and you have a nice recipe for an hour and a half of energetically stupid mayhem.

This is one of those 1980s movies that may leave viewers of a certain age struggling to remind themselves that they actually lived through that decade. Did people thirty years or so ago really dress like that? I suppose it's progressive that Yeoh and Rothrock are hardly glamorized here, but it's one thing not to be treated as sex objects, another to be subjected to the garish baggy costumes they wear in Yes, Madam. Sometimes they look like children on a playdate, or at least like their mommies had dressed them, but there's a point to it. For one thing, those outfits probably provide the ladies some much needed padding for the falls they'll have to take. And while there are plenty of shots that demonstrate that Yeoh, with her dance training, and Rothrock, with her non-combat karate training, are convincing cinematic fighters, Yuen's characters need to make some amazing acrobatic leaps and when they do, the shots are from far enough away for us to assume that these are men, not women, doing the stunts in those conveniently loose, mannish garments. Needless to say, this is where rapid-fire editing comes in very handy.

Some women's skills probably can't be duplicated by stuntmen

Like many a Hollywood cop film of the era, Yes, Madam features mismatched partners. While the thrill of the picture is the idea of two women beating up all the men, the women themselves never really become buddies. Whether a political comment is being made in then British-ruled Hong Kong, or a cultural comment is made on western cop movies, Yuen's movie makes a pointed distinction between Ng's subtler methods with prisoners and Morris's hard-charging brutality. The Brit is more inclined to beat information out of a suspect, but the Chinese does not act differently out of squeamishness. "If that worked, we'd do it," Ng tells Morris after pulling her off a hapless prisoner. Ng is more likely to let a perp escape custody in the expectation that he'll lead her to the next level of the criminal food chain. She's usually right, of course, though the chaotic scheming of the three comics complicates things. It ultimately compromises the picture until Yes Madam is more about the crooks than the cops, closing not with the superwomen sharing a triumph, but with one of the crooks going vigilante on a cackling master criminal. It's an abrupt wrap-up very unlike an American cop movie, and why Yuen and his writers should want to wrap it that way is probably what makes the picture most foreign. The Chinese may not have the same idea of "comedy relief" as Anglophones do, so it may not have jolted them so much to see a film close with a buffoon turned bloody avenger. On the other hand, since this film's master criminal is shielded by the legal system from the fate he presumably deserves yet can't receive at the hands of the policewomen. Even Morris won't shoot a man in cold blood, but a pathetic petty criminal, a man who was a punching bag for most of the picture, pretty well can. It's still an odd way to end the movie, but it may seem less odd to its original audience for reasons I don't fully get yet. But as long as you feel that Yes, Madam has given you the quota of kinetic cinema you were looking for -- and you probably will -- you can let the ending go.

BLACK MAGIC (1975)

Ho Meng-hua's landmark horror film for the Shaw Bros. studio is like Hong Kong's answer to White Zombie, a tangle of sex, greed and, yes, black magic. It opens with a prologue establishing its venal villain, Sha Jianmi (Ku Feng) plying his trade by using voodoo-like dolls to kill a cheating husband and his mistress for an aggrieved wife. The mystical murder comes to the attention of the film's Van Helsing figure, Master Furong (Ku Wengchun, an avuncular looking Wifred Brimley type), who immediately guesses that Sha is behind it and sets about taking him down from afar. Sha senses that a storm's coming and plasters his walls with warding posters streaked with blood from his own tongue. His efforts are to no avail, but he manages to escape with facial burns while leaving his client to die as his shack collapses on her head.

 

Two naked people are dead, and for Master Furong one thing is certain: Sha Jianmi is responsible

Sporting grey hair after his ordeal, Sha sets up shop near a construction site in Kuala Lumpur and somehow acquires a reputation that recommends him to Lang Jiajie (Lo Lieh), who's trying to seduce his way to Luo Yin's ("Tanny" aka Tien Ni) money and wants a love potion to lubricate his way. Sha demands payment in gold the size of his pet skull, though not in advance. Doing business with him is like dealing with the devil; you have to be careful what you ask for. His potion is good for a one-night stand, but in the morning an enraged Luo throws LJ out. Loverboy feels he didn't quite get what he wanted, but Sha doesn't care: pay or die. LJ doesn't pay, and he dies. But he's planted a thought in Luo Yin's head, since he stupidly admitted using a love potion, so the wealthy woman summons Sha to her home. She has the hots for architect Xu Nuo (Ti Lung) and, as LJ already noted, plenty of money to pay for a proper spell to lure him away from his betrothed (Lily Li). She's brazen enough to use Sha's potion on Xu's wedding day -- the briefly happy couple has Christian nuptials -- walking out with the groom in the middle of his reception as the bride looks on in horror.

Luo Yin has regrets the morning after, but she learns from her mistakes.

Luo has plenty of money to keep Sha keeping Xu in line, but Sha wants more than money. He covets Luo's body as well as her coins and gets both -- duding himself up for a while in the process in a naively charming way -- even as Luo keeps Xu as her plaything. To make things more certain she has the sorcerer put a death curse on Xu's betrothed, but her friends, figuring out that magic is involved -- the fact that they can see worms crawling beneath her skin is just a bit of a giveaway -- find that there's an expert in such things close at hand. It's none other than Master Furong, who after draining the evil worms from the intended victim heads to Luo's lair to place the place under a musical siege. The music loosens the villains' grip on Xu, who manages to escape (Ti Lung's only real fight scene in the picture is with a dog) as Furong holds Sha and his skull at bay.

Xu Nuo won't really be free again until Sha is dead, however, though temporary remedies like centipede soup are available. While Sha lives, Xu's the object of a spiritual tug of war as the bad guys reassert their influence. The film closes with a camp-cosmic showdown at the construction site as Shan and Furong vie for dominance with all the mystic powers in their arsenals, clouds gather as if the Red Sea's going to part, and poor Xu wanders among the girders. It's sort of like the climax of The Manitou staged by Harold Lloyd. I'm not sure if that'll mean anything to every reader, but to me that's a good thing: not quite intentionally funny, but it'll do.

Black Magic has a reputation for outrageous sleaze and gruesomeness, -- I haven't described the makings of some of Sha's potions, but one involves a woman stuffing rice in an intimate place --but I found it great fun. It's solid, sincere entertainment whether you find it amusing or revolting. For me, part of the fun was seeing martial-arts stalwarts like Ti Lung and Lo Lieh in situations they couldn't fight their way out of. It reinforces my feeling that they were decent actors as well as strong genre performers. Above all, however, Ku Feng carries the picture. Sha Jianmi is a great movie villain: powerful enough to be an indisputable menace, but not so powerful that he can't play the coward, too. Most importantly, Sha is no acolyte of abstract evil like a contemporary American devil worshipper, but a self-interested sociopath of limitless greed. He's perfectly hissable with just enough charisma to be compelling and just enough scuzzy venality that you're not going to root for him at the end. For moralists in the audience, he can be taken as an embodiment of the evils that can arise from loosened sexual mores, but apart from his dalliance with Luo he's more interested in money than anything else. After seeing too many villains in movies with vaguely apocalyptic motives, or who do evil to prove some kind of philosophical point, Sha is a breath of fresh air, though his breath probably doesn't smell that great.

Ho outreaches himself at the climax, as his effects can't live up to his vision, but he should have you committed enough to the story by then that you can forgive some of the cheapness and appreciate more of the craziness. As long as you're not squeamish, Black Magic is a grand piece of exotic entertainment and a landmark of global genre cinema from the Sleazy Seventies.