A randomly comprehensive survey of extraordinary movie experiences from the art house to the grindhouse, featuring the good, the bad, the ugly, but not the boring or the banal.
Let's take a look at the trailer first this time. This copy was uploaded to YouTube by venomchamber.
That's the trailer I saw on a compilation disc and that's why I rented a DVD of the film now known as Blood Money. I should have been seeing a vigorously brutal story worthy of the hype, something that should have been an improvement on the only other spaghetti western-kung fu crossover I've seen, the merrily vicious and unconscionably entertaining Fighting Fists of Shanghai Joe. As far as production values are concerned, Blood Money, a collaboration between Carlo Ponti and Shaw Bros. with Antonio "Anthony M. Dawson" Margheriti directing, wins hands down. This is a beautifully shot film on a bigger budget than you might expect, with lush cinematography by Alejandro Ulloa and evocative landscapes filmed in both Spain (standing in for the U.S. as usual) and China. The music by Carlos Savina is more elegiac than badass, more Ortolani than Morricone, but very easy on the ear. The mighty men who star, Lee Van Cleef and Lo Lieh, are troupers who perform with enthusiasm....
BUTT!
That's a pun, not a typo, and it leads us to the problem with this promising package. It turns out to be a comedy, but I have no automatic problem with that. Shanghai Joe is pretty funny, too, whether it means to be or not. But the type of comedy The Stranger and the Gunfighter indulges in has little to do with its gunfighting or kung-fu elements. The original Italian title is La dove non batte il sole. My Microsoft Translator rather witlessly translates this as "Where does not beat the sun," but a more idiomatic attempt, "Where the sun don't shine," gets us nearer the bottom of the matter.
We're introduced to Dakota (Van Cleef) working his way through the defenses of a safe. At each obstacle he discovers a photograph of a woman, and with each discovery Margheriti cuts to a flashback presumably showing how the picture was taken. Each woman had a tryst with a short, bald Chinese merchant who seems to have a rear-end fetish. He examines each woman's tush with an appraiser's eye. All of this is unknown to Dakota as he prepares to blow the safe. The merchant appears to prevent the blast, but is killed by the explosion. Dakota is captured, tried and sentenced to death for the merchant's death.
In China, we learn that the merchant was the uncle of Ho Chiang (Lo Lieh) and that funds entrusted to him by a local mandarin are unaccounted for. All the official has to show for his investment is a cigar store Indian. To redeem the family honor, not to mention save their lives, Ho must go to America and recover the money. Lo Lieh gets to show off some moves here but the action seems perfunctory and the director seems most interested in getting slow-mo shots of the actor leaping through the air. Still, it's just about the most fighting we'll see from Lo Lieh in the picture.
Ho makes it to our original starting point in time to interview Dakota on the night before the hanging. He decides that the outlaw would make an excellent guide to the rest of the west and contrives to rescue him from the gallows. Reviewing the four photos, our duo realize that they must track down these women and find out what the old man found so fascinating about their butts. The bright but guileless Ho is unselfconscious about asking women to examine their asses or, worse, asking the men in their lives for the privilege. Despite these faux pas he emerges as the brains of the outfit, equipped with a foolproof method of picking roulette winners and a case full of acupuncture needles to enhance his imposture of a doctor. He deduces at last that each woman has had a share of information tattooed on her behind; combined, these rump notes will reveal the true location of the treasure.
"I wish to look at ass of your wife." A redundantly shocking moment from The Stranger and the Gunfighter.
The plot renders Blood Money a mildly bawdy comedy of manners -- or in Dakota's case, the lack thereof. The copy I watched seems to be 10 minutes short of the original length, which may explain why nothing more salacious than a butt is exposed here. The same comedy situations are repeated four times over, while Van Cleef is wasted playing a buffoon. You hold out hope for something better once some villains are introduced: an ex-con religious fanatic murderer (Julian Ugarte) who travels in a horse-drawn church and dresses like Rasputin of the West, and a big Indian brute clearly meant for a showdown with Ho. Add the inevitable Mexican bandits and you have a potentially formidable roster of enemies. But no one's heart really seems to be into the violence, even when a tortured Dakota gets hold of a Gatling gun, and the big fight between Lo Lieh and the Indian is lackluster. This is fatal. There's no point to making a spaghetti-kung fu crossover unless you go for broke with the action and violence. There's no point to watching such a film unless you expect a lot of action and violence. But somebody (Carlo Ponti, maybe) must have thought that the actresses' assets were equal in importance to shooting, kicking and killing. With all due respect to the rears of Femi Benussi, Erika Blanc, Patty Shepard and Karen Yeh, it just ain't so.
"The Deacon" (Julian Ugarte) brings the wrath of God wherever he goes, but no man makes a martyr of Lee Van Cleef -- though they can sure try.
Maybe this film was made too late. By 1974 comedy had contaminated spaghetti westerns to an almost incurable extent, and to a point where we should be grateful that we at least got Van Cleef and not Terrence Hill. By the time kung-fu was big enough globally to make a project like this plausible, the damage had already been done, and it was probably inevitable that a film like this would end up as some sort of comedy. It is only a Seventies dream, I suppose, to envision a film with a gunfighter and a martial artist who are both badasses true to their respective genres, something closer to the Mifune-Bronson teamup in Red Sun. That ideal crossover may exist only in that trailer I saw. If that sort of crossover is what you're looking for, the trailer is probably all you need to see.
Ti Hong is an aspiring doctor who works in Dr. Chu's "surgery," as the English dubbing of Shen Jiang's film calls his clinic. Our hero's mind seems more set on kung fu, as we might hope, this being a kung fu film, though his main motivation seems to be the opportunity to practice with Chu's attractive daughter. We find them desecrating a graveyard with punches and kicks as the story begins. Dr. Chu's staff has been treating a growing number of opium and morphine addicts recently. As one doctor notes, "It just started in the last six months since the Japanese opened that club." Coincidence? Who are we kidding? This is a Chinese kung fu movie; all calamities are obviously the Japs' fault. Sure enough, at that club we find the Japs plotting their next marketing strategy. "I think we ought to import less opium, get more morphine," one suggests to their boss, the Chairman -- a well-dressed man whose face we don't see, who communicates with his minions mostly with growls and grunts.
Business is good, but could be better if only Dr. Chu, who is waging an anti-drug campaign, could be discredited. The Chairman and his Chinese collaborators come up with a brilliant stratagem to do just that. They send one of their men to the surgery for emergency treatment.
Doctor: You a drug addict? Minion: What's the matter? Mean you can't tell? [Doctor takes Minion's pulse] M: What's wrong? D: Nothing! M: Nothing? What do you mean? I'm an opium smoker. I've been smoking opium for the past fifteen years! D: You don't look like an addict. M: Well, I'm sorry about that, too! What am I supposed to look like? What sort of surgery is this? Oh, come on! Prescribe something for me! Something to make me feel better! D: Yeah, yeah. We'll do that, yeah. Hey Lu, the usual dose.
After detecting nothing wrong with the man, the doctor gives him "the usual dose" of something on the man's word that, despite all the evidence one's pulse can provide, he's a desperate drug addict. He sure does act like one afterward, raving in ersatz agony and telling anyone who happens to walk in that "I've gone mad!"
The doctors don't believe it, but the minion's pals defend his honor and the integrity of his illness, accusing Dr. Chu, who had nothing to do with the transaction, of malpractice. After some pushing and shoving, followed by some punching and kicking from Ti Hong, Chu agrees to pay the gangsters some hush money. But Ti Hong isn't having it. He invades the Jap-operated gambling den and wins the money back with extreme prejudice. That makes him a target for the Chairman's goon squad, but Ti Hong welcomes the attention. Confronted in the countryside by superior numbers, he asks a Hitler-moustached minion, "Are you a Chinese or a Japanese?" Why does he ask? "The Chinese, there's always hope for them. I'll treat them lightly. But the Japs, those pigs shouldn't live." This is actually just bluster. The victorious Ti Hong spares the Japanese, contenting himself with cutting their ears off.
We could have warned these Japanese gangsters that Hitler style was useless against Chinese boxing, but since it would have fallen on deaf ears anyway the consequences of their folly are no great loss.
Dr. Chu has a conflicted view of kung fu. He feels that his daughter and Ti Hong are wasting their time, but he once ran his own kung fu school. Back then he was just as opposed to drugs, but certain Japanese gangsters questioned his views about the deleterious effects of opium. They challenged him to a fight against a champion of theirs who not only sold but used the stuff. The only unusual effect of his addiction was to give him something like iron fingers and the power to embed them in wooden surfaces. He used this talent to tear Chu's shirt and bruise his back. This defeat compelled Chu to give up martial arts (and anti-drug campaigning, for a time), steering him toward his medical career. We've given you the key puzzle pieces now. There's a master criminal whose face we don't see, and the hero's master was humiliated by someone we do see in a flashback. Can you guess the Chairman's identity?...
Meanwhile, the Chairman's strategy shifts from discrediting Chu to discrediting Ti Hong. The bad guys approach this challenge with the same brilliance they showed earlier. They send the wife of a comedy-relief morphine addict into dangerous proximity to our hero so she can cry rape at an inconvenient moment. The addict denounces him and the wife insists that she couldn't resist him because he's so strong. Enraged, Ti Hong shoves her to the sidewalk, stunning her. The bad guys slip her a serious mickey and declare her dead. This gets Ti Hong carted off to prison, where he can still beat most of the guards and their Japanese pals with both hand shackled above his head. But it's convenient for him to be there once the bad guys arrest Chu and his daughter, bringing everyone together for the big reveal of the Chairman's identity and the big showdown between him and Ti Hong.
I can't fairly judge the quality of star Yiu Tien Lung's fight choreography because Mill Creek Entertainment's copy of Infernal Street is a clearly-cropped fullscreen version. The fighting is passable and our hero brawls with expressive enthusiasm, but the story (at least in English) is childishly ludicrous. The writer wants to drive home the anti-drug message, most forcibly in Ti Hong's flashback to his father's death from addiction, and his mother's immediate suicide, presumably from smashing the back of her head against a wall. But the dialogue (again, at least the dubbing) undermines any seriousness of purpose, as when an addict is asked why he doesn't kick the habit and answers, "Come on, I couldn't do it and it doesn't cost that much!" in a Jerry Lewis-like voice.
The toll of drugs: Above, Ti Hong's mom is collateral damage. Below, "Would you like some morphine?" "WOULD I?!?"
It renders the drama ridiculous but definitely enhances the film's entertainment value for certain audiences. I'm sure the typical anti-Jap material has the same effect, giving some viewers a certain thrill of transgression at seeing such naked hatred expressed by one people for another. Here it's done in such a bloody slapstick manner that it really is kind of funny, whether it was meant that way or not, and I suppose the Chinese in the Seventies still had fresh enough memories of Japanese atrocities to explain their attitude. In the form in which we have the film I can safely recommend it only to bad movie buffs who'd find the idea of a Chinese Reefer Madness with kung fu and xenophobia thrown in potentially appealing.
Flashlegsrare has uploaded a video trailer (widescreen and subtitled) for Infernal Street to YouTube.
Wilson Yip's biopic about the real-life Wing Chun master and mentor to Bruce Lee beat out John Woo's vaunted Red Cliff for Best Picture at the 28th Hong Kong Film Awards, though the only other award it won was for Sammo Hung's action choreography. That's a category conspicuously absent from American film awards, but no matter. I haven't seen Red Cliff yet (and in U.S. theaters it won't be the full-length movie anyway) so I don't know if I should consider this a rip-off, or if Chinese audiences felt that way. I do know that I liked Ip Man quite a bit.
High-conceptwise, think of Ip Man as a cross between Fist of Fury and Cinderella Man. Our title character is an independently wealthy landowner who stays amiably aloof from the highly-competitive martial-arts community in Foshan, though not aloof enough for the neglected Mrs. Ip. When one of the masters from "Martial Arts Street" comes over to challenge him to a duel, Ip Man invites him to share dinner before getting down to business. He's a model of courtesy; after manhandling his rival with little difficulty, he thanks the man for being lenient with him. Master Ip is civic-minded, however. When Master Jin storms the neighborhood with a band of bandits to prove the superiority of Northern boxing, it's up Ip to slap some respect into the barbarian with a devastating feather-duster attack. The fight is a joy to watch, something out of classic slapstick right down to Donnie Yen's taciturn Buster Keaton-like expression. He can be violent and non-violent at the same time. When a local cop scoffs at the masters, claiming that China needs arms and guns, not martial arts, Ip disputes his point by slapping the barrel out of the officer's pistol. But even the embarrassed officer cheers him on when he drives Jin out of town and becomes the hero of Foshan.
Choose your weapons: Ip Man (Donnie Yen, right) dusts off Master Jin (Fan Siu-Wong)
Like Kung Fu Hustle, Ip Man is set in an idyllic 1930s that must be seen as a sort of golden age by many Chinese, but inevitably 1937 rolls around and the Japanese arrive in force. These predatory invaders devastate the Foshan economy, confiscate Ip Man's property, and force him and his little family out onto the street. This is the Cinderella Man part of the movie as Master Ip learns to use his hands for manual labor rather than martial arts practice in order to keep his wife and son from starving. He gives up Wing Chun, explaining that practice makes him hungry when there isn't much food to go around.
Nevertheless, once he lands work spreading coal (after turning down an offer from a textile mill he'd invested in in better days) his ears prick up along with those of other ex-masters when the Japanese occupiers issue a challenge: their karate men vs. Chinese martial artists, with a bag of rice for any Chinese who can beat a Jap. This show is run by General Miura, a genuine martial-arts enthusiast who is the nearest thing this patriotic film will allow to a "good Jap." He has a definite code of honor compared to his underlings, and doesn't like his dojo being used for summary executions. When word reaches Master Ip that the Japs have shot down one of his old buddies, he demands to fight ten karate guys at once. He defeats them easily with attacks that are heavy with rapid-fire pummeling and limb snapping, but refuses to accept his ten bags of rice as a reward. Instead, he delivers his pal's bloodstained bag of rice to his grieving family.
That's gotta hurt! (above and below)
The Japanese aren't the only problem in Foshan. Jin's bandits are still lurking in the countryside, hijacking trucks and running an extortion racket on the textile mill Ip had invested in. Concerned about Japanese retaliation for his humiliation of their karate men, Ip tries to lay low, but news of the textile mill's distress draws him there to train the employees in Wing Chun. Under his leadership, they rout Jin's gang, but in an offscreen development Jin rats out Ip to the Japs. At first, Gen. Miura isn't that menacing. He just wants Ip to teach him and his soldiers Wing Chun. When Ip refuses, Miura's underlings start torturing people to find the master. Ip gives himself up to save his friends at the textile mill, on the condition that Miura meet him in a martial-arts duel. Miura accepts despite his minions' reservations and their readiness to shoot Ip if the fight goes his way. The stage is set for a peaceful cultural exchange demonstrating the eternal friendship of Japan and China -- yeah, right....
Gen. Miura (Hiroyuki Ikeuchi, standing) makes Ip Man an offer he can't refuse without a fight (below).
When it comes to Millennial Chinese martial-arts cinema I prefer the old-school kung fu movies to the often-overblown, FX-ridden stuff. Ip Man is a solid human-scale martial-arts film in the mold of Fearless, with lavish art direction and genuinely award-worthy action choreography from the honored Mr. Hung. Donnie Yen was nominated for Best Actor and I was genuinely impressed with his acting as well as his fighting. He handles the comedy of the first act adeptly, never blowing his cool, and his stoicism keeps the middle section from getting maudlin. He has a very good scene after his one-vs.-ten battle when he tells his wife that he now feels useless because he had never been more than a dilettante, had never really done anything useful with his talent before. It's an unusual moment of introspection in a kung fu movie and Yen makes it work.
From the set design to the fighting I found Ip Man a treat to watch, and I'd recommend it to any martial-arts fan who likes dynamic action with wirework kept to a reasonable minimum. For everyone else it's an unpretentious treat that doesn't go overboard with gore or CGI but gives you a genuine hero standing up to occupation and oppression. It's a pretty common story around the world but you can't tell it enough.
This English-subtitled trailer, uploaded to YouTube by freedomlover7, includes some authentic shots of the real Ip Man, including some money-shot photos of him with protege Bruce Lee.
Here is a more familiar China for many movie fans, the land of kung fu. To be more specific, it's the city of Canton (Guangzhou) sometime in the 19th century -- late enough for a theater to have electric lights, or so it looked to me. What more do we need to know?
The first rule of Martial Club is...If your club's lion dancers meet another lion dancing team on the streets, do not -- not! -- sniff the other lion's butt. That signifies that you regard the other lion as feminine.
The second rule of Martial Club is...Do not blink your lion's eyes at the other lion dancing team. That signifies that you look down on them.
The third rule of Martial Club is... By all means don't raise your lion's leg at the other lion. Do I need to explain what this signifies? Do any of these things and conflict may ensue.
But boys will be boys, and after director Liu Chia-liang has gone before the camera to patiently explain this to us, what do we see but one lion-dancing team dissing the other and a fight breaking out. If you think about it, this sort of thing is inevitable. These young men are trained to fight. They represent two of the city's several martial clubs. What else are they going to do? Especially with such irrepressible rascals as Huang Feihung and Yinlin amongst them?
Did that first name ring a bell? Yes, this is yet another adventure of that remarkable individual whose name is also rendered Wong Fei-hung. This was a real person who lived from 1847 to 1924, making him a near-contemporary of Wyatt Earp, another man with an eventful-enough history whose life has been subject to fictional elaboration ever since (or even before) his demise. By at least one estimate, more movies have been made about Wong, a martial artist, herbalist and national hero, than about any other person who has ever lived.
One tradition about Wong seems to be that, as a young man, he was nearly a complete dork. The best known version of this legend is probably Jackie Chan's Drunken Master films, but director Liu and star Gordon Liu (last seen here being morphed into a potato in the Bollywood trainwreck Chandni Chowk to China) are working in the same tradition. Gordon and co-star Mo Ti-lai (playing Yinlin) have a sort of Popeye and Bluto relationship without a woman to embitter it. They're the star pupils of their respective schools and always out to one-up each other. Neither is above cheating to win, both paying recruits to take dives in a contest to see which hero can defeat a man more quickly. Wong is redeemed mainly by the fact that Yinlin is by far a bigger dork than he, often content to show off his "hard qigong" to prostitutes at the neighborhood brothel when, for Wong, one visit is enough. This eagerness to impress the red-light district gets Yinlin in trouble when a third martial club, the bad guys of our story, use the hos to trick the moron into helplessness.
Yinlin's clubmates, especially his equally-skilled sister Juying, are quick to blame Wong's school and Wong himself for their brother's injuries. This is what the bad guys want. They hope to gain presige by having the other two schools ruin one another, and if that fails, they'll try to put their rivals in jail for failing to pay their way into an opera house to which the bad guy school had invited them for free.
Martial arts movie buffs state that Martial Club is one of the few times, if not the only one, in which Wang Lung-wei (right foreground) plays something like a good guy. It must have been the mellow vibe from that pipe he's smoking.
If all this fails, the bad guys' ace in the hole is Master Shan, the stranger from the North who has already beaten up Yinlin once (Wong was blamed for that, too), a powerful yet guileless fighter who doesn't seem to know better than to beat up the good guys at the bad guys' instigation. It's up to precocious, earnest Wong to straighten everything out....
Martial Club is a comedy, so it lacks that sense of sincere violence that I like in kung fu movies. It's a period piece, so it lacks the sleaze that distinguishes films set in the modern day. I didn't really find the fighting very spectacular, either, again perhaps because it's all for laughs. The highlight is a creatively choreographed fight between Wong and Master Shan in a progressively narrower alleyway. But the actors are all eager and personable, and Gordon Liu in particular is always fun to watch. So is Kara Hui, playing another of those kick-ass females who seem anomalous in the era of footbinding but also seem to be part of the Chinese tradition of martial-arts fiction. Martial Club isn't going to rank high on my list of kung fu classics, but as a way to waste a couple of hours courtesy of the Albany Public Library I can't knock it.
The DVD has the original trailer, but all I could find online is the modern trailer for the DVD edition, uploaded by asdae121.
He may look like the Lon Chaney Jr. of martial arts cinema, or the perfect Monster for a Chinastein movie that was never made, but that just means that Yang Sze, better known to history as Bolo Yeung, doesn't get enough credit for the pure manliness he has exuded consistently in his long pseudonymous career. In part that may be because he wasn't given enough opportunities to show his thespian range. At first glance, no doubt, directors and producers may have doubted his capacity for speech or reason. But every so often he was given a chance to shine, and he may never have glowed so brightly again as he did in the 1978 film Storming Attacks, released in the U.S. as Image of Bruce Lee. Of course, it was Bruce Li and not Bolo who was the titular image, though the fact is acknowledged only when his cop character, disguised as a cabbie, is told that he should go into the movies, since he is the .... and it is implied when, as a member of the police Special Squad, he must shimmy up the side of a building in a talismanic yellow tracksuit in a vain attempt to prevent a diamond merchant from committing suicide. So, no: Bolo is neither the image of Bruce Lee, nor a secondary hero, nor even the primary villain of the picture. Instead, we are to accept him as a Japanese gangster, Kimura, in league with a father-son team of counterfeiters. But this relatively small part gives him more character and dialogue than better known Bolo vehicles like Chinese Hercules. Here he appears as something for once closely resembling a human being, especially when it comes to clothes. Image is full of flamboyant fashion, its heroic cops being fond of big yellow scarves while, by comparison, the female lead often does without clothing entirely. But Bolo really stands out as the fashion plate of the picture, and an epitome of what it meant to be a man in Seventies exploitation cinema.
In cooler climates, or in front of pictures of them, Bolo prefers the dignified yet formidable look of leather.
In mixed company, portraying the smooth businessman, he has the best manners, perfected by years of rigorous training. He does not throw the woman over his shoulder and run off with her at the first meeting. All that comes in due time. Note his flexible ensemble, equally sporty with or without the jacket. Without, it is clear that the man was born to wear white, while turtlenecks become him equally well.
We're all used to Bolo the fighter, but Image of Bruce Lee gives us Bolo the lover as well, playful as well as suave, now in a blue jacket worthy of a yachtsman and glasses that express both sophistication and the vulnerability that chicks dig. He leaves a lasting impression on women. In this particular case the woman has a bruise on her breast where he slapped it.
But on a dime, Bolo can turn from lover back to fighter and master of suitcase fu.
Even on casual occasions, Bolo always has the winning look as he lives life to the fullest...
...and even if he loses a few, he's still a real swinger.
Image of Bruce Lee is actually a mildly entertaining film that comes off more like a crime film with incidental yet frequent kung fu fights. It has plenty of the garish sleaze that distinguishes kung fu films set in the modern day from period pieces, and Danna, the actress who plays the enigmatic "Agent Seven," remains a treat for the eyes even after her round of rassling with the ardent Bolo. But something is undeniably missing once the big guy quits the scene. Bruce Lee imitators pretty much grew on trees in those days, but there's still only one Bolo, a fact for which the world is eternally grateful.
Something was different about this DVD, different from the other Indian videos in the Albany Public Library's collection. They're all distributed by Indian companies, but Nikhil Advani's martial arts comedy musical was packaged by Warner Home Video. Turns out that the big TW invested in this film, which probably explains its lavish look. It also turns out that they took a bath. Like the other Indian films I've examined since starting this blog, Chandni Chowk to China was a critical and box-office bust when it hit theaters last January. I seem to be attracted to those qualities that repel the average Indian moviegoer. In that regard, that makes the average Indian moviegoer little different from the average American moviegoer, at least of the present day.
Does that mean I liked Chandni Chowk? To be accurate, I was fascinated by it, as I was by the sci-fi trainwreck Love Story 2050. Advani's film, produced by Ramesh Sippy (It is, in fact, Ramesh Sippy's Chandni Chowk...) has the same everything-and-the-kitchen-sink quality, and piles on top of that its most distinguishing characteristic: a blatant thematic and stylistic ripoff of Kung Fu Hustle. Because that's what Stephen Chow's film was missing, now that I think of it: music video style production numbers! That, and the Great Wall of China.
Chandni Chowk is a market district of the Indian city of Delhi. There dwells Sidhu (Akshay Kumar), a vegetable chopper for Dada, who has raised the orphan to manhood with the kind of tough love that involved kicking him for long distances across the Delhi cityscape. Sidhu hopes for a better life but puts his trust in luck and the advice of his dubious guru Chopstick, a half-Chinese practitioner of Feng Shastra, a hybrid discipline. Our hero thinks his luck has changed when he finds a potato with what looks like an elephant trunk. That means it's the image of Lord Ganesh!
No sooner than you can say "shrine of the holy tortilla" he and Chopstick have a pilgrimage racket going, but extortionists ruin their fun, forcing Dada to bail them out, after which he punts poor Sidhu some kilometers away, where he lands at the feet of two Chinese tourists who naturally conclude that he is the reincarnation, whom they've come to India to seek, of their village's great hero, Liu Sheng.
We were shown Liu Sheng's legendary battles against invaders on the Great Wall before the opening credits. He's the hero of the village of Zhange, which we learned was now under the thumb of the vicious Hojo and his criminal gang. How vicious is Hojo? He's played by Gordon Liu, for one thing, and he has an Oddjob boomerang model bowler that he uses to slit the throats of uppity folk. This scumbag is looting the village of its cultural treasure and selling them off to foreigners. It's a good way to smuggle stolen diamonds out of the country while they're at it. You might wonder what the Communist government is doing about this, but you probably shouldn't. This film takes place in a fantasy China (though you might observe that Liu Sheng wields a hammer and sickle in battle and on his statue in the village center). In the real China the government wouldn't have tolerated Hojo's antics, or else he'd be bribing them so they wouldn't tolerate our heroes antics later.
Gordon Liu of 36th Chamber of Shaolin and Kill Bill fame as Hojo (center) with friends in Chandni Chowk to China.
The Chinese don't speak Hindi, so Chopstick interprets for them. He knows that the hapless Sidhu is incapable of fighting Hojo as they wish, but this opportunity looks like a free ticket to China for him. It's a dilemma illustrated by the literal appearance of good (angel-winged) and bad (dressed like a mandarin) little conscience figures on his shoulders. He decides not to tell Sidhu what's expected of him, explaining instead that the slogan dado hojo actually means "you're the coolest" or something like that. So it's off to China, but not before a bizarre encounter outside the Chinese consulate between Sidhu and "Miss TSM," a commercial spokesperson for the DanceMaster G9, which seems to be a set of ankle bracelets that simulate (or stimulate) accurate dance moves. She clasps a pair on Sidhu and induces a spastic episode that enables her to steal his spot in line -- why someone who represents a Chinese company should do this is unclear, but it keeps the plot moving.
Her commercial was the film's first quasi-musical number. The next is a dream inspired by Sidhu watching a Chinese tourist video on the plane. This is Bollywood on a huge scale, with what I think is a CGI Forbidden City with lots of extras in traditional costumes out of a Zhang Yimou fantasy film, followed by a vignette in glamorous 1930s Shanghai with some fine looking women, and petering out in hip hop style as our dubious heroes reach the Middle Kingdom.
Met by adoring villagers, Sidhu breaks away when he thinks he sees the wicked Miss TSM in the airport. Can't be, though; this lady sort of looks like her, but she's pregnant. No, she isn't. She suddenly whips off a fake tummy bulge as the airport security closes in and starts kicking the crap out of them and lashing at them with the spurs on her pigtails. Meanwhile, the real Miss TSM is visiting the company factory, which proves to be the film's musical Q lab. Singing scientists demonstrate instant translation devices and a bulletproof umbrella that doubles as a parachute. "Wow, James Bond!" she exclaims in English.
But China proves a bit of a buzzkill for the perky spokesperson. Like Chopstick, she's of mixed blood, and while visiting the Great Wall (just about everyone does in this picture) she recalls how her father, a Chinese policeman, died fighting Hojo while she and her Indian mother escaped. Sakhi (to use her real name) had a twin sister named Suzy, but she's presumed dead after Hojo's monster albino goon Joey, aka White Bull, threw her off the Wall, Dad diving off after her. Sakhi disperses some memorial flower petals, which drift down into the hands of a shabby bearded tramp who appears to live inside the Wall. Could he be...? And could Suzy be...? Not the vicious criminal Meow Meow, Hojo's ruthless lieutenant, could she??? Who am I kidding?
Despite Chandni Chowk's drubbing by critics, Deepika Padukone earned an Asian Film Awards Best Actress Nomination for her dual role as Miss TSM (Sakhi) and Meow Meow (Suzie).
Sidhu and Chopstick have settled in at Zhange after unwittingly dodging assassins and after Sidhu manages to fall off the Great Wall. The village holds a festival to celebrate his arrival, and the next big musical number is an homage to Jackie Chan's drunken boxing as a hammered Sidhu serendipitously dodges all manner of attacks from Hojo's foot soldiers. He then meets cute again with Sakhi, who has made her way to the village, until Chopstick breaks a bottle over her head. Then Meow Meow arrives, hoping to seduce Sidhu into a fatal kiss with poisoned lipstick. She lip-synchs at him in oldschool shrill Bollywood style, but his drunken mastery still prevails. But Chopstick falls in love with Meow Meow on sight and serenades her until Sidhu breaks a vase over her head and throws her in the same closet Sakhi was dumped in earlier. Another of Hojo's minions sneaks Sakhi away, while a waking Meow Meow hears from Chopstick that Sidhu "dances to my tune." So she frees herself, captures Chopstick and takes him to Hojo for a meeting recorded discreetly by Sakhi, who somehow got loose and somehow gets back to the village just before Hojo arrives in force.
The villagers give the still-clueless Sidhu a hammer and sickle to kill Hojo, but he thinks he's just there to chant friendly slogans until Chopstick finally sets him straight. There's another surprise in store: Hojo had sent White Bull to India to find dirt on Sidhu, and he's come back with Dada as a hostage. Sidhu begs Hojo to spare his surrogate father, but Dada exhorts him to fight. He sets an example himself. We saw earlier that he can fight, but he's no match for a hat to the throat. And here the tone shifts. A good guy character has been brutally killed, and it suddenly isn't funny. Sidhu is abject with grief and shame, writhing in agony on the ground before rising in rage to make a pathetic attack on the villain. Hojo orders White Bull to throw him out of China via the Great Wall, which the film sometimes treats as if it were the actual border of the country.
Maybe they don't compartmentalize genres and their emotional elements in India like we do in America. It might not have been as much of a jolt for them to have a "tragic" episode in what will remain a comic film, even if it seems wrong to others. But there was always room for pathos amid comedy in the old days. Chaplin seemed to think it was a necessary part of the equation. Keaton, on the other hand, might have killed Dada with a sight gag -- not that the bowler hat isn't one, but you get my point. On the third hand, Sidhu is more like a Harold Lloyd character in his struggle for self-confidence, and the movie in some ways reminds me of the Hope-Crosby Road movies-- but before I continue speculating this way I must remind myself that this film bombed in India, which means that whatever was going on here, most Indians probably thought it wasn't funny, but "stupid."
We left Sidhu being flung from the Great Wall. Who should catch him but the tramp who we pretty much assume to be Sakhi's father. He nurses Sidhu back to help but mocks his sacred potato, which our hero has been holding onto throughout the picture. Turn that into french fries, the tramp says. "This isn't a potato," Sidhu protests, "This is my god!" Then he notices that the tramp had been speaking Hindi to him, but the tramp (in Hindi) denies this. He thinks he's speaking Chinese. As you see, after a mournful musical number in memory of Dada, the comedy has more or less resumed. But now it has a dramatic edge as Sidhu vows to truly "become Liu Sheng" and avenge Dada by destroying Hojo. The tramp leads Great Wall tourists in laughing at the idea.
Learning that Sidhu is still alive and that a suspiciously familiar man is harboring him, White Bull attacks the odd couple in an empty restaurant. At this point, Sidhu becomes a living weapon, because the tramp uses him as such, manipulating his limbs to punch and kick the enemy. This amazes Sidhu, who takes it as a sign that "Liu Sheng has stirred!" At last White Bull, wounded by chopsticks, recognizes the tramp as Chiang Kohung the policeman before said policeman kills him by throwing Sidhu on top of him to drive the chopsticks in more deeply. Hearing his name restores his memory, except he now thinks he's still a cop (after 20 years) and attempts to arrest Sidhu for killing White Bull.
Somehow Sidhu escapes this predicament and somehow infiltrates the Shanghai Opera as a spear-carrying extra so he can attempt to assassinate opera fan Hojo. It all goes by too quickly before you can ask "how?" or "why?" and the end result is another extra killed with a spear meant for Sidhu. Hojo chases him into an office building, where they face off in an elevator before Sakhi appears to drive Hojo off with some TSM brand Mace. She and Sidhu flee to the roof, and the only way out is down. Luckily, Sakhi brought her TSM super umbrella for some Mary Poppins action that inspires a musical interlude as hero and heroine float over the city.
By this point I had to admit that there were too many clothes in the washer and the soap was starting to come out through the cracks of this strange contraption. But still to come is another attempted arrest by the still-deranged Chiang, halted only when he recognizes Sakhi as his long-lost daughter. Still to come is Chiang's unbelievable reinstatement in the police force, and his agreement to train Sidhu rigorously (and at punishing length for the viewer) in his unique style of "cosmos kung fu." Still to come is the belated truth of Meow Meow's origin. And of course, still to come is the final showdown with Hojo, in which a clean-shaven Sidhu must learn all the lessons that have been thrown at him throughout the picture about finding his power within himself -- and the scene when Hojo turns into a potato.
Director Advani really loves the Great Wall, so I had to give you one shot of it.
Sidhu demonstrates his innovative cosmic kick, which Chiang rates as only a 9.5 out of 10.
I honestly find this Leone-inspired shot (above) to be pretty cool looking.
India sure knows how to make train wrecks of movies the way we used to do over here. In fact, Chandni Chowk to China reminded me in many ways (including the use of a narrator) of no less an American train wreck than Hudson Hawk, which you'll recall also featured a hero that danced and sang, after a fashion. Akshay Kumar, I learn, is more of an action-comedy star than a pure comedian, so a comparison to Bruce Willis is even more apt. He was more acceptable to me than an American comedian probably would be in an otherwise similar film, but that's probably because I don't know him enough to despise him. I happened to find Hudson Hawk a very entertaining train wreck because of its almost arrogant defiance of action-movie conventions. I have no way to know if Chandni Chowk was as transgressive a film for Indians as Hudson Hawk was for Americans, but I couldn't help being impressed by its out-of-control audacity, even as I realized that its inspiration was flagging badly as it became baldly imitative of Kung Fu Hustle in its final fight scenes. By the time Gordon Liu had become a potato (not literally, but for crying out loud, that image is so wrong!), the show had definitely jumped the shark. But you know what? Sometimes people jump the shark for a reason, and sometimes jumping the shark is what people pay to see. And this is the kind of film where the stuntman wipes out on the opposite ramp, takes out a row of barrels, then gets up and takes a flamboyant bow. Chandni Chowk's way of doing that is to tease a sequel that will never be by introducing pygmies and announcing Chandni Chowk to Africa! That is a gesture I have to salute.
But only the moving image can truly convey the madness that is Chandni Chowk to China, so here's a trailer, uploaded by szymon2707