Black Invitation (1969)

Original title: 黑帖

China, the outskirts of the Martial World, where a gang of mediocre bullies is a major threat. After four years of wandering, major servant’s son Nian Zhu (Pai Ying) returns to the community he left for reasons of broken hearts and personal dignity. He doesn’t appear to come back with anything more than the shirt he left in on his back and a somewhat ratty looking umbrella. In truth, Nian Zhu has learned rather awesome kung fu, but has taken his master’s lessons about not using violence to heart so deeply, he’ll go out of his way to hide his abilities. That’ll cost a lot of people, obviously.

But really, how much kung fu does a man need to reconnect with his father (Kao Ming) and the lady love (Han Hsiang-Chin) who waited for him – and who is the adoptive daughter of his father’s patrician boss?

Turns out quite a bit of kung fu, for our protagonist’s old home is under threat from a group of bandits living and working in the nearby hills. Said bandits have been terrorizing the local communities for some time now. Their modus operandi is to send out the titular “black invitations” with their money and rich people’s daughters and mistresses wish list, and come down hard on anyone resisting. Apart from the kind of kung fu that’d get them kicked off the movie early in many another kung fu film, the bad guys also utilize the least subtle spy available, traitorous, not the least bit suspicious Wan Ren-Mei (Wan Chung-Shan).

Somehow, it will take a whole movie to take these guys down, with a couple of kidnappings and the usual scenes of the non-violent hero getting tortured before that blissful state of ass-kicking can be achieved.

In some regards, Chou Hsu-Chiang’s Taiwanese martial arts movie Black Invitation feels as if it were a predecessor to the thoughtful mid-period style of the great King Hu. It is at least much more concerned with philosophical concerns and the personal drama of Nian Zhu’s past and relationships than with pulling the audience from one fight to the next. In the early stages of the film, this works rather well, partially because Pai Ying very capably embodies the emotional weight of a world-weary homecoming through every expression and movement. There’s an effective sense of melancholia running through the early parts of the film, of lives not lived to their best, and certainly not their fullest, of youthful idealism getting ground down by a world that simply doesn’t care.

The more the film needs to integrate its more traditional wuxia plot, the less interesting it becomes. Not because there’s anything wrong with integrating the emotional-philosophical with the martial arts tropes, but because the film’s martial arts elements never really convince. The villains are less than impressive, so much so they never feel like the threat everybody around treats them as.

Worse, the martial arts scenes have a couple or three fun ideas, but their execution is much below what you can expect from a Taiwanese film of this era. It is difficult to say if the choreography (apparently by Pai Ying himself) is the problem, for Chou cuts away from all moments of impact and stages every single action scene in a way that hides forms, postures, and movement, as if this were an early 80s low budget martial arts movie made in the US.

This is particularly frustrating because the first one and a half acts are fine indeed, the melodrama perhaps a little stiff but the film’s approach to its protagonist’s plight genuinely moving; the rest of Black Invitation however, leaves much to be desired.

Past Misdeeds: The Saviour (1980)

Through the transformation of the glorious WTF-Films into the even more glorious Exploder Button and the ensuing server changes, some of my old columns for the site have gone the way of all things internet. I’m going to repost them here in irregular intervals in addition to my usual ramblings.

Please keep in mind these are the old posts without any re-writes or improvements. Furthermore, many of these pieces were written years ago, so if you feel offended or need to violently disagree with me in the comments, you can be pretty sure I won’t know why I wrote what I wrote anymore anyhow.

It would be easy to confuse Hong Kong police Inspector Tom (veteran actor Pai Ying, looking a bit bored) with your run-of-the-mill cop on the edge. His boss (Chris Dryden) at least seems to take him for one, complaining that Tom never keeps any criminal alive. But what the film shows of the cop lets him look like some sort of anti-Danny Lee, killing only in self-defence, being not too fond of torture, spending his free time taking care of an orphan boy. Given these facts, our so-called loose gun acts like the least psychopathic cop in Hong Kong cinema, though, admittedly, the way police officers in HK movies usually act, that's not much to say of a cop's mental health.

Tom's newest case is a series of murders of prostitutes. While the audience knows the identity of the killer right from the start, Tom will have to spend a few scenes not moving a facial muscle, or, as the experts call it, "investigating". Fortunately, one of the killer's victims escapes with her life and is willing and able to identify him. The young man doing the deeds is one Paul Kwok (Ng Man-Hung?), who isn't quite the nice little boy he once was anymore since he witnessed his mother killing herself in front of his eyes while rambling about "sluts" and "tramps", a catastrophe caused by his Dad's very obvious cheating. Now, with a witness, it should be an easy case for Tom, and Paul should be facing a nice vacation in an institution.

Unfortunately, the young man's father (even more veteran actor Tien Feng) is a retired gangster, and the sort of gangster without any scruples to hire one of his old associates to kill the witness and later on (in utter stupidity) even try for Tom's life at that. After the inevitable death of the witness, Paul goes free again.

The only way Tom sees to still catch his man is to let a friend of one of the victims (Gigi Wong), who also doubles as his own love interest, do some undercover work in killer provocation.

Before Ronny Yu became Ronny Yu, the emperor of blue lights in neo-wuxia movies, he learned the director's trade making movies in various other genres, like this Teddy Robin Kwan-produced thriller. Even this early in his career, and confronted with a total lack of blue lights, Yu certainly knew how to stage a scene, use dynamic editing to ratchet up the tension at the right moment, and set up a nice nod in the direction of Dario Argento in a staircase sequence. Quite unlike the enthusiastic, Chor-Yuen-influenced wallowing in careful artificiality that characterizes the visual style of Yu's films of the 90s, The Saviour is aiming for the speedy edited type of tight pseudo-naturalism typical of many of Hong Kong's crime films and thrillers of the late 70s and early 80s, with only short moments of the non-realist - like the flashbacks to the death of Paul's mother, that staircase scene, and a handful of other moments - prefiguring at once Yu's later style and making that style's debt to the giallo surprisingly probable. This doesn't mean that the shots that are supposed to look spontaneous and "real" here aren't set up just as carefully as those of a film made in a more obviously artificial style; The Saviour certainly isn't a point-and-shoot affair, but a thoroughly composed picture that is meant to feel thoroughly un-composed.

Most of the time, that well-constructed pseudo-naturalism works out well for the film, that is, as long as the script plays into Yu's hands keeping things relatively low-key and reasonably believable. Unfortunately, the construction of the movie's final act leaves something to be desired. What starts out unoriginal yet casually believable (as far as such things go), turns into a classic case of an idiot plot, where the final confrontation only plays out in the supposedly exciting way it does because the female lead seems to have suddenly misplaced her brain and her once professional cop friends just as suddenly stop thinking or acting like people who know what they are doing, too. This sort of thing would rankle less in a film that never pretended to be taking place on planet Earth as we know it, but in a film that spent most of its first hour pretending not to want to be too sensationalist, this sudden turn for the preposterous is more of a problem. That the script's failure at this late stage doesn't ruin the film completely is Yu's achievement - he just pulls enough magic tricks out of the "look, I'm DIRECTING!" hat to distract from the writing problems.

The other problems Yu needs to and does distract from throughout the movie are the frankly bored and boring acting by Pai Ying and the decidedly unthreatening performance by Ng Man-Hung. It's nice that they (or Yu) decided to step back from the more typical scenery chewing found in every other film from Hong Kong ever, but they then fell into the trap of acting so low-key they might as well have been replaced by wooden puppets. I think I would have preferred the scenery-chewing here.


Still, Yu's direction is stronger than his film's flaws, and though I wouldn't recommend The Saviour as one of the director's best films, it is well worth watching for anyone interested in Yu's early career or in the move against the beautiful artificiality of the venerable Shaw productions taking place in the Hong Kong movies of that era.

On WTF: The Saviour (1980)

Being the kind of curious person I am when it comes to movies, I'm always happy to take a look at the lesser known films of directors whose central works I've enjoyed.

Ronnie "Bride With The White Hair" Yu's early career is especially interesting, because unlike, say, John Woo, he was already making pretty interesting films when he was just starting out. Case in point is Yu's The Saviour. My weekly column on WTF-Film will tell you more about the film and the wooden dolls acting in it.

 

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