The Swordsman of All Swordsmen (1968)

Original title: 一代劍王

Swordsman Tsai Yieng-Chieh (Tien Peng) is obsessed with vengeance. He is hunting down the men who killed his family to acquire a valuable sword when he was still a child.

But his straightforward way to slaughtering a quartet of vile men is getting increasingly complicated and morally grey. Even though he is trying to keep´cool and removed from the world, connection is not to be escaped: he gets help, if he want to or not, by people with agendas of their own. There’s Flying Swallow (Polly Shang-Kuan Ling-Feng) who saves him from a deadly poison for reasons having something to do with not repeating the injustices of previous generations (and probably love, as well), and who will indeed turn out to be the daughter of one of the men Tsai is planning to take vengeance on. Then there’s Black Dragon (Chiang Nan), the greatest swordsman in the martial world (he’s got a little medal that says so), who helps out our protagonist because he just needs to have a duel with him when the whole vengeance business is over and done with.

Eventually, even one of those horrible killers Tsai has set out to kill right back will turn out to have repented, and be quite helpless now.

I really have underrated director Joseph Kuo. Some of his films may have been shoddy attempts to jump on the newest trends, but at least this early in his career, he was also able to make a proper masterpiece like this wuxia. At first, it appears to be a well-shot but straightforward vengeance tale, with a straightforward hero hunting down straightforward villains for straightforward reasons in a straightforward manner. But with every additional character Kuo introduces, things become less easy and less clear, vengeance turns out to not be just in every case, and the obsession of the martial world with very clear and strict rules of conduct not fit for the more complicated world of the human heart. These rules turn out not be an ethical way to lead one’s life, but a cage one traps oneself and others in.

Visually, Kuo couches this tale in often beautiful and poetic nature shots that position the human drama in a world that mirrors and comments on it, and at times dynamic, at times focussed swordfights. It’s all wonderfully of a piece, where what at first appear to be distractions will turn out to be important parts of the film’s philosophical argument – it’s rather astonishing coming from a typically distractible director like Kuo.

The Return of the 18 Bronzemen (1976)

Original title: 雍正大破十八銅人

Qing prince Yong Zhen (Carter Wong Chia-Ta) doesn’t like the choice of successor to the throne made by his late father, and so changes Daddy’s last will to become emperor himself. Framing the actual successor for an assassination and grabbing the throne is all in a day’s work.

Most of the rest of the movie flashes back to Yong Zhen’s earlier years, when he, an already accomplished martial artist, takes on the role of a commoner to be taught the legendary martial arts of the shaolin. The harsh training regime isn’t quite enough for the guy, so he also commits some minor acts of villainy trying to acquire further shaolin secrets.

Joseph Kuo’s follow-up to to his rather wonderful 18 Bronzemen is a bit of a mess. The first act and the final ten minutes or so seem to belong to a different film – one that doesn’t even have an actual ending. The film appears to believe because its audience already knows the folklore surrounding the destruction of the shaolin temple, it is not its business to actually tell that story even in so far as it touches on what’s happening in its own main plot, the shaolin temple sequence. Which leaves Return not just without an ending but also without a dramatic climax. There’s a pretty random fight against Polly Shang-Kuan Ling-Feng, out to take vengeance on our nasty protagonist, but since we never actually spend time with her, or see the reason for her need for vengeance, or even get a conclusive ending to that fight, this just strengthens the feeling of Return simply being unfinished – or consisting of scenes of two different films with the same cast that have been smashed together without rhyme or reason, or interest in coherence.

The main shaolin training sequences are fun, at least, with some nice further ideas for shaolin torture, I mean training and testing, regimes that make much of visual interest of the film’s small means, fun choreography, and a very accomplished editing flow. This part of the film really only lacks at least somewhat distinctive characters – none of Yong Zhen’s co-students are fleshed out to any degree, and even he doesn’t have anything like actual character development – to be riveting. However, the martial arts are fun enough and the training methods weird enough, to make for a somewhat entertaining middle film, even though it never acquires an actual narrative or makes anything much out of the opportunity to flesh out the backstory of one of he major off-screen villains of kung fu folklore.

The 18 Bronzemen (1976)

Original title: 少林寺十八銅人

His grandmother gives Tang Siu-Lung (Tien Peng) into the care of the Shaolin temple when is just a little boy, so they can train him for vengeance on whoever is responsible for the death of his parents. Though nobody bothers to tell the kid, apparently.

Twenty years or so later, Siu-Lung has grown up beside the abrasive, rude, but also protective, Brother Wan (Carter Wong/Carter Huang Chia-Ta) and the rather less strict Ta Chi (Chiang Nan) as brothers who share a somewhat sadomasochistically coded training regime. Little does Siu-Lung know that the man he is supposed to take vengeance on later for murdering his father is already making plans to assassinate him right in the monastery. But then, Siu-Lung has no clue who his father was or that he was murdered in any case. Before any of that becomes important (or, depending on the cut of the film you watch, before any of that is even mentioned), our hero and his friends must get through the final test of accomplishment for Shaolin kung fu students, an often deadly gauntlet that features some of the best robot armour ancient China has on offer as well as a lot of monks painted bronze and some rather remarkable tests of fortitude.

Afterwards, vengeance on an evil general (Yi Yuan) and a surprise fiancée with considerable fighting skills (house favourite Polly Shang-Kuan Ling-Feng) and a tendency for crossdressing and wearing capes await, as well as betrayal and dramatic revelations concerning all three of the Shaolin students.

I’ve never really delved into the body of work of Taiwanese martial arts and wuxia director Joseph Kuo Nan-Hong, and what I’ve seen didn’t exactly impress me much. His films – like most Taiwanese martial arts cinema of the era I’ve seen – tend to the rough around the edges and the scrappy, and while I usually like that sort of thing, I don’t seem to appreciate it as much in martial arts cinema for some reason.

However, a film like The 18 Bronzemen does make a boy rethink some of his prejudices, and there’s certainly going to be more Kuo in my near future. Ironically enough, the versions of The 18 Bronzemen made available by Eureka, doesn’t actually feel all that rough around the edges and scrappy. In fact, particularly in the reconstructed original version of the film, Kuo shows a decidedly great hand at providing his film with a proper flow – there are some simple yet wonderfully effective transition shots (half of which are missing in the the prettier cut of the movie based on a Japanese recut) that make clear passages of time and space easily enough. Even though the film does show its (much lower than Shaw Brothers or Golden Harvest) budget from time to time, there’s an energy and visual inventiveness to the direction that always puts itself in service of making the martial arts look cooler than the excellent choreography already is.

Kuo’s sense for flow also helps along the film’s curious structure of half shaolin training film – with that wonderful version of the 36 Chambers that predates the Shaw Brothers interpretation – and half martial arts vengeance movie whose feel borders on wuxia. Of course, you can see where Kuo got his ideas for some (or even most of it) but his execution is excellent and energetic, with neither drama – there’s some great melodrama here as well – nor action letting the side down or slowing the film down.

Being the kind of guy I am, I’m of course particularly fond of the film’s weirder elements, like our main villain’s final defence consisting not just of stolen Shaolin skills he trained with the help of useful little statuettes of bronze as a memory help the movie flashes to when appropriate but also of dressing random fighters up as himself (even doubling up on his transport for it), or male, heterosexual men not being able to identify a cross-dressing Polly Shang-Kuan as a woman (still one of my favourite classic martial arts movie tropes after all these years). I’m also particularly happy how much ass Shang-Kuan is allowed to to kick once her character is finally introduced halfway through, not always a matter of course in films on the martial arts side of the martial arts/wuxia divide. As always, what she lacks in precision during the fights, she makes up for by so fully applying herself to the action one can’t help but be convinced by her fierceness.

Hell, I even like Carter Wong in this one.

A Girl Fighter (1972)

The Kim family dominates a province in ancient China through the force of their supreme martial arts and lots and lots of money.

The worst of the family is Kim junior, Kim ten-jiao. When he gets it into his head to rape the female head of household of the Lio family and her husband, the rest of the family of course still tries to protect her. Alas, he kills them all, including the woman.

The local magistrate, especially after he has been pressured by higher-ups in the bureaucratic hierarchy, would very much like to arrest the younger Kim for this deed, but the people in the area are so afraid he just can't find anyone willing and able to do the arresting. Until Sima Mu-rong (Polly Kuan) appears, that is. The young woman is just burning to help bring Kim to justice. The magistrate is afraid of her girl cooties at first, but a short demonstration of her martial arts convinces him that she is the right woman for the job. It should always be this easy.

Later, we will re-learn the lesson that people in wuxias are blind in any case and have difficulty to parse someone looking like Polly Kuan (with make-up and all) as a woman as soon as she dons male clothing, so Polly could just have spared herself the trouble and pretended to be a boy from the beginning. Ah, the glories of cross-dressing!

The arrest itself isn't too difficult. Sima outclasses Kim quite easily, but the real trouble begins afterwards. Sima and a handful of guards have to transport Kim the long way to court. Kim senior is not going to stop at anything, even the theft of the magistrate's official seal, to get his son back.

Help for our heroine comes in the form of the slaughtered Lio family's nephew (Tien Peng). At first, he plans to kill the prisoner himself, but quickly adjusts his goals when he realizes the efforts the elder Kim makes to put a stop to Sima.

A Girl Fighter is another Taiwanese wuxia made by people from the surroundings of King Hu's Dragon Gate Inn and A Touch of Zen. Director Yeung Sai-Hing was the production manager of those films, and the first half of A Girl Fighter makes at times quite clear why he didn't work as a director too often. The film starts out rather lackluster, hitting all the right genre beats without making much use of them. Especially the fight sequences are a minor disappointment, seemingly filmed to look as fake as humanly possible with some dreadful wire work that lets the fighters resemble nothing so much as bumble bees, making this part of the film a swell example of the deadly bumble bee fu style so feared in ancient China.

Surprisingly, the second half of the film very suddenly picks up the slack by transforming itself into a variation of a Howard Hawks western with a neat siege sequence and a rather exciting trek through trapped enemy territory. The fights start to look a lot more convincing too and the whole tone of the film shifts into a much tenser and darker direction, until it all culminates in the sort of grand finale Cheng Cheh usually traded in - although seemingly edited with a butter knife.

Even before the action of the film gets watchable, the exciting phenomenon known as Polly (Shan) Kuan, as well as the less exciting, yet dependable phenomenon that is Tien Peng, should be enough to keep one watching. What I find so wonderful about her is the determination she brought to everything she did. No matter if it was a "normal" wuxia like this one, a nice and friendly kung fu comedy or the sheer insanity of many of her later works, Polly brought the same amount of energy to every movie she acted in. She was game for just about anything, and automatically elevated each of her movies into the "entertaining" category through sheer presence, even in those cases when she was the only good thing about her films.

 

Technorati-Tags: taiwanese movies,polly kuan,tien peng,wuxia,reviews

Son of Three Films Make A Post

Ong bak 2 (2008): Despite a troubled production history and a certain stubborn resistance of the film against involving its viewers emotionally, Tony Jaa's & Panna Rittikrai's nominal sequel to the film that brought Thai martial arts cinema into the view of a Western mainstream audience delivers an infectious flow of truly awesome action sequences. People fearful of abrupt, open endings which ask the viewer to pray for a film's protagonist should probably beware, though. But if you like your martial arts films as physical experiences, this is not to be missed.

 

Rider of Revenge (1971): Quite a few people - among them house favorite Polly (Shan) Kuan as morally upright swordswoman and always dependable Tien Peng - are after the rather fearful murderer Ting after he has been broken out of jail. Some of them want his hidden loot to pay for their hundreds of henchmen, some of them to finance disaster relief (no, really), while Polly of course only seeks justice and Tien Peng is on a ma-related mission Bollywood would approve of. While all of this probably won't rock your world, fine acting and solid fighting still make for an entertaining Taiwanese wuxia.

 

Zinda Laash (1967): A Pakistani version of Horror of Dracula, with some striking black and white photography that reminds me of expressionist silent movies. Interestingly, the film is set in contemporary Pakistan, quite unlike most of its Western brethren's fixation on the Victorian era. It even culminates in a car chase. Only the needle-dropped soundtrack lets the film down sometimes: a jazz version of "La Cucaracha" does not for an ominous mood make. The musical numbers are fine, though.

 

Technorati-Tags: taiwanese movies,thai movies,pakistani movies,horror,martial arts,wuxia,polly kuan,tien peng,tony jaa,panna rittikrai,in short

The Ghost Hill (1971)

Two swordsmen, the absurdly straight and knightly Shadow Tsai (Tien Peng) and the rather more dubious Black Dragon Fung (Tong Wai) are fighting a duel for the title of "Sword King" as well as the possession of a blade called the "Purple Light Magic Sword". Fung wins the fight, but only because Tsai is so fair that he isn't willing to strike down his enemy while he can't see his sword, so the resident martial arts master gives title and sword to Tsai. A slightly disgruntled Fung and a very happy Tsai go their ways.

Tsai needs the sword for something different than prestige - it's the only way to take revenge on the killer of his father (and we're not going to learn about the why and wherefore of that death), whose skin is supposed to be impervious to weapons and who also is a fearsome fighter even with the little handicaps of being old and blind. He is also protected by his daughter Swallow (Polly Kuan), an effective swordswoman in her own right.

Such a simple tale of revenge wouldn't be enough for a film very much in the spirit of the Chor Yuen school of the wuxia film and so the house of Tsai's master is attacked by a strange group of fighters. One of them pretends to be Fung - and really, who else would have a motive to kill Tsai's master and make off with the Purple Light Magic Sword?

At the same time, Tsai's potential revenge victim, who is also - as we will learn a little later - the teacher of Fung, is attacked and killed by a strange group of fighters pretending to work for Tsai.

All this devious killing is part of the plan of a certain King Gold (Sit Hon, yes, having his skin painted golden) to get Fung and Tsai to kill each other, because he...um, you got me there. Wants to piss off the best swordsmen around? Well, he is a man who has lots and lots of other things to do: Raping women (thankfully off-screen) while wearing his pet parrot on his shoulder, taking baths in scalding hot water, throwing his servants into said water, shooting people with his harpoon arm, laughing evilly after every second sentence he says etc, etc, so it is all too explainable why not every single one of his plans can be a hit.

This one turns out especially badly for King Gold. Instead of causing at least one dead swordsman, his plan only leads to Fung, Tsai and Swallow talking things through (after some drama and fighting of course) and combining their efforts against Gold (whom, as I'd like to emphasize, they held no grudges against before he tried to mess with them).

Of course, all this is not complicated enough at all, so what about a little emotional trouble? So, Swallow is in love with Tsai, Tsai is probably (he is the strong silent and slightly stupid type) in love with Swallow, and Fung is very definitely in love with Swallow and also rather jealous of Tsai being such a swell and well-loved guy.

Still not complicated enough? Alright, King Gold also has a daughter named Gia (Hon Seung Kam), who is also a little in love with Tsai - and, as it turns out, not King Gold's daughter at all, but the daughter of a dead enemy, taken in and raised as Gold's daughter to be married by the golden madman as soon as she's old enough (and can I get an "Ewww" here?). Turns out this is going to be a good reason for her uniting with the other three swordspeople against him. It was probably not Goldie's best idea to teach her the art of fighting.

As you can see, there are a lot of plot points to resolve until our heroes can attack King Gold's mountain with the help of a lot of guys we didn't meet before, go through his creatively trapped (ice! fire! poison!) Ten Gates of Death and kick his ass.

 

The Ghost Hill (and I don't have a clue why the film is called that way) is a rather fine example of the slightly mad wuxia type beloved Chor Yuen pioneered. Taiwanese director Shan-si Ting was no Chor Yuen, to be sure, as he was missing Yuen's incredible sense of color, framing and use of sets, but his film should be a lot of fun even for people not completely in love with the wuxia genre. The film goes along at the slightly mad pace these things should have - fast enough to confuse the average viewer with its quite complicated plot line and the merry bunch of characters. But really, why should a film have just one old master when it can have three (or is it four? I'm not sure anymore)? The same goes for bearded evildoers and death traps.

Many of the Taiwanese wuxias I know have a little trouble keeping their intensity up when the fighting stops and the melodrama starts. This is not a problem here, thanks to a very well-cast and well-played core of characters. For once, even the chemistry between the love interests is as it should be. That everyone knows how to look good in the not brilliantly but well choreographed fights is a given in any case. The characterization is of course more archetypal than deep, but all four heroes are in the hands of actors who know how to make an archetype come alive. My favorite though is Sit Hon's King Gold, with his permanent belly-laugh and his parrot - and a lair that is probably the historical source for every place those Hindi villains are inhabiting.

I wouldn't really know what to criticize about the film if not for the fight scene between Swallow and Gia which is partly sped-up in the most irritating and obvious way possible - and for no good reason, since other fights show both actresses to be more than capable enough to provide a good fight without this kind of non-trickery.

 

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