The Black Tavern (1972)

Original title: 黑店

Stopping off in a tavern, one of those singing beggar monks (Dean Shek Tin) that apparently roam the martial world sings a merry song about a corrupt official who has retired and is now transporting his ill-gotten gains via snowy backways to his future home. This really catches the imagination of a number of evildoers. First and foremost, this is Zheng Shoushan, the Whipmaster, (Ku Feng) and his minions, but also robber teams and individuals with delightful names and shticks like the Five Ghosts of Xiang Xi, the Three Headed Cobra, the Iron Arm, as well as the somewhat more respectable swordsman Zha Xiaoyu (Tung Li).

An increasing number of these guys and gals descend onto yet another tavern everyone is convinced the ex-official must come through on his way to Mar del Lago. It’s already the kind of place guests never leave, unless as mutton, so the influx of murderous martial artists doesn’t exactly make it less safe. As it goes with people like these, they do start killing each other rather quickly, for various reasons, mostly greed.

Sneaking around the tavern is a swordswoman who dresses like the Lady Hermit herself – as it will turn out, Shih Szu reprising her role as Zhang Caibing/Cui Ping from Meng Hua-Ho’s film of the year before.

Teddy Yip Wing-Cho’s The Black Tavern isn’t quite as great as that wuxia classic, but it is certainly a nice diversion from some of the standard tropes of the wuxia, telling its story a little differently. While Zhang Caibing does eventually make quite an impact – there is after all very little that’s better than a heroic swordswoman played by an actress specialized in that sort of thing – much of this plays out like a bottle episode of a TV show whose lead is only there for a third of the shooting schedule, which fires the producers up to make something out of a handful of sets and another handful of character actors.

Cool sets and character actors are things the Shaw Brothers had rather a lot of, and so this a film carried by newcomers and veterans like Ku Feng strutting their stuff, typically great (though not brilliant) fight choreography, and the special delight of some weird but rather nasty people making the world a better place by following their worst impulses and murdering each other gorily. There is a surprising number of decapitations on screen.

As is often the case, the combination of obvious budget constraints and talent leads to a highly entertaining film.

The Criminals (1976)

This Shaw Brothers production consists of three episodes by different directors "based on true crimes".

The first one, "Hidden Torsos", tells of the rather unlucky attempt of Jenny (Shih Szu) and her little mute daughter to leave Jenny's lover Rong Sheng (Si Wai). Jenny ends up stabbed, her kid drowned. Rong Sheng bricks their bodies in, but chooses such a stupid place for it that they are found earlier than he had expected.

The second episode, "Valley of the Hange" (sic), is about a worker named Hong the Bull (Kong Yeung) and his troubles with his wife Mei Jiao (Terry Lau). Just think, although he paid enough to marry her to pay for quite a lot of whores, she doesn't want to sleep with him anymore! When Hong finds out that Mei Jiao instead sleeps with his foppish colleague De the Prince (Tin Ching), only deadly violence can be the answer. The film approves.

The last part of the film, "The Stuntsmen" (sic, again) tells the story of Shaw Brothers stuntman Chen Zhong (Lo Lieh). Surprisingly enough, many of the stuntmen we see don't seem satisfied with what the Shaw Brothers are paying and work as gangsters on the side. Chen Zhong meets and falls in love with the prostitute Hong (Tanny Tien Ni), who looks exactly like actress Tanny Tien Ni, whom he of course fancies. He has a glorious idea for Hong's prostitute career - pretend she really is Tanny Tien Ni! The plan works out nicely, but Chen Zhong is sucked ever deeper into the gangster lifestyle and soon has his own gang as well as his own gang wars. He survives his new lifestyle nicely until he takes the homeless Kid Liu (Wong Yu, not the regularly one-armed one) under his wing and in his trust. As it goes in cases like these, Liu falls in love with Hong, their affair gives one of Chen Zhong's enemies a convenient method to blackmail Hong, murder happens.

The exploitation arm of the Shaw Brothers was quite active during the second half of the 70s, churning out lurid films like this one by the dozens. This "ripped from the headlines" portfolio film was successful enough to get three sequels. The reason for its success probably wasn't the film's rather dubious quality, but the siren song of cheap, ugly thrills. Of course, I'm perfectly fine with that.

Seen as a film rather than a money-making device, The Criminals is a bit more problematic. Each of the segments is directed by a different director and goes for a different sort of luridness. This makes the film more than a little disconnected.

Cheng Kang's first segment is probably the best of the three. While it is a bit short, "Hidden Torsos" works very well as a tour de force thrill ride. A certain visual pop sensibility, a wee bit of Poe and merry crassness collide in a nice little heap of cheap yet effective thrills without much substance but with a lot of drive.

Hua Shan's second segment is less satisfying. It is as sleazy as one could wish for, but the "horned husband kills his wife" plot just couldn't keep me interested for a whole thirty minutes. On the plus side stands an ensemble of actors camping it up so much that it's obvious nobody here is taking the whole thing seriously. That doesn't make the episode shorter however.

Where "Valley of the Hange" is too long, Meng-Hua Ho's "The Stuntsmen" is way too short to effectively develop anything that is packed into it. At first, the glorious chutzpah of the Shaw Brothers basing parts of an exploitation film on their own bad reputation is very charming, especially when the film goes as far as to have a doubleganger prostitute of one of the studio's actresses played by said actress herself in it, but the segment soon just ignores the enticing and rather creepy self-referentiality and transforms into a standard gangster film.

Alas one that fails at pressing the plot of a two hour film into barely forty minutes. A few scenes like the two big(ish) murder set pieces do pack a bit of a punch (this is a highly professional production after all), but everything else happens too fast and is too superficial  and jumpy to leave much of an impression.

Of course, The Criminals still is the movie in which the Shaw Brothers show the Shaw Brothers as the cradle of protection rackets and prostitution, so nobody interested in the studio's films or exploitation filmmakers exploiting themselves should miss out on it, even though it is not a very good film.

 

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In short: The Rescue (1971)

At the beginning of the Mongol Yuan dynasty rule in China, a group of rebels has put it in their minds to free the still loyal prime minister of the Sungs, Wen Tianxiang (Fang Mian) from imprisonment. After some struggles the group finds out that the Mongols are hiding the official in the Celestial Prison, which unfortunately does look more like a very earthly prison.

The rebels, among them their single female member, the young swordswoman Bai Yaerh (Shih Szu), decide that the best way to get Wen out is to get themselves thrown into the jail where some supporters will provide weaponry and keys. Also letting himself into the prison in this very natural way is Le Heru (Lo Lieh). This roguish expert fighter doesn't have heroically dying for his country in mind. Rather, he is using the traditional friendly stalker route trying to win Bai Yaerh's heart.

Le Heru still comes in handy when the plan goes awry and most of the rebels are killed. Thanks to his help, Bai Yaerh belongs to the handful of people who escape the prison with their lives.

Of course, the patriots can't let their project end this way.

The Rescue is a very typical historical Shaw Brothers wuxia. The word typical shouldn't be read as "not worthwhile", on the contrary, the typical (historical or not) Shaw Brothers wuxia of this phase of the studio's life was really a rather good film.

The production line method of filmmaking has a bad reputation (mostly among people who have never seen many films made this way), but in the case of the Shaw Brothers the production line mostly lead to a very solid technical base from which to work. So director San Kong had a solid professional cast, solid professional fight choreography, solid professional sets and so on, and so on. If it sounds as if I was trying to say that The Rescue is a lot like dozens of other Shaw Brothers films, then, well, yes I am in fact saying it. That however is not a bad thing, because I most probably liked these dozens of other films.

A few things here are a little different, though. First and foremost, Lo Lieh wasn't allowed to play heroic roles very often, and seems to relish the possibility. He also works nicely with Shih Szu, who herself is really good as the extremely competent swordswoman with the tendency to upperclass petulance. Besides the mandatory looking pretty, which was not much of a problem for her, she also seems to have done quite a bit of her fighting herself, and did it well, which not every Shaw heroine did or was allowed to do.

Some of the mass fights are also worth mentioning for their well developed sense of controlled chaos and proper use of the typical Shaw-colored blood.

Add to that the more low key way the film treats its mandatory patriotic speeches, a love for people in disguise, a choice misuse of "Also sprach Zarathustra" and a very undignified patriotic sacrificial death for one of the main characters, and you'll find me completely on the side of your film.

 

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The Lady Hermit (1971)

A young (and I mean really, really young) woman named Cui Ping (Shih Szu) is searching for a mysterious swordswoman, the Lady Hermit, whom she deems to be the only teacher worth learning from. Cui Ping plans to become a good enough fighter to challenge the current "Number One In The Martial World", Black Demon (Wang Hsieh), who is a right bastard. It's not as if it was personal between Cui Ping and Black Demon - she lacks the expected backstory about murdered parents and is instead driven by a combination of youthful arrogance and just as youthful righteousness. Not a bad combination in a woman brandishing a whip and a sword.

Said woman is more than on the right trail to find her heroine - she has already met her in the form of a maid (Cheng Pei Pei) working at the escort service Cui Ping has made the base for her search. Leng Yu Shuang, as the Hermit's real name is, has been laying low there for a few years to recover from a grievous wound to her hip she suffered when fighting (and losing against) Black Demon.

Also working for the escort service is Chang Chun (Lo Lieh in one of his knightly roles), soon to be one third of a love triangle between the heroines, and really not of much other use.

To make matters a little more complicated, Black Demon's henchmen have slowly closed in on the Lady Hermit and are concocting their own version of a protection money racket - led by someone claiming to be the heroine (just with a lot more beard) to flush the original out. So the rest of the film's plot should be more or less obvious.

If someone could explain the reason for the bizarre differences in quality and style of the films of The Lady Hermit's director Meng Hua Ho to me, it would be very much appreciated. How it is possible that the man responsible for The Oily Maniac and Mighty Peking Man was just a few years earlier making an excellent wuxia like this is beyond me. Who knew how good he was in making the best of location shots? Or making real neat looking action scenes?

Of course, The Lady Hermit is a very formulaic film, but that's one of the reason we call movies like it "genre movies". The question in a case like this is: how well does a film use the formulae of his genre and (if the genre is already getting decadent one way or the other) how does it twist them? The former does not seem to have been a problem for Meng Hua Ho at all - the movie contains everything one expects of a non-mad wuxia, realized in as dynamic and exciting ways as possible. The fights are as well choreographed as they are bloody, which is no surprise in a Shaw Brothers film, of course, but also show a fine sense for action set pieces like a fight on a suspension bridge (including really bad model effects - always a plus) that some people in Hollywood would go on to steal a few years later for that film with the permanently screeching woman, or, as we call it, the Anti-Lady-Hermit.

The twist in the genre formula is the consequent way in which the film substitutes typical male roles with female characters and vice versa - not completely atypical for the wuxia, but seldom played this straight and unflinching. Also, Lo Lieh as Damsel With A Sword In Distress really is something.

And speaking of "really being something", there are our heroines. Cheng Pei Pei was a much more accomplished actress at this point in her career than in her earliest years (and keep in mind she was only 25 when this film was made) and this is surely one of her best performances. Where many wuxia heroes tend to be rather bland, she projects a rare mixture of determination, competence, fragility and humor combined with the ability to kill people with tea cups.

Shih Szu, only 16 here, mostly lives off youthful charm, but what could be a problem in other roles becomes a believable part of her character here.

All in all, there's no reason to miss this, unless you're on of those people who are categorically against watching really good films.

 

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