Shaw Brothers

The Magnificent Trio

My goal for these reviews is to watch the Shaw Brothers movies in mostly chronological order. I say mostly because Celestial Pictures, the company restoring these films for DVD, is not releasing them chronologically; each month brings a smattering of titles from across Shaw’s 26 years of Hong Kong production. It makes it difficult to watch a director or a genre evolve.

Take, for example, Shaw’s most famous director, Chang Cheh. Mostly known for his work in the 70s, Chang began making his name as a Shaw director in the mid-1960s with films like Butterfly Chalice and Tiger Boy. By the time he made The Magnificent Trio, he was enough of a known commodity to be included in the marketing. I’d love to discuss how Trio evolved from these earlier films, but they have yet to see the light of day on DVD.

While I can’t yet see the influence of Chang’s earlier films on this work, there is plenty of obvious influence from another source, Japanese samurai drama, chambara and jidaigeki, which were growing favorites in Hong Kong theaters. Kung Fu Cinema points out that Trio is a remake of a Japanese film Three Outlaw Samurai, which is not available on DVD in the US, but it feels more like a follow-up to The Seven Samurai, which explains the title’s similarity to The Magnificent Seven. An oppressed village, with the help of three skilled fighters, stands up to corrupt government officials.

Trio twists the Seven Samurai setup by having each of its fighters—Lu (Jimmy Wang Yu), Yan (Lo Lieh) and Huang (Cheng Lui)—find love with Shaw actresses Chin Ping, Fanny Fan and Margaret Tu Chan. The battle between romance and loyalty turns out to be the film’s largest, and most interesting, conflict and was one that Chang would return to time and time again. For Chang the struggle between the two was irreconcilable, true heroic men could not be loyal and in love at the same time.

If only the movie were content to stop there. Sadly, the rest of the excessively shaggy plot involves roughly 432 characters, many of whom are never introduced. Bandits, officials, villagers, ministers, hot dog salesmen, drunken passers-by. I lost track and am probably making much of this up. Fair to say that the plot veers uncontrollably from revenge fantasy, political suspense to love story, rarely taking the time to establish anything properly.

Until Butterfly Chalice and Tiger Boy are released, and they are not on the schedule for 2004, The Magnificent Trio will be the oldest Chang Cheh directed movie available on DVD. While far from his greatest work, it’s still an educational bridge between the Japanese influences driving Shaw Brothers and the obsession with manhood that would drive much of its 1970s output.

The Magnificent Trio
Released: November 8, 1966
Dir: Chang Cheh

Rose, Be My Love

If The Blue And The Black had been made well (and if its star hadn’t died) it might have ended up like Rose, Be My Love, a film that starts off like any number of Shaw weepies then, unexpectedly, matures into an older and wiser weepie.

Rose begins with the standard setup; boy, Jiancong (Kwan Shan), falls for girl, Rose (Lee Ting), but is torn from her by fate, arrogant parents and, just like The Blue And The Black, the tumultuous winds of World War II. But, unlike that 4-hour epic, Rose dispenses with empty spectacle and pretensions of ‘importance’ and delivers a lean 90-minute story that explores far more ground than its lengthy predecessor.

Even from its opening scenes, Rose plays with the weepie genre’s standards. Beginning, roughly, in the modern day, the lovers’ tragedy is told through flashbacks. As I’ve said in reviews of other weepies, the ending of these films are often set in stone mere minutes after the film begins. By beginning at the end, Rose appears to admit the film’s predictability, setting up the end result of a tragedy that we’ve yet to witness. But this admission is a fake out, hiding the film’s deeper structural changes to the rules of the weepie.

My biggest problem with Shaw weepies is their lionization of youth and history. The stories, almost universally set in the past, feature young lovers who defy all logic and pain to recapture their halcyon days. In Shaw weepies, first loves are always better than second loves, naiveté is always better than experience and the sacrifice of self for the past is noble.

Rose, thankfully, recognizes that argument for the horseshit wish fulfillment it is. First loves are often the worst and youth, when viewed from a distance, is like watching a brainless pantomime of adulthood. If I sacrificed myself for the beliefs I held when I was 16, I would have burned myself in protest when Dr. Who was cancelled by the BBC. Now that’s honor.

Instead of chaining its characters to the past, Rose, in a refreshing change of pace, allows them to age and recognize that maybe childhood is best left behind when the rewarding responsibilities of adulthood are taken up. Their decision, of course, is tragic and tear jerking as the genre requires it to be, but it’s still a significant maturation of the hidebound Shaw weepie.

Rose, Be My Love
Released: September 26, 1966
Dir: Chin Chien

Princess Iron Fan

Following in the tradition of its predecessor, The Monkey Goes West, Princess Iron Fan delivers gorgeous colorful fun while stripping away much of the religious allegory that helped make the original Monkey fables so enduring. And, as a perfect example of Shaw’s increasingly salacious style, this family film is even spiced up with a quick bit of female nudity, thanks to the frequently nude Lily Ho*.

Unlike its predecessor, Princess Iron Fan doesn’t have to expend any energy on backstory or introductions, not that Monkey bothered to explain much. Instead of exposition, the film can focus on two of the stories from the 400-year-old collection of Monkey myth, Journey To The West: the traveler’s outsmarting of the stubborn Princess Iron Fan and their battle against the scheming White Bone Demon.

Combining these stories into one film makes for a minimum of dead time and allows Shaw to pit their all-male pilgrims against a trio of villainesses, embodied by their most beautiful stars, Lily Ho, Cheng Pei Pei and Pat Ting Hung.

Princess Iron Fan interrupts the action once for a much needed bit of back story, explaining Monkey’s early days wreaking havoc in the Heavenly Kingdom. That this scene is filled with dozens of gymnastic children in monkey suits and pajamas only makes it more welcome. Who can hate kids in monkey suits?

Considering that Monkey is one of the most popular literary characters in China, I can’t begrudge Shaw for making these films so monkey-centric. But they do so at the cost of the stories’ religious resonance. Instead of Monkey learning valuable lessons about Buddhism, his fellow travelers learn the same lesson again and again—Always Trust Monkey. When Monk Tang banishes Monkey for breaking the tenets of Buddhism, the remaining travelers are quickly captured and nearly killed. Instead of Monkey learning the errors of his rash ways, his hasty decisions are frequently vindicated.

But that’s a minor quibble with a movie that I found to be far more entertaining than the earlier Monkey film. Allowed to cut to the chase Princess Iron Fan does just that, delivering an enjoyable, if frothy, take on an ancient myth.

Princess Iron Fan
Released: August 9, 1966
Dir: Ho Meng Hua

*I may have this wrong. It could be Pat Ting Hung.

The Blue And The Black (Parts One and Two)

I’d like to believe that someone at Shaw Brothers said, “We should not release this movie.” After all, the star had committed suicide before shooting completed, leaving many of her scenes unshot and, after 3 years in production, the film not only lacked its female lead it also felt like a film from the distant past. Taste and style had changed a lot between 1963, the year The Blue And The Black began production, and 1966, the year it was finally released. I hope that someone looked at this Frankenstein of a film and said, “No.”

That man, if he even existed, was certainly frog-marched out of Movie Town, the Shaw Brothers studio, and put on a boat to Macau. A one-way ticket grasped in his still surprised hand. Any logical or moral reasons to withhold The Blue And The Black fell before one name, Linda Lin Dai.

When Dai committed suicide in 1964, she was working on three, maybe four*, Shaw Brothers films. The highest-profile of these was The Blue And The Black, a two-part, 4-hour epic based on a novel tracing the unrequited love of two teenagers through the Japanese occupation of World War II and the Communist defeat of the Nationalist army. The novel, which was part of a genre that bashed communist China, was popular—unsurprisingly—in Taiwan, the government of which allowed Shaw Brothers to shoot the film on the last remnant of the Republic Of China, using the island’s soldiers as extras.

Even at more than twice their length, the film is little more than a repeat of the plots of weepies like Vermillion Door or Love Without End. In fact, several of Love Without End’s most popular scenes are blatantly restated in The Blue And The Black and lead actors Lin Dai and Kwan Shan are asked to little more than repeat their performances from that 1961 Shaw favorite. The fact that the actors were nearly twice the age of the characters bothered no one, although it makes the first half of the film nearly incomprehensible. Seeing the 30+ Kwan Shan bawl like a high school boy is downright disconcerting.

Even if Dai had not killed herself, it’s unlikely that the movie would have been very good. The novel’s politics have been stripped from the script. Shaw films were largely apolitical, attempting to satisfy a wide range of audiences. Paul Fonoroff, a Hong Kong film critic, explains on the DVD’s commentary track that Shaw was considered a “Right Wing” studio, meaning they favored the Republic over the Communists. But communism is hardly even mentioned in The Blue And The Black, much less criticized.

Lacking the novel’s historical and political background, the script also takes no pains to adapt the sprawling book to the more limited silver screen. Instead of rewriting or consolidating the many side-plots, the film simply skips them and then mentions years of story in passing with lines like, “Remember when I nearly died in Hong Kong?” Um, no. No I don’t.

Without character development, backstory or political relevance, most of The Blue And The Black comes off as a jury-rigged weepie set in the indefinite past. On the DVD’s commentary track, Fonoroff and Lawrence Ah Mon, a current Hong Kong director, spend most of the movie’s first half describing the film’s many, many faults. Perhaps that’s why the commentary track is mysteriously absent from the second half.

When the film awkwardly ends with the embrace between Kwan Shan and a substitute who is obviously not Lin Dai (the Dai double was named Elsie Tu and Shaw billed her as the new Linda Lin Dai), all the film’s faults crystallize. Blue And The Black is just a stand in, a four-hour filler for a star, a genre and a style that had been lost years before.

The Blue And The Black (I and II)
Released: June 30 and July 21, 1966
Dir: Doe Chin

*I’ve seen both numbers. I’m not sure which is correct.

The Knight Of Knights

After six young, buff and partially-dressed men die gruesome, bloody and amputation-related deaths in the film’s opening 10 minutes, it should surprise no Shaw Brothers fan that Knight Of Knights was written by Chang Cheh, who, in 1966, was already becoming known as the cinematic master of killing young, buff, partially-dressed men.

Cheh’s greatest films would combine gallons of blood with male melodrama, resulting in over-the-top spectacles that engaged the audience’s eyes and hearts. The Knight Of Knights is not one of those films. The elements—revenge, adventure, and masculine pride—are all there, but the film lacks the characters or the emotions necessary to make the elements engaging.

Wen Su-chen (Kiu Chong) is the knight of knights, a chivalrous swordsman investigating a group of bandits remarkably similar to the villains of Temple Of The Red Lotus, fake monks who kidnap women for fun and profit. Knight’s monks, however, have a much cooler lair, full of traps, secret doors and hidey-holes.

Wen Suchen’s story is obviously inspired by the adventure-laden wuxia novels that formed the bedrock of many Shaw films (especially the Lung Ti/Yuen Chor collaborations of the 1970s). But, unlike those characters, Wen Suchen didn’t appear in books before making the jump to film; he was (as far as I can tell) invented solely for this film.

If there were a series of Wen Suchen novels, then perhaps the film’s thin characterizations could be justified; reading the books, or seeing the other Wen Suchen movies would fill in the blanks. But, without the support of canon, the entire film feels a bit hollow.

Co-star Lily Ho, in her first big role for Shaw, illustrates the commercial paradox of the Shaw Brothers style. While unconscious, Lily Ho is assaulted by a villain who goes so far as to look at her shoulder before Wen Suchen fights him off. After awaking, Ho is so ashamed at the loss of her virtue that she attempts to kill herself.

In this moment, Ho is the perfect symbol of the mythical past created by Shaw; honorable to the point of absurdity—c’mon, it was just your shoulder!—she represents the “good old days” that people the world round yearn for, even if those days never existed.

2 minutes later, Lily Ho is buck-naked and only a strategically placed ponytail prevents the film from shocking audiences world wide (it was still shocking, apparently. However, the moment is less revealing than the similar shot in The Golden Buddha). Shaw was willing to sell the idea of a mythical utopian past, but they also realized that nudity and blood sold more tickets.

Shaw had sold purity since their early days; “Yellow Plum” films, like Love Eterne and Last Woman Of Shang, relied on an idealized past. But puerility was something new; partial nudity went far beyond the hinted-at lovemaking of Shaw’s earlier films. As old trends fade, new trends emerge. When the public tired of melodramatic operas, Shaw developed a new way to put butts in seats, mix the purity that sold to female audiences with the titillation that brought in the guys. Pure and puerile, that was Shaw in 1966, and that would be Shaw for many years to come.

The Knight Of Knights
Released: May 18, 1966
Dir: Hsieh Chun

The Golden Buddha

Advertised as “suspense in the Bond tradition,” I have to wonder what Bond movies the makers of The Golden Buddha were watching. Instead of a suave tuxedoed spy, protagonist Chung (Paul Chang Chung) is a corporate exec in a grey suit with a knowledge of judo. Instead of investigating, Chung stumbles headlong into a brainless race for treasure, competing against the Skeleton Gang, a needlessly covert gang of thugs who have no plans for world domination, blackmail or anything evil beyond petty thievery and underground lairs.

Led by a cross between Ming the Merciless and that creepy guy who hangs out outside the local leather bar, the Skeleton Gang isn’t exactly what I’d call threatening. However, they do seem to have an endless supply of men with very poor Judo skills. And, of course, busty women in gold bras.

Perhaps that’s what “suspense in the Bond tradition,” really means—sexy women and a foreign locale. If so, then Golden Buddha has Bond suspense in spades; Partially filmed in Thailand, the film features many shots guaranteed to help sell the film to locals and to other markets anxious for a glimpse of exotic Thailand.

And, if shots of Bangkok’s neon aren’t enough to pull you in, perhaps actress Fanny Fan’s...um, fanny, will interest you. The Golden Buddha is an early example of a technique Shaw would use increasingly in their kung fu and exploitation pictures, pointless shots of female nudity or gore that could be inserted into prints distributed in countries with lax censorship laws and removed from prints in more conservative countries.

This trick allowed Shaw to maximize their box office by tailoring their films to all of their markets while also further muddies the idea of the “definitive” version of a film, an ideal that has become increasingly remote in the age of special-edition DVDs and unnecessary “Director’s Cuts.”

Perhaps that is Golden Buddha’s contribution to the world of film; it’s an example that films are, first and foremost, products for consumption and are built to meet the needs of the paying audience. Artistic merits (of which The Golden Buddha has very few) follow a distant second.

The Golden Buddha
Released: April 27, 1966
Dir: Lo Wei

Come Drink With Me

I’ve already written at length about Come Drink With Me, so I won’t repeat myself here. Instead, I’d like to look at the film as it compared to the Shaw films that came before it, and the many that would follow in its drunken footsteps.

Come Drink With Me certainly wasn’t the first wuxia film; it wasn’t even the first wuxia film made by Shaw—Temple Of The Red Lotus, which was released 6 months earlier, uses many of the tricks and styles that made Drink famous.

But Drink is not just a fine-tuning of Temple, or a rehash with subtle changes to appease the audience. It’s a remarkably different film that had farther reaching consequences than its predecessor.

Gone are the romances, the melodrama and the tragedy that appeared in nearly every previous Shaw film, replaced with adventure, action and a non-romantic pair of leads, Chang Pei Pei and Yueh Hua. These two actors, unseen in previous Shaw Brothers movies*, along with a new director** and a largely unfamiliar cast***, broke Come Drink With Me away from the previous body of Shaw films.

There are, of course, some songs, typically lush costumes and many women dressed up as men. But there are also less idolized peasants, a conflicted hero and a much tighter plot. If you watch Come Drink With Me in isolation from the Shaw films that proceeded it, the film feels rather conventional—something you’ve seen a million times in other Hong Kong films. But after spending the last two months watching films like Love Eterne, Les Belles and Love Without End, I think I can finally glimpse what it must have felt like to see it in 1966. Hong Kong had stepped boldly in a new direction.

Come Drink With Me
Released: April 7, 1966
Dir: King Hu

* Yueh Hua did play Monkey in Monkey Goes West, but he was covered in makeup ** Drink was King Hu’s third movie, so he was fresh by Shaw standards *** The villains had been seen in other henchman roles

Till The End Of Time

I knew I’d watched too many Shaw Brothers romances when, in the opening scenes of Till The End Of Time, I pointed at lead-actor Peter Chen Ho and declared, “Soon, you will be dead!”

And, really, who could blame me? After a steady parade of happy romantic pairings, in which one lover is invariably struck with a mysterious, unnamed and fatal disease, I have created my own little game of picking who would be coughing up blood by the film’s close.

And Chen Ho, showing every one of his 35 years, seemed the most likely choice. Chen Ho would, in fact, die four years after this film was made. But that coincidence had no bearing on my ghoulish prediction. I simply figured that Jenny Hu, a young star-to-be in her first film, would simply look better crying over Chen Ho’s grave than he would look crying over hers. Really, I was just making the logical choice.

My prediction was wrong and Till The End Of Time defied Shaw’s normal predilections by killing no one. Not one in almost two hours. Shocking! Paradoxically, that didn’t make the film any less formulaic, just slightly less tragic.

Chen Ho meets Hu after nearly running her over on his way to the prom. Yes, the prom. Hu, and the film’s other emerging female star, Lily Ho, would fit in at a prom. Chen Ho would be mistaken for a teacher. But it’s telling that Shaw Brothers had no young male stars. Jimmy Wang Yu was the only actor around near the right age, but he was known as a martial arts actor, thanks to his role in Temple Of The Red Lotus, and not a dramatic lead. This was a studio geared towards discovering new female, not male, talent.

Talent like Jenny Hu, who was exactly what the film needed: a gorgeous, young actress who could move from playing a glamorous cabaret singer to a glamorously tragic wife to a tragically glamorous musical sensation. Her scenes, especially the gold lame-laden pop numbers, are the film’s highlights. Justifiably, the film made her an instant success and she went on to star in a number of remarkably similar roles.

Speaking of remarkably similar, the plot of Till The End Of Time bears a number of resemblances to previous Shaw successes and popular Hollywood formulas. A rich boy falls for a poor woman and they marry in defiance of the wishes of the boy’s haughty family. They struggle on, suffer tragedy and nearly self-destruct; but their love, and a huge number of freakish coincidences, carry the day.

The one plot device that stands out is that Chen Ho, despondent and self-pitying, becomes as bitter, intractable and dislikable as his elitist father. But making one of your romantic leads unpalatable isn’t really a wise choice, even if it is unique. Till The End Of Time may be an excellent example of Shaw’s skill with young female talent, but it’s also an equally excellent example of their love of style over substance and originality.

Till The End Of Time
Released: March 16, 1966
Dir: Chin Chien

The Monkey Goes West

Imagine Mickey Mouse. But a naughty Mickey Mouse. Like “accidentally destroying entire buildings” naughty. Naughty like a hurricane.

Now imagine him teaching you about religion. And imagine he’s the most popular house-destroying soul-saving mouse ever, loved by millions upon millions.

That very confusing image you’ve conjured up is the closest I can come to describing Monkey (aka Monkey King or Sun Wukong), often described as the Trickster god of China. But he’s more than a brother to Loki and Coyote, he’s also an Buddhist allegory, teaching religious tenets amongst all his tomfoolery.

Journey To The West, a 400+ year-old novel, is the main source of Monkey mythology, tracing the journey of Buddhist monk Xuan Zhan (Ho Fan) from China to India on a quest to return with sacred Buddhist texts. A consistently popular legend, it was filmed before the Shaw Brothers version in 1965, and has been filmed, animated and televised many times since.

Journey is huge (over 100 chapters), multi-faceted novel, so each production has been able to draw out their own version of Monkey. He’s a rebellious trickster, he’s a penitent troublemaker, he’s an adventurer, he’s a religious icon. Shaw’s version skips the deeper meaning and keeps everything on an entertaining, if not always engaging, surface level. Like Jason and The Argonauts or Clash of the Titans, mythical import steps aside for effects and glitz.

Based on a story that everyone in Hong Kong and the other Shaw territories knew by heart, Shaw skipped the exposition and got right to the fun—Monkey (Yueh Hua) and Pigsy (Peng Peng) performing magical tricks and fighting demons, dragons and each other. Monkeys growing understanding of Buddhist virtue is mostly lacking; perhaps that is more fully explored in the film’s three sequels.

Another reviewer calls this a “gathering of the troops” movie, introducing the characters and establishing the story that’s to come. To audiences already familiar with the adventures of Monkey, the film’s minimal exposition is probably sufficient. Others, like me, may be a bit more confused. Thankfully, the back story of the world’s most popular naughty, building destroying, soul-saving Monkey can be easily found in books and on the Web.

The Monkey Goes West
Released: January 18, 1966
Dir: Ho Meng Hua
HKMdb is down, I’ll link to their page when the site is back.