Shaw Brothers

The Singing Killer

What’s strange about The Singing Killer is not the musical numbers, or David Chiang’s laggardly lip-synching. It’s that Chang Cheh took his most dynamic, charming star and turned him into a nearly lifeless lump. For most of the film, Chiang’s gold lamé pants are ten times more exciting than the man wearing them.

Granted, Johnny, the titular singing killer, is supposed to be moody and preoccupied; as his singing career launches him to stardom, Johnny longs for the girl he lost and worries that his criminal past will destroy his life. But Chiang takes this conflicted character and drains him of energy. Even during his upbeat musical numbers, he looks dreary and static.

Without Chiang’s dynamism, there’s very little to prop up the film’s factory-standard plot. Chang Cheh continues the migration from swordplay films to kung fu films with the film’s early action scenes, which feature some nice fisticuffs. But by the film’s end, most of the fighting is done with guns, and is not nearly as interesting.

Even for die-hard fans of David Chiang/Ti Lung pairings, the film has very little to offer. Ti Lung has one line in the film and appears, briefly, in two scenes. Vengeance! this is not.

The Singing Killer
Dir: Chang Cheh
Released: December 22, 1970

The Chinese Boxer

Critics love ‘firsts,’ we love finding the headwaters of whatever genre strikes their fancy. The first Velvet Underground recording, the first cubist painting, the first modern kung fu movie.

It‘s fun identifying these moments of conception, to find the moment that divides the ‘before’ from the ‘after;’ but in all the excitement of finding a genesis, we sometimes get a little bit overzealous and misidentify a small evolution for major revolution.

The Chinese Boxer was Shaw‘s first kung fu film, the first to feature fists instead of swords. But, in typical Shaw Brothers fashion, The Chinese Boxer wasn‘t cut from whole cloth. It‘s not so much a first as it is a small step in a larger transformation.

The dichotomy to keep in mind when watching The Chinese Boxer is not ‘swordplay’ vs ‘kung fu’, but North vs South. The Chinese Boxer isn‘t the triumph of kung fu, rather it‘s when the Southern residents of Hong Kong finally clambered over the walls of the Northern bastion of Shaw Brothers studio.

Kung Fu was not a new genre in Hong Kong cinemas. The Cantonese film industry had been churning out fist fighting films for decades. For example, Cantonese filmmakers released nearly 100 films about Cantonese kung fu hero Wong Fei Hung in under two decades, and they were still releasing 3 to 4 new Wong Fei Hong films per year in the late 1960s. Obviously, there was money to be made in kung fu.

Shaw Brothers studios never turned down a money making genre. So where were their kung fu films? That Shaw hadn‘t made these films before 1970 probably had less to do with economics than with geography and national identity. Most of Shaw‘s creative staff in the 1960s were not from Hong Kong, they were expatriates from the northern city of Shanghai, previous capital of the Chinese film world, and the city where the Shaw brothers started their first film studio.

As the 60s passed, the Shaw studios adapted to their new location; Cantonese locals joined the casts and crews and the city of Hong Kong became a presence in Shaw Brothers films like, A Place to Call Home. Slowly the northern studio began to reflect its southern surroundings.

Probably the biggest step in this transformation was the hiring of Tang Chia and Liu Chia-Liang as action directors. Tang, who trained in both Northern and Southern styles of martial arts, worked with Liu on the Cantonese Wong Fei Hung films before coming to Shaw where they eventually teamed up with director Chang Cheh.

The films made by this crew began to look less and less like their wuxia ancestors and more like Cantonese kung fu—films like Vengeance! could just as easily be kung fu films should the protagonists ever drop their swords, and should Chang Cheh ever drop the Peking opera imagery.

So when Jimmy Wang Yu took a standard Lo Wei script, teamed up with Tang Chia and fought with his fists, he wasn‘t revolutionary, he was just taking the next small step in the evolution that began when Shaw moved to Hong Kong. Northern-style dramas had finally been replaced by southern action. The Cantonization of Shaw Brothers was almost complete—the final step wold come a year later with the release of House of 72 Tenants, Shaw‘s first Cantonese language film.

But none of this pontificating reveals much about The Chinese Boxer as a film. Is it any good? Not so much. Jimmy Wang Yu was an erratic actor at best, and he‘s far from his best here. The fights are, of course, fun to watch. But everything in-between rarely rises above lackluster. The DVD‘s excruciating ‘improved’ soundtrack only makes the whole experience worse. Only Lo Lieh, as the villainous karate master, and his crew of exotic henchmen stand out.

The Chinese Boxer
Released: November 27, 1970
Dir: Jimmy Wang Yu

Apartment For Ladies

Thanks to movies like Apartment for Ladies, I now know how women spend their time when men are not around. Let me share my new found knowledge.

• 50% of their time is spent parading around in their underwear
• 30% is spent in catfights
• 10% is spent using their sexuality to swindle stupid men
• 10% is spent attacking men who steal their underwear

That’s pretty much it. The secret life of women in a nutshell.

Inoue Umetsugu showcased Shaw’s female stars in a way that no other director did—he made them glamorous, clever, powerful and sexy. But, in films like Apartment For Ladies he also pigeonholed and mocked them. What do the heroines do when taking revenge on a couple of swindlers and rapists? Bump them with their hips and tickle them.

While Inoue’s gender comedies are all in the spirit of good fun, they become exasperating during moments like these. Apartment for Ladies' ensemble cast includes several generations of female stars—Ouyang Shafei, Teresa Ha Ping, Lily Li and Betty Ting Pei. With all this experience and star power, tickling is the best they can do?

It might be unfair to attack a comedy for a scene it plays for laughs, but the tickling is just a symptom of a larger problem. Where Inoue once made films that showcased women (such as Hong Kong Nocturne), in Apartment For Ladies he instead showcases stereotypes. It’s much less satisfying.

Apartment For Ladies
Dir: Inoue Umetsugu
Released: November 20, 1970

The Price of Love

There are few movies that have successfully tackled love amongst the handicapped. Too often these films fall into easy sentimentality, or excessive moral posturing. The films become about handicaps instead of love.

The advantage given The Price of Love is that it comes from a genre known for excessive tragedy, absurdly overblown trauma and hanky-wrenching finales. Compared to these melodramatic gyrations, the stars' physical impairments are almost minor.

After Jui Fang (Chin Ping), a blind woman in an abusive household, meets hunchbacked musician Wu Shang (played by real-life hunchbacked musician Teddy Robin), a fairly standard wenyi weepie unfolds. Love gained, love lost, tragedies, musical numbers, etc.

The Price of Love's biggest surprise is that it offers very few surprises. Instead of bending the rules of romantic melodrama for its handicapped characters, it never waivers from the Show Brothers formula.

Because it’s so faithful to the blueprint, there’s not much to recommend the film. Beyond Teddy Robin’s folky-crooner songs of love lost and found, there’s little in The Price of Love that really stands out.

The Price Of Love
Dir: Wu Chia Hsiang
Released: November 6, 1970

A Time For Love

Another madcap ‘comedy’ replete with singing, brief nudity and largely unwatchable zaniness. Honestly, when the comic highlight of a film is a sexually aggressive robot, there’s not much to laugh at.

On the plus side, the film does have some moments of fine satire, especially in the opening scenes when the servants of the rich Old Lau sing about how great it is to rob the old man blind. And Lily Ho as Pearl, the servant’s daughter who falls for the Lau scion, shows some decent comedic instincts.

While A Time For Love is slightly better than its predecessor, Guess Who Killed My 12 Lovers, it still runs out of steam about 45 minutes into its 90 minute length. By the time the film introduces the rapist robot, it’s clear that they are stretching for anything to keep the movie moving. It succeeds, if only because it’s so jaw-droppingly mind-boggling.

A Time For Love
Dir: Kuei Chi-Hung
Released: November 16, 1970

Guess Who Killed My 12 Lovers?

During the 1960s, Shaw Brothers transformed from a Female-oriented film studio to a Male-oriented one. The romances and operas that began the decade gave way to swordplay, spy films and war dramas.

Tho sole holdout genre from Shaw’s more feminine days was the wenyi drama — weepy romances usually adapted from novels. But as the 60s came to a close, so did the wenyi drama.

Never one to abandon an audience, the studio tried other ways to bring women to the theater. But instead of appealing to the older women that flocked to wenyi and haungmei opera, Shaw targeted teenage girls with pop musicals like Guess Who Killed My 12 Lovers.

The quality of Guess Who and other teen girl films from the early 70s indicate that Shaw didn’t put a very high priority on these films. Put simply, these films are horrible. With about 15 minutes worth of plot, Guess Who pads itself out to 90 minutes with songs that recap the silk-thin plot, and bizarre digressions.

But as long as the films brought audiences into Shaw-owned movie theaters, I doubt the studio cared that much about the movie’s quality.

Poor Jenny Hu, a star that Shaw Brothers never figured out how to sell, sings and smiles her way through Guess Who, looking only mildly embarrassed to be stuck in an orange bathing suit for most of the movie. It should not come as a surprise that Guess Who was her last film with Shaw Brothers.

Guess Who Killed My 12 Lovers?
Dir: Wu Chia Hsang
Released: September 11, 1970

The Heroic Ones

Chang Cheh’s most famous films from the 1960s are known for their strong solitary heroes — Jimmy Wang Yu, Ti Lung and David Chiang. But in the 1970s, his most popular movies featured large groups — such as Five Deadly Venoms or the huge ensemble in The Water Margin.

The Heroic Ones was Chang’s first step from his solo-hero films to his Gang Of Manly Men movies. Instead of a single, vengeance-minded man, The Heroic Ones features the super-masculine 13 Generals and their warfare-obsessed father King Li (Ku Feng).

Fourteen stars is a big change from a single hero, but the story of Heroic Ones only focuses on 4 or 5 people, with the remaining actors serving as mostly nameless extras, ready to die as needed.

The 13 Generals are all sons (biological and adopted) of King Li, who has raised them all to be military masters. But his 13th son, Li Tsun Hsiao (David Chiang), outshines them all at tests of manliness. He drinks, fights and grabs more glory than all his other brothers combined.

Fighting two different attempts to overthrow the Tang emperor, as well as handling their own internal struggles, the 13 Generals get plenty of chances to show off their martial arts skills. And, just like the size of the cast, the fight scenes show Chang’s evolving style and point the way to the kung fu films of the 1970s.

Eschewing most of the high-camp fantasy seen in wuxia films of the 1960s, action directors Lau Kar-Wing, Liu Chia-Lang and Tong Gaai keep the swordplay powerful but realistic. Writer, actor and filmmaker Bey Logan says that the fighting in The Heroic Ones uses actual martial arts styles. I’ll have to take his word on it.

The Heroic Ones may presage the cinematic trends of the 70s, but it’s not that good of a film judged on its own merits. Plot threads appear and disappear, the brothers mostly congeal into an undifferentiated mass and the resolution is far from satisfying. Chang seems out of his element, which isn’t a surprise, and the film suffers from its lack of focus. But Chang would quickly adapt, as would the rest of Hong Kong cinema.

The Heroic Ones
Dir: Chang Cheh
Released: August 14, 1970

Love Without End

Whenever a film goes through the remake process, I have to ask why. Only nine years had passed since Love Without End charmed audiences in 1961. Why remake a film that’s not even a decade old? Why remake a film forever linked with Linda Lin Dai, Shaw’s biggest, and first tragic, star.

So, why? Nine years may seem like a short time, but the Shaw Brothers of 1961 was still a small, growing studio battling with rival MP & GI for box office supremacy. What better way to charge into a new decade than with a remake that helped launch the studio into the 1960s?

And what better way to solidify a potential new star? Jenny Hu had been working at Shaw since 1966, but he career didn’t really start to move until 1969, when she started in 3 films. By putting her into a high-profile remake of a classic film, perhaps Shaw Brothers hoped to create another super star.

But nothing puts a filmmaker more firmly between a rock and a hard place than remaking a classic. Deviate from the original too much, and the fans will cry foul. Stay too close to the source, and there’s no reason to remake the film.

Director and writer Pan Lei takes the safe route and, with the exception of the colorful sets and short mini-skirts, his version of Love Without End might as well take place in 1961.

That’s not to say the film is bad—the remake is as good as the original, and it’s beautifully made. It just never differentiates itself from its predecessor. And the changes it does make only take the harsh edges off the male lead, Tang Pengnan (Ling Yun). And few films are well served by making their characters less interesting.

If Pan Lei’s Love Without End wasn’t a remake, it would stand out as one of their romantic classics. Instead, it’s simply a high-quality shadow.

Love Without End
Director: Pan Lei
Released: July 18, 1970

Vengeance!

Chang Cheh bookends Vengeance! with battle scenes from Chinese operas in which the dying hero, streaming blood, fights his enemies until the bitter end. And, just in case we missed the similarities between these operatic snippets and the film we’re watching, Chang intercuts plenty of opera into the film’s many battles.

But, as hard as he tries, Chang never quite builds a flawless bridge connectiong Chinese Opera and his heroic bloodshed genre flicks. The Japanese influences are too obvious; the almost ritual disemboweling, the white robes, the unquestioned honor of dying as a warrior. The movie could as easily be called Seppuku!.

Vengeance! is Chang’s revenge genre at it’s most stripped down. No time is wasted on elaborate plot twists or other frivolities. All of the film’s energy is focused on its elaborate and entertaining fights—the story (Yulou (Ti Lung) is killed for defending his wife’s honor so his brother, Xiaolou (David Chiang), comes to avenge the murder by killing everyone involved) is merely a formality.

That terseness carries over to Chiang; his stern and streamlined performance breaks from the raffish, genial wanderer he played in The Wandering Swordsman. In Vengeance! Chiang’s only moments of happiness come from his love, Zhengfeng (Wang Ping). The rest of the time he’s a dour force of nature.

But Zhengfeng never poses much of threat to Xiaolou’s suicidal revenge trip; nothing can get between Xiaolou and his glorious ending. And the film delivers the goods we’ve anticipated since seeing the blood-soaked opening title — bowels are rent, blood is squirt, vengeance is executed. With an title as imperative as Vengeance!, what other options are there?

Vengeance!
Released: May 14, 1970
Dir: Chang Cheh

My Son

In my reviews of Shaw Brothers melodramas, I frequently critique them for their formulaic predictability—a heroine (tragic, of course) finds herself in a situation beyond her control and sacrifices herself for the good of others. Imagine my surprise to find that in 1970, when these wenyi melodramas were being phased out of Shaw studios, screenwriter, poet and director Lo Chen turned out a unique melodrama featuring an unlikely star, Jimmy Wang Yu.

Reminiscent of “social-problem” films like Summer Heat, My Son is the nasty, pessimistic tragedy of Yang Kuo Liang (Wang Yu) and his girlfriend Mui Lin (Margaret Hsing Hui). Angry and rich, Yang argues with his father (Tien Feng) and fights anyone who pisses him off, which is everyone. But when he’s with Mui Lin, Yang’s angry demeanor subsides. He takes her boating, pays for her sister’s medical care and promises to keep her from harm.

Sadly, Yang’s promises last as long as his patience and the couple’s situation declines in a series of painful tragedies, almost all of which are instigated by Yang’s pig-headed anger, fear of responsibility and shirking of responsibility.

Having a film’s star be both unlikable and at fault for the pain of others was a rare step for Shaw. The stars of their other melodramas were praised, and the tragedies that befell them were either unavoidable, or instigated for the good of others.

Yang is a unique anti-hero in Shaw melodramas, and that’s not the kind of role I’d expect Jimmy Wang Yu to play. And as much as I’d like to say that My Son gave Wang the stereotype-busting kind role that allows him to exhibit his real skills, that’s simply untrue—Wang simply wasn’t that good; My Son shows why he was better suited to roles that required less complicated acting.

Wang’s acting is not the film’s only stumbling block; an exploitative scene or two combined with a stupefying Wu Ma as a “hippy” throw the film off its game. However, the hippy’s “crazy freak out” party does lead to the film’s best quote, “We are the mystifying generation!”

Fumbles aside, the film is far better than other contemporary melodramas. After Shaw Brothers had wrung the life out of the wenyi genre, it’s nice to see an attempt, even an uneven one, to resuscitate the genre.

My Son
Dir: Lo Chen
Released: June 25, 1970