Shaw Brothers

The Sword and the Lute

In 1965, director Hsu Tseng-Hung helped to reintroduce the swordplay genre with his film Temple Of The Red Lotus and its quickly made sequel Twin Swords (which is not yet out on DVD, sadly). In 1966 and 67, sword-fighting films began to take off, thanks to films from Chang Cheh and King Hu. While the genre was evolving beyond its Saturday-matinee-style roots, Hsu seemed perfectly content to continue to make foam-light adventures.

Although Sword and the Lute is a sequel to Temple and Twin Swords, the main characters from those films barely appear in this third, and final, film in the series. After losing the deadly Phoenix Lute, the Yin Yang Swordsmen (Jimmy Wang Yu and Chin Ping) mostly fade into the background while another group of heroes gets to do all the adventuring.

Led by the unlikely pair of Fung Bo Bo (a pre-teen girl) and Pang Pang (a comic actor, perhaps best known for playing Piggie in the Monkey Goes West films), the chivalrous knights of the film battle the lute stealing bandits, who also have their thieving eyes on the appropriately named Invincible Sword and the magical Seven Star Stone.

It’s not a movie to take too seriously, obviously. The plot moves quickly, the fighting is well choreographed, the bandits are evil and the heroes are good. That’s really all I can ask, and I expect that’s all Hsu Tseng-Hung was aiming for.

The Sword and the Lute
Dir: Hsu Tseng-hung
Released: April 21, 1967

Dragon Swamp

Mixing the brain-bending special effects of Land Of Many Perfumes and the over-the-top swordplay of wuxia films like Golden Swallow, Dragon Swamp is an early entry into wuxia sub-genre I call, at least until I think of a non-obscene phrase, the “mindfuck film.”

These films attempt to capture, to the best of cinema’s ability, the deeply unreal landscape of the magical wuxia pian novels, full of giant monsters, super powers, mystical weaponry and a plot twist on every page. While nearly all wuxia films feature some of these elements, the mindfuck film pushes them into a whole other realm of unreality.

I like these films—mainly because they don’t have to worry about remaining tethered to reality. The best balance on the knnife’s edge of enjoyable silliness and total incomprehensibility. Dragon Swamp manages its tightrope act quite well; it’s perfect Saturday morning matinee material.

Much of the film’s success is due to Cheng Pei Pei, who plays two roles, the precious youngster Qing-er and Qing-er’s disgraced mother, Fan Ying, who stole the Jade Dragon Sword, sacred relic of the Lingshan clan. Banished to the Dragon Swamp for 20 years, Fan Ying is separated from her daughter, who, 20 years later, also leads a thief to the Jade Dragon Sword. I guess it runs in the family.

As penance for her mistake, Qing-er goes in search of the sword and becomes entangled in the machinations of the Dragon Swamp Master (Tung Li), the mysterious Roaming Knight (Yueh Hua, Cheng’s co-star from Come Drink With Me), and a number of other high-powered baddies. Throughout it all, she maintains her youthful bluster and naivety.

Fan Ying, on the other hand, remains serene, confident and content, even after she’s attacked by “poisonous miasma.” It’s nice to see Cheng Pei Pei go beyond he standard sword fighting beauty role and flex some different muscles.

Dragon Swamp would still be fun without Cheng Pei Pei, but I doubt it would be as satisfying. Although replete with bizarre lines like, “Tell madam we only have six dragon gall bladders left,” Dragon Swamp's psychedelic setting is consistent enough that everything seems plausible, if not exactly sensible.

Dragon Swamp
Dir: Lo Wei
Released: March 27, 1969

Madam White Snake

Take a well-known myth, popular for hundreds of years, tweak it slightly, cast top celebrities in the leading roles and, voila, instant crowd pleaser. With almost every haungmei opera released by Shaw Brothers studio, the technique is the same. And, really, why shouldn’t it be? If the approach works, stick with it.

By the time Shaw Brothers studio was founded, the story of Madam White Snake was already over 1000 years old. Versions abounded, each with their own unique take on the tale of romance between mortal pharmacist Xu Xian (Chao Lei) and immortal snake spirit Bai She Chuan (Linda Lin Dai). Shaw combined some of the versions, adding some details here, removing some details there, and filmed the resulting musical in the standard haungmei style.*

Bai and her sister, the green snake spirit Qing (Margaret Tu Chuan), declare immortal life boring and lonely and decide to live amongst mortals, where Bai falls in love with the Xu Xian, partially because he, in a previous life, saved her from death. With Qing acting as matchmaker, the two quickly settle into marital bliss.

Most of the other versions of this story cast Qing not as a supporter of marriage, but as the romance’s doubting Thomas, warning Bai against the entire idea. Shaw’s conversion of Qing’s traditional role into an instrument of romance highlights a common Shaw trope—the role of the “second woman”—the cheerful, outspoken, id-laden sidekick without who romance would never flower. The problem with mythical Chinese heroes and heroines is that they are so impossibly proper that they can never express love or show any overt interest in a member of the opposite sex. That would simply be too scandalous.

The “second woman” however, suffers none of these restrictions. Brash, and fearless of humiliation, she forces the bashful couple into romance and matrimony, rarely finding love for herself. Sometimes, as in The Bride Napping, the “second woman” role is played by the film’s star. Usually, as in Madam White Snake, it’s a supporting role.

No Shaw marriage can remain unthreatened; enter Fahai, a powerful Buddhist monk to tries to reveal Bai’s slithery nature to the oblivious Xu. Religion is the unambiguous villain of Shaw’s telling of Madam White Snake. Fahai disrupts Bai’s marriage with a ferocity and malice unseen in older versions of the tale. His motives remain unexplored, turning him into little more than a paper-thing fanatic.

The biggest change implemented by Shaws is the film’s abrupt, almost absurd ending that excises most of the story’s final act, but caps the running time at a theater friendly 95 minutes. The swiftness of the conclusion detracts slightly from the film, otherwise an enjoyable example of Shaw’s haungmei style and their reworking of Chinese classics. But, I guess even millennia-old tales must bend to the realities of movie economics.

Side note: One of the biggest names in the standardization of the Shaw Brothers style has to be Japanese cinematographer Tadashi Nishimoto. Madam White Snake was his first haungmei film to hit the big screen (confusingly, he started working on Beyond The Great Wall three years earlier, but it wouldn’t be released for another 2 years). He obviously got the hang of the genre quickly, moving on to work on classics like Love Eterne and The West Chamber.

Madam White Snake
Dir: Yue Feng
Released: October 12, 1962

The Lotus Lamp

Stars who die young are doubly cursed. Not only are they dead, but they leave behind a few films that can never live up to the glowing reputation that invariably surrounds the prematurely departed.

I realize that sounds glib, placing a poor film performance on the same level as an early, usually tragic death. I’m not trying to belittle these stars or their deaths, only point out that they were more fallable than their post-mortem deifications would lead us to believe.

Linda Lin Dai is one of the best remembered Hong Kong stars of the 50s and 60s. When she committed suicide in 1964, Linda Lin Dai was working on at least two films, the epic The Blue And The Black and the haungmei opera The Lotus Lamp.*

Of the two, The Lotus Lamp was the closest to completion, so it lacks the jagged, Frankenstein edges of The Blue And The Black. But, like that WWII melodrama, The Lotus Lamp shows an actress that time and the Shaw Brothers studio had left behind.

Originally, Lin was meant to share the screen in The Lotus Lamp with Cheng Pei Pei and Ivy Ling Po—Lin playing the motherly Goddess San and Ling Po playing her teenaged son Chen Xiang—a symbolic changing of the guard with Lin graduating to Shaw’s “older women” roles and passing her mantle on to Ling and Chang. But Lin fought the casting, pushing Ling Po out of the film (although she still provides some of the singing voices) and taking two of the film’s three starring roles.

Lin was well-suited for the role of Goddess San, an immortal who falls for and marries the mortal scholar Liu (Cheng Pei Pei). Playing Goddess San required a certain regal bearing and a motherly concern, traits that Linda Lin Dai could exude in her sleep. San, however, exits the movie early when Three Eyed God (Tien Feng), the protector of heavenly purity, and his companion, Sky Dog (a shape shifting German Shepard who should have his own cartoon series—The Adventures Of Sky Dog!) discovers San and Liu’s forbidden love. San is punished with eternal confinement and Liu flees with their infant son, Chen Xiang, swearing to avenge his wife.

Time passes and Chen Xiang grows into a pouty, angry teenaged boy. Once Lin Dai bounds on screen, looking like the exact opposite of a pouty, teenaged boy, the inappropriateness of this casting becomes clear. Whatever Lin’s reason for forcing Ling Po out of the film—jealousy over Ling Po’s rising popularity, insecurity in her own star power, fear that her age (almost 30) would force her from the spotlight or a desire to try a cross-dressing haungmei role that were currently all the rage—the decision was a poor one.

From this moment on, The Lotus Lamp stops being a slight, if enjoyable haungmei opera and mutates into the archetypical train wreck, made all the more awful by its star’s imminent suicide. If Linda Lin Dai had made another thirty films after The Lotus Lamp, the film would simply be seen as one of her lesser efforts. Instead, it is haunted by its casting and suffers all the more for it.

*I’ve seen sources claim she was working on two, three or four films at the time of her death.

The Lotus Lamp
Dir: Yue Feng
Released: July 8, 1965

Return Of The One-Armed Swordsman

The tournament movie—where would Hong Kong filmmaking of the 1970s be without the tournament movie? There would be no Master Of The Flying Guillotine, that’s for damn sure. And that would be a shame.

The tournament film, for those unfamiliar with the term, is a kung fu or swordplay film with only the tiniest nod towards plot or sensibility. The hero reluctantly enters a tournament featuring dozens of fighters sporting wacky weapons or esoteric styles; if he wins, the hero will avenge some egregious wrong. If he loses, he dies.

That’s pretty much it. Toss in some random but ultimately unnecessary backstory and you’ve got yourself a tournament film, staple of cheapo HK filmmakers in the 1970s.

While I doubt that Chang Cheh invented the tournament sub-genre with this sequel to his massive hit One-Armed Swordsman, the film (imaginatively named Return Of The One-Armed Swordsman) certainly pre-dates any of the tourney films that I’ve seen. That Chang Cheh made such an early entry into the tourney film canon is intriguing but disappointing.

Now, while I have nothing against tourney films, I would never claim that they are anything more than 90 minutes of thought-free film. The original One-Armed Swordsman was a bit more than that, telling a intriguing tale of the battles within men’s hearts.

Return only concerns itself with the battles between men, any of the original’s emotional weight is whittled away as the uni-limbed Fang Gang (Jimmy Wang Yu) slices down the henchmen of the Eight Sword Kings.

Ah, the right villainous Eight Sword Kings; where tournament films really shone was their villains, each specializing in the most absurd fighting styles imaginable. The Eight Sword Kings—Furtive King, Poisonous Dragon, Hell’s Buddha, Flying Fighter, Hercules, Ape’s Arms, Spinning Wheels and the female Thousand Hands—don’t just feature bizarre weapons, but come with their own amusingly named henchmen—9 Flying Pupils, 7 Earth Bullies, etc.

While Return certainly succeeds by the limited criteria of the tourney film sub-genre, offering both extensive fighting and entertaining villains, that doesn’t make it any less of a disappointment when compared to its predecessor. But if left to stand on its own two legs (or its own one hand), the result is up to snuff.

Return Of The One-Armed Swordsman
Dir: Chang Cheh
Released: February 28, 1969

The Land Of Many Perfumes

Watching Shaw’s four films of the tales Sun Wukong, the Monkey King, from 1966’s The Monkey Goes West to 1968’s The Land Of Many Perfumes, is a lesson the studio’s endless tinkering, perfecting their film formulas through many small changes, adding a feature here, tweaking a feature there, trying to find the sweet spot that would balance special effects, musical numbers, bawdy comedy, Chinese mythology and Buddhist theology.

The Monkey Goes West is the movie most faithful to its source, introducing the pilgrims in much the same way as in the original tale. But the title change, from the book’s title of The Journey West, highlights the series’ monkey-centric nature, specifically his love of troublemaking and magic. Special effects and physical humor were always in the driving seat, putting religion far behind.

This approach held through the entire series while other features have been added or removed. The first film’s frequent musical breaks became rarer in each sequel, mirroring the decreased interest in musicals between 1966 and 1968. Female flesh, barely seen in the first film, became a staple, although the surprising amount of nudity seen in Princess Iron Fan, the second film in the series, was curbed in the third and fourth films.

While still clothed, women are perhaps the biggest feature of Cave Of The Silken Web and The Land Of Many Perfumes. The third film’s lightly-clad spider demonesses are replaced in the fourth film with an entire country of women, which is also besieged by a variety of female troublemakers—all of whom wear see-through pants and brightly colored underwear.

The plethora of women allows director Ho Meng-hua to break out another favorite trick of the Monkey films, magical impersonation. When every woman within 100 miles falls in love with beleaguered Tripitaka (Ho Fan), everyone wants to impersonate the newly popular priest. First used in Cave Of Silken Web, this split-screen special effect (a la The Family Trap) was obviously popular enough to bring back.

New to The Land Of Many Perfumes is the technique of rear projection, used to simulate hurricanes, magical spells and the film’s nearly indescribable climax: Monkey peeing on everyone and unleashing a giant chicken.

Feel free to read that sentence again, if you’d like.

The Monkey stories frequently feature weapons borrowed or stolen from the Celestial Kingdom. Cave Of The Silken Web, for example, ended with a heavenly flamethrower. Princess Iron Fan hinged on the titular fan, so heavy that only immortals could wield it. But when Monkey (Chou Lung-chang) announces that only “Moon King’s Chicken” can defeat the villains, well, it’s surprising, but who’s going to argue with a statement like that?

The lunar chicken, brought to life through a combination of puppetry and rear-projection, lives up to his billing. And, as the pilgrims head off, apparently no nearer to the Buddhist scriptures they are seeking than they were after the first film, I wondered if Perfumes marked the end of the series because the formula had out-lived its welcome or because no one could think of a way to top a giant moon chicken.

The Land Of Many Perfumes
Dir: Ho Meng-hua
Released: January 26, 1968

The Thundering Sword

Shaw Brothers loved efficiency. Although their films took an age to make compared to the Cantonese films that were frequently made in a week, the Shaw Brothers strived to make their filmmaking process as svelte as possible—hence the endlessly reused Movie Town lots, the contract actors, writers and directors and the recombinations of popular plot elements.

Director Hsu Teng-hung was proud of his efficient filmmaking technique, claiming that he shot over 60 setups in one day on the set of Thundering Sword.¹ It’s easy to see how he worked so quickly. He kept editing to a minimum, tracking the camera through a scene, using zooms to provide the emphasis usually given by more familiar but less efficient close-ups and reverse shots.

For all of the cleanness behind the camera, obviously no one suggested that the scriptwriter, Sheng Chiang, apply the same rigor to his work. Thundering Sword delivers a plot so thoroughly incomprehensible, so poorly thought out, convoluted and belabored as to be an exitless hedge maze built by drunken gnomes. Characters wander in and out without introduction or explanation. The caterpillar clan, who adorn their house with bug idols, worship a snake. The titular sword is forgotten for at least half of the film. Setting one foot inside Thundering Sword’s funhouse guarantees at least 90 minutes of forehead exercise as your brow knits tighter and tighter.

The full plot description takes up twice as much space as most reviews, so I’ll provide an executive level summary: Yu (Chang Yi ) and Chiang (Lo Lieh) are searching for the Thundering Sword, which, prophesy says, is strong enough to destroy the world. Chiang finds it, but Jiau (Chang Pei Pei), leader of the Caterpillar clan, steals it and poisons Chiang. Jiau tries to get Chiang home for treatment, but poor Chiang is waylaid and crippled by bandits. Jiau, meanwhile, kills 3 dozen people and falls in love with Yu, who unwittingly takes the wrap for her crimes. 60 minutes of plot twists later, all is explained (not really) and the clans settle the matter of the Thundering Sword.

Credit is usually given to King Hu’s Come Drink With Me and Chang Cheh’s Tiger Boy for reviving the wuxia pian genre and transplanting it to Shaw’s Mandarin studio of the 1960s. But Hsu Teng-hung’s wuxia film, Temple Of The Red Lotus, was made and released before Hu and Cheng’s films. Why do Hu and Cheng continue to receive all the laurels? Well, unlike Hu and Cheng, who went on to make a number of great films, including many wuxia classics, Hsu Teng-hung went on to make films like Thundering Sword.

To be fair, wuxia stories are almost always complex and stuffed with a certain amount of nonsense; both of Tsui Hark’s versions of Zu: Warriors of the Magic Mountain, which share much with The Thundering Sword, are plotted with only the laziest of eyes towards comprehensibility.

But wuxia films, the good ones at least, tend to overcome their baroque plots with gorgeous visuals or an emphasis on the tales’ mythical aspects, making the numerous plot twists part of a fun and beautiful package. But Thundering Sword matches its absurd plot with a visual style chosen for efficiency rather than effect and quickly wears out its welcome.

1 Emily Lo “Profile of Hsu Teng-hung.” The Shaw Screen: A Preliminary Study.

The Thundering Sword
Released: May 9, 1967
Dir: Hsu Teng-hung

Cave of Silken Web

Third of the four Monkey films Shaws made in the 1960s, Cave of Silken Web retains much of what made the earlier films so enjoyable: special effects, scantily clad villainesses and catch song routines. However, the third child also strikes off in a new direction, showing Shaw’s growing love for swordplay.

While nearly plot-free, Silken Web is never short on action. Monk Tripitaka (played again by Ho Fan) is captured by a septet of spider demonesses, whose skimpy arachno-erotic costumes are undeniably the film’s stars. To free his master, and fellow pilgrim Pigsy (Peng Peng), the ever-inventive Monkey (Chou Lung-chang) relies on his skills of impersonation, turning into simulacrums of local gods and various spider demonesses.

The film is obsessed with impersonation. Demonesses turn into pilgrims. Pigsy turns into Tripitaka, while turning Tripitaka into Pigsy. Monkey turns into just about everyone. Hong Kong didn’t use this much split-screen trick photography again until Jackie Chan’s Twin Dragons. The only character exempt from this abundance of magic is Monk Sandy. For the first time in Shaw’s Monkey films, Monk Sandy is given something to do, returning to the Jade Kingdom to retrieve a jar of magical fire. I’ve wondered about the short-shrift the Shaw movies give to Sandy, but from what I’ve read of the original stories, Sandy just didn’t do that much.

When they aren’t impersonating each other, the characters are fighting with swords, staffs and rakes; the series adjusting to Shaw’s greater use of action and fight choreography. But, in a pleasant change from its two predecessors, Monkey appears to have learned some restraint on his religious pilgramege and he saves his companions through a combination of intelligence and patience, as compared to his more aggressive solutions in earlier films.

The Shaw Brothers Monkey films were never overly fond of plots, but the story of Cave of Silken Web is surprisingly thin. Like today’s summer blockbusters, the film is mostly an excuse to fill the screen with action, effects and almost-dressed attractive women. And, just like today’s blockbusters, the formula works.

Cave Of Silken Web
Released: August 21, 1967
Dir: Ho Meng-hua

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.

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