Shaw Brothers

Yang Kwei Fei

One of my main goals in writing about the Shaw Brothers films is to talk about why they made the films they made. To me this is more interesting than talking in the typical platitudes of the film critic — “A thrill a minute! Two ears up! Etc”. Because of this I love watching Shaw’s adaptations of classic Chinese literature. Of the common Shaw Brothers genres none do a better job of illuminating the ideological engines that drove the studio’s output.

Audience familiarity with the source material was a big bonus for Shaw Brothers; just like today, most audiences are more willing to watch known quantities than unfamiliar stories. So Shaw Brothers frequently adapted novels, poems and pulp serials to the big screen. Few sources would have been more familiar to audiences than the classics, stories that had been memorized and retold for centuries.

And the classics had the advantage of flexibility; when Shaw Brothers adapted popular modern novels they probably had much less freedom when adapting the story to suit their tastes. After all, the studio expected that most of their audience had read, or heard about, the novel. Thus the film needed to deliver what people expected.

But with classical stories these restrictions mostly disappeared. While the stories were well known their descent through the oral tradition resulted in many different, conflicting versions. Like languages, these stories had evolved into an array of dialects.

Take the story of Yang Kwei Fei. If you google the name right now, the top results will contain at least three different versions of her story. These stories will mostly agree on the historical particulars — her name, who she married, how she died — but will disagree on almost everything else.

To Shaw bosses, this divergence was perfect. Since there was no single story to adhere to, the films could deliver characters that everyone knew, while the studio could still adjust the story to meet their needs — be those needs marketing, moral or cultural.

And the most important need of Yang Kwei Fei was that its star, Li Li-hua, look good. So the morally conflicting story of China’s great beauty, a woman who nurtured and loved the man that overthrew a dynasty, thus causing her own death, becomes an oddly disjointed glamour film about the tragic, tearful scapegoat of a nation.

In the early 1960s, when Hong Kong films featured and were made for women, it would have been hard to portray Yang Kwei Fei, or Li Li-hua, in an completely unflattering light; although Yang starts the film as a cruel and jealous concubine, she quickly and mysteriously softens by the film’s halfway point.

Yang’s character development isn’t helped by the film’s extreme brevity. At just over an hour long the film feels like it’s missing its entire middle act. In order to get to the tearful ending, it was probably just easier to skip over the parts of the story where Yang behaved less glamorously.

And, in the end, this film is really all about glamour. Director Li Han-hsiang features Li Li-hua in every way possible, surrounding her face with appropriately lush backdrops; Yang is Li’s film, from her steamy introduction, to her tearful end — and there’s no way that she would be shown in anything but the most positive light.

Yang Kwei Fei (sometimes called The Magnificent Concubine)
Dir: Li Han-hsiang
Released: May 31, 1962

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

That Man In Chang-an

Terrible. What else can I say? From beginning to end this film is non-stop awfulness. The plot changes every 5 minutes, characters appear and disappear for no reason, the acting is no better than at my local high school and the huge final battle looks like Keystone Kops.

Like The King With My Face, That Man in Chang An was an attempt to capture the Korean market. Featuring a number of Korean actors, parts of the That Man appear to have been shot in Korea, and the film may have been a co-production between Shaw and a Korean studio.

But unlike The King With My Face, That Man is a massive waste of time.

The plot’s not coherent enough to retell. But there’s an evil Empress (who we never see), the maniacal general Lu Kun (Korean actor Park No Sik), a trapped princess (Fang Ying), a heroic maid (Alison Chang Yen, the film’s highlight) and a mysterious masked man (Kim Jin Kyu). There’s also something about trying to overthrow a kingdom and usurp the emperor, and a lot of talk about the town of Chang An (which we also never see, I think). But since the film never invests any time in making the plot make any sense, I don’t see why I should.

Judging by the non-stop maniacal laughter of Lu Kun, and the film’s endless cliff-hangers, director Yen Chun may have been trying to make an old-style serial adventure film. While that can work, That Man forgets to include any adventure.

One of the film’s biggest stumbling blocks is its hero; As the masked avenger, Kim Jin Kyu is the exact opposite of the leading men usually cast in these roles. Too old and completely lacking the necessary physique, he’s utterly unbelievable as a wuxia knight. When he’s masked, the film can avoid the problem by using a stunt double. But in the film’s final battle, he fights without a mask. So Yen Chun resorts to speeding the film up to ludicrous speed just to make the fight look exciting. It doesn’t work.

That Man In Chang-an
Dir: Yen Chun
Released: February 18, 1967

Sons of Good Earth

Who would expect a rousing, flag waiving pean to patriotism to begin with a 30-minute remake of An American In Paris? Not me, that’s for sure. But that’s exactly what the first third of Sons of Good Earth is, all the way down to the incidental music that sounds straight out of the MGM vault.

Struggling painter Yu Ri narrates the opening, introducing his town and its residents. Unlike Gene Kelly film, Yu Ri’s not worried about being broke, but about the weightier matter of the imminent Japanese invasion of China.

After helping a pretty girl, He Hua (Betty Loh Tih), out of trouble with an abusive mistress, Yu Ri, his sidekick friend Guan Shan Sheng (Lee Kwan) and He Hua all settle into a cosy lighthearted life; at no point to they sing “Good Morning,” but the local kids do entertain them with a patriotic song about crushing the Japanese.

I’ve seen An American in Paris and Singing in the Rain countless times, and it was disconcerting to see them remolded so drastically. Not that King Hu does a bad job, in fact he captures the MGM spirit quite well. But I never expected to see Gene Kelly’s joie de vive mixed with anti-Japanese jingoism.

Eventually the movie has to address the war, and the MGM homage is dropped in favor of a more standard WWII drama plot. Collaborationist conspire against Yu Ri and He Hua; the lecherous Japanese general rapes Chinese women and brave Chinese men form a guerilla army.

Eventually the film devolves into all out warfare, with Yu Ri mounting the barricades and wielding a rifle like a lifelong soldier. Rousing, no doubt. But the best aspects of the film and completely discarded. Betty Loh Tih disappears for the last third of the film and Peter Chen Ho, a gifted comic actor, looks quite out of place gutting a Japanese soldier with a sword.

Sons of Good Earth was King Hu’s solo directorial debut, and it’s most unlike his later films. But its mixture of the genial and the brutal can be seen in his wuxia films like Come Drink With Me and Dragon Inn. But he never made another musical.

Sons of Good Earth
Dir: King Hu
Released: May 6, 1965

Empress Wu

They typical Shaw Brothers approach to adapting a popular novel or opera for the screen was to assume that the audience already knew the story; this way, the film could skip to the good parts without worrying too much about back story.

When it came to historical dramas, the studio took much the same approach. When telling the story of China’s only female emperor, Shaw assumed that most of the audience would know the rough outline of Wu Zetian’s life. So they can skip or alter most of the historical nuances and jump right to the good stuff.

But really, who wants to hear about musty history when an actress as great as Li Li Hua is giving such a fantastic performance? Not me, that’s for sure. Empress Wu was made when common attitudes about China’s sole Empress were changing. Reviled for years for her violations or Confucian ethics and gender roles, Wu Zetian’s reputation was on the rise in the 60s as Chinese women began to expand beyond traditional roles.

Besides, when your audience is primarily female, as Shaw’s was in the early 60s, do you really want to make a film that vilifies China’s only female ruler?

Empress Wu walks the historical fence, alternately portraying Wu as feminist icon, cruel dictator and wanton hussy. And Li Li Hua moves effortlessly between these extremes, casually beheading a man in one scene and crying over a wayward child in the next.

Of course, to reenforce the story, the film plays fast and loose with historical accuracy, skipping over many of Empress Wu’s harsher actions, inflating the cruelty of her enemies and greatly simplifying the political machinations which allowed her to rule China. Shaw’s changes only soften Wu’s image, making her bitter aspects easier to swallow.

So don’t watch Empress Wu for a history lesson; Shaw Brothers never saw themselves as a didactic film studio. Instead watch it for the grand acting of Li Li Hua and the artistic pageantry of director Li Han-Hsiang.

Empress Wu
Dir: Li Han-Hsiang
Released: June 14, 1963

The Assassin

To cap their most prolific year to date (42 films in 1967), Shaw Brothers turned to the men most responsible for the studios swelling coffers, director Chang Cheh and actor Jimmy Wang Yu. 5 months earlier, their film The One-Armed Swordsman started Chang’s streak of million-dollar box-office smashes. In his follow-up, Chang laid bare the force driving the studio’s growth—the Japanese film industry.

Run Run Shaw admired, and mirrored, Japanese studios, molding much of Shaw Brothers to follow their example. It was in 1967 that this emulation really began to payoff. Shaw’s two imported Japanese directors, Inoue Umetsugu and Kô Nakihara, made their first films for Shaw Brothers in 1967, and the studio’s biggest hit of the year, The One-Armed Swordsman was a direct descendant of Japan’s most popular handicapped swordsman, Zatoichi.

In The Assassin, director Chang continued the Japanification of Shaw Brothers studio, taking the most Chinese story he could find (an ancient tale of a political assassin and his devoted sister) and making every effort to make it appear Japanese.

Over the film’s introduction, which explains the political turmoil of the “Warring States” period, Japanese music plays¹. And as hero Nie Zheng (Jimmy Wang Yu) moves from his quiet, modest home up through the houses of power, the sets continually mimic those seen in Japanese samurai films.

These Japanese sets provide the background for the very Chinese story of Nie Zheng, a hot-headed youth who wants, like all hot-headed youth, to make his mark in history. But when fate, in the form of ex-minister Yen Chung-Tzu (Tien Feng), comes calling, Nie honorably puts history on the back burner until he finishes providing for his mother and sister (Li Hsiang-chun), who later repays her brother’s filial piety.

Cheng later dismissed the Japanese stylistics of The Assassin as artistic posturing, and most current writing about The Assassin details the film’s allegories of Hong Kong’s 1967 riots and China’s growing Cultural Revolution². But from my modern perspective, the film’s allegories don’t look that different from all of Chang’s other films that feature frustrated youth who make their names through bonded friendships, bountiful slaughter and beautiful suicide. For me, it’s the film’s aesthetics that make it unique.

The Assassin
Dir: Chang Cheh
Released: December 22, 1967

¹I’m making some educated guesses about the music in The Assassin. Like some of the other Celestial DVD releases, most of the film’s original music and sound effects have been replaced with hideous, ill-conceived crap. These changes make the film nearly unwatchable. However, the Japanese music over the credits sounds original.

²I might be making up Chang’s dismissal of this film. I don’t currently have access to my copy of Chang Cheh’s autobiography. Once I can get my hands on it, I’ll confirm this statement.

Too Late For Love

One of the finer entries into the Shaw genre I call “moral tragedies,” Too Late For Love sets up an epic battle between the hidebound older generation, played by Ouyang Sha-Fei, in a rare leading role, and the more permissive, starry-eyed young lovers, Su Fen (Ivy Ling Po) and Kuo Liang (Kwan Shan). The result is a more finely balanced version of films like Auntie Lan and Rose, Be My Love that dominated the Taiwan film awards, winning 3 acting awards along with Best Drama.

Su and Kuo marry and, following tradition, Su lives with her new mother-in-law while her husband fights the occupying Japanese. Mom, in the best Jocastic tradition, berates Su Fen for failing to live up to almost every expectation. The dowry wasn’t big enough, the bride didn’t bow deeply enough, her sewing is poor, etc. Considering Su Fen’s love of the color white, symbolic of death in China, it’s not surprising that mom finds her a bit unsettling. When Su Fen is diagnosed with tuberculosis, mom only despises her more, seeing her as a fatal threat to her son and her family. Tragedy ensues, of course, but true love lives on.

It would be remarkably easy to treat the mother as an unabashed villain, a blinkered traditionalist who can’t give up her son. But the script, combined with a nuanced turn by Ouyang Sha-Fei, avoids this trap. Nearly all of Mom’s apparently ugly decisions can be justified if approached from her point of view. And as oppressed as Su Fen feels, she’s also blind to the ways she could make her life easier.

As I’ve said before, these moral tragedies must walk a fine line to appease both older and younger audiences; Too Late For Love walks that tight rope effortlessly, never dismissing mom as a relic and never championing the young lovers as the flawless wave of the future.

The film’s sure-footedness, marred only by its inability to more clearly define the role Su Fen’s step mother plays in this family drama, positions this film as one of the best films about the generational watershed occurring throughout the Chinese diaspora.

In 1967, the first generation of children born after the Communist victory in China was coming of age, a generation who must have had totally different feelings about traditional Chinese culture than their parents who had fled the civil war and whose homeland was starting to fall under Mao Zedong’s cultural revolution. Tales of generational conflict over social mores and family preservation, judging by their frequent appearance in theaters of the late 1960s, had a strong appeal.

Too Late For Love
Released: March 29, 1967
Dir: Lo Chen

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

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.

Last Woman Of Shang

Chang Cheh hovers on the horizon during Last Woman Of Shang’s opening battle, in which men are decapitated, impaled and otherwise slaughtered. He, and his blood-stained tales of male bonding are coming, there can be no doubt.

But for now, women, especially Linda Lin Dai, rule Shaw Brothers studio and in this semi-factual tale of early Chinese history, the last film Dai completed before she committed suicide, it is women who decide the course of history.

The corrupt Emperor Chou lusts only for beauty and battle, levying stiff taxes on his nobles and attacking the warlords that were plentiful in pre-unification China. When one family resists, he destroys them, leaving only their daughter.

Now, as any fan of revenge dramas knows, leaving a child alive is a recipe for disaster. But the emperor underestimates Dai, she is only a woman after all, and not only lets her live but marries her to boot. Dai, initially unwilling to marry, finally accepts after her maid suggests they work from the inside to topple the evil regime.

Dai has a lot of fun playing the unsuspected intruder, cozying up to the Emperor with love in her eyes that quickly turns to menacing disgust when he looks away. She sings, she dances, she loves and she plots, waiting until the moment arises to exact her revenge and reunite with her true love, the revolutionary Yin.

She may be having fun, and Shin Yeong-gyun, the Korean actor playing the manic-depressive emperor, has a riot, but the film that surrounds them is not that involving. There’s an endless string of evil councilors who wander in and out of the film and a lot of other padding that fills time but offers little. Not enough time is given to Dai’s conflicted nature, or the relationship between her and her maid, who often has to goad Dai into action.

It is, however, a well-designed film. Although the costumes are certainly far more luxurious than those worn in 200BC, the film does recreate little historical details like letters written on turtle shells—paper wasn’t yet invented—and location shooting allows for large-scale battles.

But design doesn’t trump plot. This is a film whose reputation, sadly, is built the tragedy of Dai’s suicide. If she had lived to make a dozen more films, Last Woman of Shang would likely have faded into dim memory. Instead it will always have the unfortunate honor of being “The Last.”

Last Woman of Shang
Released: August 26, 1964
Griffin Yueh Feng
HKmdb