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
