Shaw Brothers

A Cause To Kill

1970 was a tough year to be Ivy Ling Po. After years of serving as the face of haungmei opera, she found herself an actress without a genre. After The Three Smiles, the curtain fell on haungmei films at Shaw Brothers, taking with it one of the studio’s few remaining showcases for actresses.

In the 7 years since Ling Po had joined Shaw Brothers, the gender roles on the studio lot had flipped; instead of making female focused films for female audiences, Shaw now made male focused films for male audiences. Where Cheng Pei Pei once slashed across the screen in Come Drink With Me, she now asked for Lo Lieh’s help in The Flying Dagger.

With haungmei dead, and fewer female roles in Shaw movies, 1970 must have been a time of concern for Ling Po. But, as one of Shaw’s two most popular actresses the studio was bound to find a new role for her to play. Eventually she’d move into martial arts films, but for a while she starred in modern day dramas.

In A Cause to Kill, Ling Po builds on her portrayal of a suspicious wife that she began in Raw Passions. Only now, instead of being a victim, she gets to play the villain — a jealous wife who decides to kill her husband and restart the movie career that marriage took away.

The noir-ish result, a hard-bitten, chain smoking Ling Po, is certainly a shock for those used to seeing her playing gentle male scholars. But the rest of the movie doesn’t live up to Ivy’s transformation. As the cheating husband Chang Li De, Kwan Shan plays the same mild mannered man he’d been playing for 10+ years. And Chiao Chiao, as mystery novelist Su Su, is more Nancy Drew than Sam Spade.

Cause to Kill was the second Shaw film for director by Mu Shih Chieh (an alias for Japanese director Murayama Mitsuo). He shoots the film with a pop sensibility that made Inoue Umetsugu’s (Shaw’s most prominent Japanese director) movies so much fun. But the over-the-top spotlights and general lack of subtlety cut the legs out from under any suspense the film tries to muster.

There’s plenty of proof in Cause to Kill that Ling Po was no one trick pony. But she needed a better film in which to showcase her flexibility.

A Cause To Kill
Dir: Mu Shih Chieh (Chinese pseudonym for Murayama Mitsuo)
Released: January 15, 1970

Raw Passions

There’s very little about Raw Passions that isn’t confusing. From its flash-forward opening to its plot of endlessly cris-crossing blackmail schemes, the whole endeavor never makes much sense. But the real question is this — why, if the star is one of the biggest actresses in Hong Kong and Taiwan, would Shaw Brothers spend most of the film focusing on the boobs of second-rate actress Meng Li?

Well, ok, maybe the answer to that question is obvious to boob fans. But for fans of Ivy Ling Po, the popular actress that Passions largely ignores in favor of Meng’s mammaries, the answer is probably more elusive.

A purported thriller, Raw Passions doesn’t have enough plot to fill its 85 minute running time. Instead of adding more story, the filmmakers add endless musical and belly dancing routines — many of which feature Meng Li’s breasts and crotch.

For those of you who don’t think that an entire movie can be based on bosoms, there’s not much to recommend Raw Passions. Ling Po plays suspicious, jealous wife Lin Man Ying, whose husband, Lin Sau Ming (Kao Yuan), is blackmailed by vixen Sasa (Meng Li and her bust) for no good reason at all. Sasa is also blackmailing Lin’s boss, Tao Wai Kong (Wang Hsieh), for knocking her up.

When Sasa turns up dead, Sau Ming is the main susepct. He and his wife are hounded by even more blackmailers, all trying to get money out of whoever they can. When she’s not being blackmailed, Man Ying tries to prove her husband’s innocence while also harboring suspicions that he’s been unfaithful.

But, really, once Meng Li’s breasts are out of the film, the whole endeavor looses steam and the plot unreels with unsurprising twist after twist until the murderer is revealed. If only the script writer could have figured out a way for Sasa to be killed by her own cleavage.

Raw Passions
Dir: Lo Chen
Released: September 14, 1969

Diary Of A Lady Killer

Diary Of A Lady Killer, Japanese director Kô Nakahira’s fourth, and last, Shaw Brothers film began, as did nearly all of Kô’s Shaw films, as a remake of a Japanese film directed by none other than Kô Nakahira, The Hunter’s Diary [Ryojin Nikki] (1964).

But Hunter’s Diary came from a novel by Masako Togawa, which featured more than a little influence from Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho (1960), itself based on a novel. Goodness! That’s at least 4 generations of the same idea. While Shaw Brothers was certainly comfortable with remaking the familiar, Lady Killer is a little bit too familiar, featuring not particularly surprising plot twists, cross dressing and  a climbing body count.

In the end, this almost instantly forgettable film (no, really. I had to look up a plot description just to remind myself what happened) is notable only for a couple of stylish flourishes from Kô and the last film appearance of Fanny Fan (who, true to her stereotyped form, bares her butt).

The most interesting aspect of Lady Killer is that it points the way to Shaw Brothers’ increasing bawdiness in the 1970s. Their films of the 60s occasionally bared a buttock or the side of a breast, but always cut away before things got too dirty. With the arrival of the new decade and the sexual revolution, Shaw Brothers embraced nudity with both hands (so to speak) in films like Intimate Confessions Of A Chinese Courtesan.

1969 was the turning point for this shift from prim smuttiness to full-on obscenity; with its nudity-laden opening credits (which featured several nude women posing, inexplicably, with puppies and kittens) and frank sexuality, Diary Of A Lady Killer helped lead the way.

Why Shaw Brothers began featuring nudity in 1969 is a bit of a mystery. It happened about the same time that Hollywood began to release its share of sexual films, but Hollywood was protected by the newly-enacted ratings board. Shaw Brothers had no such system to shield its films from censorship (Hong Kong didn’t adopt their current ratings system until 1988). Perhaps the studio’s increased reliance on male audiences—thanks to the popularity of macho swordplay films—helped encourage the growth of the erotic film genre. Or, perhaps Shaws was only competing with the increasingly explicit films coming out of Europe and America.

Saying that the film’s surprising amount of skin is its most interesting feature is obviously damning it with faint praise. Still, for those like me who approach the output of Shaw studios as an evolutionary process, Diary Of A Lady Killer stands out as a curious milestone. The bashful Shaw era, when showing anything more than a bare bottom was unthinkably shocking, was at an end.

Diary Of A Lady Killer
Dir: Yang Shuxi (Chinese pseudonym for Kô Nakahira)
Released: May 10, 1969

The Singing Thief

Like Francis Ford Coppola directing a musical, or James Cameron directing a romance, directors often strike off in directions unfathomable, exploring genres that previously seemed antithetical.

Sometimes, as in the case of Titanic, the switch is a hit; or, as with One From The Heart, it isn’t. Regardless, audiences have come to expect their directors to work familiar themes and settings throughout their careers.

Of course, we only developed this idea after the collapse of the studio system, a shift in power that allowed directors—previously commoditized and controlled as much as, if not more than, actors—to have a say in what project they directed.

But in Hong Kong, especially at Shaw Brothers, the studio system continued to thrive. Actors and directors were held under contract and worked where they were assigned. Still, I can’t quite grasp the logic that led to Chang Cheh directing The Singing Thief, a modern-day fashion-drenched “action musical’ about Diamond Poon (Jimmy Lin Chung), an ex-con club singer pulled back into the world of crime.

Sexy girls, sly heroes, pop songs, mini-skirts, Nehru jackets to high heaven, garish clubs and hot cars. And...Chang Cheh? No one was more suited to this film than Shaw director Inoue Umetsugu. Indeed, Umetsugu directed The Singing Escort, also starring Jimmy Lin Chung and released 6 months after The Singing Thief.

But assuming that Shaw’s simply assigned their #1 director to a pop-fluff film doesn’t make any sense. It’s not like Cheh had much free time, he directed 5 films that were released the same year as Thief.

My guess is this: someone at Shaw Studios saw the Taiwanese pop singer as a possible star. Attractive (indeed, he’s almost the spitting image of a young Chow Yun Fat), fashionable and charming, Jimmy Lin Chung could have been an excellent replacement for Peter Chen Ho (then aging and ailing, he would die in 1970) in Shaw’s glamorous musicals. So the bosses decided to give the kid a shot and try to build a star.

Thus, 1969 was the year of Jimmy Lin Chung. In January, he appeared in Tropicana Interlude (aka, Tropical Interlude), a romance/melodrama. In September, The Singing Escort, a musical. And stuck in the middle is Chang’s The Singing Thief—part musical, part thriller, part bloody action. In three movies, Shaw tried sticking Lin Chung in all of their major genres, seeing what would stick. Nothing worked. Lin Chung was awful, grating and overly precious. He made no more movies with Shaw Brothers.

Of the three films, Chang got the hardest one to pull off successfully. Maybe he requested it; maybe he, the studio’s most reliable director, was assigned the job. Either way, Chang never tamed the beast and the result shifts genres willy-nilly, a wandering Franken-movie in search of a home.

For most of the film, the plot goes nowhere, waiting for the stars to try out a variety of sexy costumes or swan about while singing. Then Chang kicks everything in to high gear with an almost never-ending series of brutal fights featuring fists, shovels and guns. Then they sing again. Confusing.

Obviously not a good movie, The Singing Thief remains interesting for two reasons. First, the schadenfreude of watching a studio trying, and failing, to catch the next big thing. Second, just like One From The Heart or Titanic, the fun of a seeing a director trying to sail in unfamiliar seas.

The Singing Thief
Dir: Chang Cheh
Released: February 14, 1969