by Meyers, Ric
Despite their many successful wuxia productions, Bruce Lee’s success rocked the Shaw Studio status quo. Up until then, their kung fu films were of the swingy arm/limp leg variety — emblazoned by the convulsive success of director/writer Chang Cheh. Cheh was born in 1923 but only began his film career after World War II. He started as a scriptwriter but was soon writing, directing, and even scoring films he made in Taiwan. Even when China shut its cinemas to Taiwanese productions, Chang continued to write and direct, only this time for legitimate theater.
Finally, in 1957, an actress named Li Mei invited Chang to Hong Kong to write and direct a film for her. The resulting effort, Wild Fire, was something of a box office bomb, but it served to establish Chang in South China, where he explored all his skills by writing martial arts and romance novels, film reviews, and a newspaper column — all under different pseudonyms. He returned to the film industry in 1960, again as a scriptwriter, but with even more success. Two years later, he was invited to join the Shaw Brothers Studio, where he served as chief scriptwriter for five years, churning out more than twenty screenplays in that time. It was at the end of this initial tenure that he really hit pay dirt, by writing and directing Tiger Boy, starring (Jimmy) Wang Yu and Lo Lieh, in 1964.
Its success emboldened him to take on the entire basis of Hong Kong kung fu films. It had been twenty years since the end of World War II and all those hard-working husbands now had leisure time too. Besides, Chang liked looking at strong, handsome men, almost as much as he enjoyed watching American films. He especially appreciated the wild emotions of Rebel Without a Cause (1955) and the cathartic violence of Bonnie and Clyde (1967). He couldn’t help but wonder what those two would look like, blended together and projected through a kung fu prism.
The result was The One-Armed Swordsman (1967), a truly revolutionary production that changed the way Hong Kong audiences watched movies. This tale of a Jiang Hu swordsman who is forced to chop off his own arm through the hateful machinations of his teacher’s daughter (only to learn a new style, complete with a chopped-off sword), was a huge success. When the theater lights came up after the title character successfully wiped out the evil Long-Armed Devil’s headquarters, the audience was not the same — figuratively and literally.
After years of Confucian morality and bloodless, unconvincing, stagy fights led by women “disguised” as men, The One-Armed Swordsman showed them a tortured antihero who thought nothing of slaughtering his enemies. And after all the abuse he had taken, the viewers went along with the slaughter — in fact, cheered it. And the slaughter was bloody. None of this swinging a sword and having the opponent just fall down stuff. Here, limbs were chopped off, blood spurted, and victims fell writhing.
Suddenly producer Runme Shaw, director Chang Cheh, remarkable screenwriter I Kuang, and star Wang Yu had the first million-dollar-grossing movie in Hong Kong history. And with it, Chang Cheh had established a new tradition that has become known as “yang gang (staunch masculinity).” Chang Cheh’s yang gang led to the director being declared the “Godfather of the kung fu film” — creating a separate but equally successful genre to the wuxia flying swordspeople phantasmagoricals directed by such studio stalwarts as Ho Meng-hua (1975’s The Flying Guillotine), Li Han-hsiang (The Mad Monk, 1977), and the aforementioned Chang Ho-cheng, among many others.
Naturally a sequel was called for, and The Return of the One-Armed Swordsman appeared in 1969, but not before the director cemented his stardom with two other films during the intervening year — The Assassin and The Golden Swallow, both starring Wang Yu. Both movies displayed Chang Cheh’s priorities: manly men giving, and receiving, hyper-violence. The finale of both films find Wang Yu covered in blood — both his own and his enemies. But the actor wanted to boil his own blood.
To that end, he wrote and directed The Chinese Boxer, which was released in 1970, a full two years before Bruce Lee got his big Hong Kong break. It established the Japanese-hating, empty-hand martial art sub-genre Bruce revolutionized with Fist of Fury. By then, Yu was South China’s biggest action star, beating his Japanese enemies into the ground, as well as his Shaw Studio contract. Bolting for Golden Harvest almost the moment Return of the One-Armed Swordsman was done, he added insult to injury by making The One-Armed Boxer in 1971, followed by what many consider his best movie, Beach of the War Gods (1972), which had him taking on the invading Japanese army single-handedly.
Wang Yu (aka Wang Zheng-quan) was born in Jiangsu Province, but little else was revealed in his official biography. Reportedly an avid swimmer and a “skilled student of karate,” he showed little martial art skill in his films. Far from classically handsome, his screen persona was dark, small, and furtive. To compensate, he filled his films with slaughter and torment, always taking on dozens of attackers who he could wade through with a stiff chop here and a weak kick there. His action choreography looked more similar to American cliff-hanger serials than kung fu.
After grinding out a bunch of less and less distinguished flicks, the renamed Jimmy Wang Yu replaced Bruce in several internationally co-produced oddities following Lee’s death. A Man Called Tiger (1973), The Man from Hong Kong (1975), and A Queen’s Ransom (1976) had one thing in common: they were all laughably bad. The latter two also featured ex-007 George Lazenby, and all three also served to display just how good Bruce Lee had been. Wang’s on-screen charisma and kung fu were negligible.
Yu retreated to Taiwan and into ultra-cheap efforts designed to trade on his previous successes: One Armed Swordsman vs. Nine Killers (1976), Return of the Chinese Boxer (1977), and, ironically, his most beloved film in the West, The One-Armed Boxer vs. the Flying Guillotine (aka Master of the Flying Guillotine, 1975), which heavily influenced The Street Fighter video games.
Meanwhile, Chang Cheh plunged on with nary a look back. The director seemed relieved to be done with Wang Yu, replacing him with David Chiang with hardly a blink. It was Chiang, an ex-choreographer and stuntman, who stared in The New One-Armed Swordsman in 1971, as well as at least a half dozen more in between. Chiang was part of a show business dynasty. His father was a popular star while his mother was a well-known actress. Eventually, both his brothers, Paul Chu and Derek Yee, would also make their mark in movies.
David was born in Suzhou, Jiangsu Province, on May 11, 1947, and given the name Jiang Weinan. Although educated at Chu Hai College in Hong Kong, no one doubted that he’d follow in his parents’ footsteps, and, by the time he graduated he had already appeared in many films, most notably The Call of the Nightbirds (1965). Nevertheless, action called to him, and, once on his own, he presented himself as an agile, clever martial arts instructor on film sets. It wasn’t long before the personable, stylish young man, then known as John Chiang Dawei, came to the attention of Chang Cheh, who invited him to join the Shaw studio in 1966.
While Chiang may have been even thinner and more diminutive than Wang Yu, his face communicated a more clever, rebellious, and mischievous demeanor than Yu’s dark, sour expression. To off-set his stature, Cheh teamed him with a tall, majestic actor named Ti Lung. Born in China in 1946, then educated at the Eton School in Hong Kong, Ti originally went to work as a tailor. But finally, the man born with the name Tan Furong auditioned for a part in Chang Cheh’s Dead End (1968). One look at the tall, sensitive, intelligent, well spoken, handsome young man and Cheh fell in love. Ti Lung was created and nurtured by Chang, who showcased him in dozens of movies — his sincere, imposing yang suitably served to Chiang’s clever, brisk yin.
As the director remembered in his memoir, “Chiang was only [a] supporting actor in (his first Shaws film) Dead End, playing a garage repairman, but his ‘cool’ demeanor was second-to-none. So, in The Duel (his second Shaw film), Ti Lung was in the leading role. But in Vengeance (his third film), it was Chiang who played the lead….”
Once Cheh decided that David had the “lean and hungry” look he wanted to showcase, the smaller, more angular young man took precedence in the director’s films over the increasin
gly majestic Ti Lung. It wouldn’t be long before both men would chafe against Chang’s predilections, but five years in “Cantowood” is like an entire career anywhere else.
Once Chang Cheh hit his stride, he started producing films by the seasons — four a year (often with the assistance of such co-directors as Pao Hsueh-li and Wu Ma). Some flicks, like Vengeance (1970), were box-office and critical successes. Others, like The Anonymous Heroes (1971) were contrived silliness. But soon the pair of stars and their director were known as “The Golden Triangle.” It’s a mark of Chang’s talent and restlessness that he wasn’t content to leave it at that.
Spotting a martial arts champion named Chen Kuan-tai, he decided that his forceful presence was made for his movies, and started a string of productions featuring him. Unlike many kung fu film stars, Chen started as a martial artist, not an actor. He began his training at the age of eight, and became extremely proficient in what was known as the “Monkey-King Split and Deflecting Arm” style. So proficient, in fact, that he won the light heavyweight championship at the South-East Asian Chinese Martial Arts Tournament in 1969.
He made his way into movies via Huang Fei Hong Bravely Crushing the Fire Formation (the last Huang movie of the early 1970s), but achieved stardom both in and out of the Shaw Studio system — maintaining his vehement streak of independence throughout his long career. By starring in both Ng See-yuen’s independently produced milestone The Bloody Fists and Chang Cheh’s The Boxer from Shantung in 1972, his fame, and reputation, was ensured. But it wasn’t until Cheh featured all his new stars in 1973’s The Blood Brothers that superstardom beckoned to all four.
Based on a classic tale, The Assassination of General Ma, it told of a lover’s triangle between two men and a woman as well as three friends. It is set in the mid-nineteenth century during the Taiping Rebellion and is based on actual people and events. Chiang and Kuan-tai are highwaymen until Lung convinces them to join the Imperial Army. As Lung excels, his lust for absolute power begins to corrupt him absolutely. He has an affair with the Kuan-tai character’s wife, then has Kuan-tai killed. Chiang takes revenge for his dead friend on his ex-friend, and then willingly gives himself up and is executed.
Ti Lung’s conflicted power-monger was perfectly set off against Chiang’s love-sick idealist, with Kuan-tai’s desperate nobility trying to span the chasm. The actors were rarely better, but the result was that they no longer required Cheh’s tutelage, which was becoming stiff with repetition. The director compensated by filling his subsequent films with a multitude of actors — carefully studying them for future stardom. Meanwhile, he used them to continue making crowd-pleasing favorites.
The Water Margin (1972) and its long-awaited sequel All Men Are Brothers (1975) were two more Cheh milestones, based on the classic novel by Shi Nai-an called Outlaws of the Marshes, written in the fourteenth century. It concerned the 108 Mountain Brothers — a famous band of righteous mercenaries in the eleventh century (Sung dynasty) who fight bad guys where they find them. But Cheh truly found his niche in 1975 with Five Shaolin Masters (aka Five Masters of Death) — the fourth in Cheh’s Shaolin series, featuring his new discovery Fu Sheng. (Alexander) Fu Sheng was a remarkable actor, having, at different times, been referred to as the Bob Hope, or Jimmy Cagney, or even the James Dean of Hong Kong. He was equally adept as a lecherous comic, a pugnacious, wise-cracking hero, or as a brooding rebel (who, coincidentally, died way too young in a tragic car crash). Like Cagney, he was also a beloved collaborator who elicited nothing but praise from every director and actor he worked with.
As far as Asian critics were concerned, Five Shaolin Masters marked the start of Cheh’s decline. As far as American fans were concerned, it marked the start of his ascension. Indeed, he no longer seemed to be looking for relevant images. Now he seemed intent on producing one-hundred-percent superhero entertainment. He seemed to stop taking his movies’ histrionics seriously and got down to some serious mayhem.
The film was based on a famous story — the Shaolin Temple’s destruction and the survival and vengeance of its escaping students. It teamed Ti Lung and David Chiang with Fu Sheng, as well as two more Cheh hopefuls, a ferret-faced martial artist named Chi Kuan-chun and a cute-looking fellow named Meng Fei. Together they take on early eighteenth-century enemies led by actor (Johnny) Wang Lung-wei — a brutish, mustached presence who was to become one of the most versatile villains in the kung fu genre.
Here is a telling distinction of kung fu movies. Wang Lung-wei is not a versatile actor; he is a versatile fighter. It is his particular skill that he can make defeats by everyone from Fu Sheng to David Chiang look believable. When Wang Lung-wei is ultimately defeated, whether by a ninety-eight-pound weakling or a hulking muscle man, Johnny makes it work. He ranks as one of the Shaw Studio’s all time greatest villains. To beat him this time, Fu Sheng and Chi Kuan-chun learn the Shaolin animal styles, Meng Fei learns the “rolling” style (a form of wrestling that David Chiang did in Seven Blows of the Dragon), Ti Lung becomes master of the bo (aka staff or pole), and Chiang uses the steel whip (he hurls the sharpened point through two men at once during the climactic free-for-all).
Only Sheng, Chiang, and Lung survive at the fade-out, but this film’s success was to lead to many other Shaolin movies made by Chang Cheh over the next two years — all featuring Fu Sheng. In a very short time, this personable actor had won over audiences with his boyish, impish charm. Even when playing a serious character, he had a wit and prickly style unmatched by any other action star working. Cheh secured Sheng’s future by starring him in The Chinatown Kid (1977) and the Brave Archer series (1978-79).
The former film was probably one of the best modern kung fu movies made at that time. In it, Sheng plays an impoverished troublemaker who is forced to flee Hong Kong to an obviously backlot San Francisco. There he slaves in a Chinese restaurant, meeting up with a quiet student (Sun Chien). Because Fu is such a good martial artist, he runs afoul of two warring street gangs, led by muscular Lo Mang on one side and sophisticated Kuo Chui on the other. Sheng is seduced by wealth and power, but when Sun Chien’s character becomes addicted to the drugs supplied by the gang, Sheng attacks his new bosses, killing all, but dying himself.
The Chinatown Kid was more realistic than most modern chop-socky pictures, and Chang Cheh pulls off one of his cleverest metaphors in the form of a digital watch. It represents the brave new American world to Sheng’s naive character, and his actions all revolve around attaining and sustaining the watch. At the end, as he’s dying, he offers it to Chien — who takes it. The whole business is obvious, but extremely effective.
Sheng proved his mettle in period pieces directly afterward with The Brave Archer (aka Kung Fu Warlords) series, in which he played a Sung dynasty hero named Kuo Tsing, who did precious little archery. Hong Kong audiences lapped up these colorful, convoluted epics — full of duels between fighters of at least equal ability, in sumptuous period costumes, on exact, intricately detailed period sets. They were crazy, silly, and, as the series continued through two sequels and an abortive fourth feature, The Brave Archer and his Mate (1982), increasingly unfocused. But the Kid and the Archer were enough to cement Chang Cheh’s next career-changing brainstorm.
Using the “team” concept from Five Masters of Death, why not film a series of lively kung fu movies all starring the same actors in basically the same roles? Cheh seemed to think that his mistake was using ambitious actors for his first team (Chiang, Lung, Kuan-tai, Sheng, etc.). For his next, he’d recruit lesser stars to ensure greater longevity. Bit by bit, his new team took shape in the Fu Sheng Brave Archer and Shaolin series. Then, in 1978, they were introduced, fully formed, in The Five Venoms (aka Five Deadly Venoms) — a hunk of kinetic kung fu grand guignol.
In this film, set in the fifteenth century, a dying teacher taught five masked students the deadliest forms of “poison kung fu” known: snake, centipede, lizard, toad, and scorpion. None of the students knew each other at the time, but now several had teame
d to become criminals. The sifu tells his last student, who knows a bit of all five arts, to find the students and stop their crimes. From this simple premise, Cheh wrought martial arts extremism. The villains practice esoteric, nasty killing styles. They defeat each other with a solid gold, knife-lined casket, pins in noses, knives in ears, as well as their own unbelievable skills. In the finale, when the venoms fight, the heroes literally walk up the walls and stand there. It is all done with bold, unapologetic style.
Thus the new team was born. Kuo Chui (aka Kwok Chun-fung aka Kwok Choi aka Philip Kwok Choi aka Philip Kwok) was always the main hero and always played a street-smart supreme fighter who hid behind the guise of a beggar, transient, or criminal. Born and raised in Taiwan, his father was a comic actor, but Kuo was only interested in action. Soon he was training in Taiwanese Opera as an acrobat and stuntman, where Chang Cheh discovered him in 1973. Because he could do things almost no other Taiwan stuntman could, and was about the same height as Fu Sheng, Chang Cheh brought him to Hong Kong, and made him the leader of what he called “The Third Class” (following the likes of first class man Jimmy Wang Yu, and second class man David Chiang).
Chiang Sheng was known by American fans as “cutie-pie,” and indeed he was. Just as small and thin as David Chiang, he almost always played the acrobatic partner to Kuo. Lu Feng almost always played the insidious traitor who lures heroes into his traps. Like Kuo, this duo was also discovered by Chang in Taiwan and brought over to star in Hong Kong. But unlike Kuo, they did not have the luck to make a go of it outside Shaw Studio walls.
