by Meyers, Ric
While Lu Feng, who was always saddled with the villain roles, was an intensely private man, Chiang Sheng took things more personally. When his work as Chang’s co-choreographer and assistant director didn’t lead to bigger things, “cutie-pie” reportedly turned bitter and self-abusive. He died in 1991, at the age of forty, of a heart attack. Kuo Chui has been widely quoted saying that his friend was alone, depressed, drinking heavily, and actually died of a broken heart.
Lo Mang almost always played the thick-muscled (and thick-headed) Hong Kong Chinese of the group. Like Kuo, he was able to create a career for himself away from Chang Cheh, but unlike Kuo, he stayed within Shaw Studio walls when the Taiwanese acrobats headed home near the end of the Shaw Studios film unit era. Born in China, Lo started kung fu training in his early teens, and still takes pride in working out every day. Finally there was Sun Chien, a leg fighter supposedly held back in his career because he was thought to be Korean. In fact, it’s reported that he was born in Taiwan (with the name Sun Jian-yuan), where he was recruited by Chang.
Cheh also used a variety of regular actors in secondary roles (including Wei Pai, Yu Tai-ping, and Wang Li, among others) but these five were the main unit for more than a dozen thrillers that were unique in their extremism. The tone was set by their second movie, Crippled Avengers (aka Mortal Combat or Return of the Five Deadly Venoms, 1978). The venerable Chen Kuan-tai played a Ming Dynasty kung fu master driven mad by his wife’s death and son’s disfigurement (his enemies chopped off the boy’s forearms and the mother’s legs). Years later, Kuan-tai has taught his son (Lu Feng) the Tiger style and replaced his limbs with metal arms that elongate and shoot darts.
From then on, the wealthy man cripples whomever he doesn’t like. He blinds a trinket salesman (Kuo), deafens a blacksmith (Lo), chops the feet off a passerby (Sun), and renders simple a hero who wants to avenge them (Chiang), by tightening a steel band around his skull. The four unite, find a sifu, and learn new kung fu techniques to off-set their handicaps — the footless man even getting remarkably effective metal feet. They crash the villain’s birthday party and make sure he, and his son, don’t have one to grow on.
There is hardly a believable second in this adventure, but as a kung fu movie it works, as do such following adventures as The Daredevils (1978) — an early Republic of China conflict in which street performers avenge themselves on a corrupt general (about the only Venoms film in which the Kuo Chui character dies) — and The Kid With the Golden Arm (1979). Here Kuo Chui plays a drunken-style master who aids a hero-laden escort service trying to get a wagon of gold to a famine area during the Ming dynasty.
The ax-, sword-, spear-, and wine-jug-carrying heroes face masters of the Iron Palm (which leaves a black imprint that slowly kills the victim), the Iron Fan (a gigantic, sword-edged, steel war fan), the Iron Head (really, a man with a steel forehead shield), and the infamous Kid with the Golden Arm himself — a master of an art that makes him invulnerable to blades.
To see any of the Chang Cheh movies of this period is not to believe them, but to enjoy them for their kung fu craziness and exuberant bloodiness. When asked why he was depending upon such supposed “ugly” actors, Chang reportedly replied, “They become beautiful when they move.”
And move they did. “Mr. Chang himself cannot handle morning shifts,” Kuo Chui explained. “Usually we would do an eleven o’clock shift, or a one o’clock shift. He would arrive, at the earliest, say three or four o’clock, because he had to come back at night to write scripts, and do other things. We were actors, assistant directors, martial art directors, wire-workers, and prop-men. I mean, we actually helped with props. We were rather busy all around. As long as it can help, we would do it. In terms of shooting times, we must wrap at eleven o’clock at night. We were always punctual. So it’s a steady shift —normally nine hours.”
In addition to all his other duties, the director even started searching out new talent while teaming his Venoms with Fu Sheng and Ti Lung for Ten Tigers of Kwantung (1979), a Cheh mess which juggled two stories through flashbacks, involved Huang Fei-hong’s father and cousins, and had a man’s head kicked off at the climax. Despite its entertainment value, the audience was becoming inured to the director’s cavalier approach.
That out of his system, Cheh took his Venoms through The Spearmen of Death (1980) and Masked Avengers (1981). They fought spear-topped flags in the former and particularly nasty tridents in the latter, both about eight feet long. It gave the stars the chance to strut their stuff, but also the director to overuse a particularly harsh sound effect whenever blade entered flesh.
The final complete Venoms movie was House of Traps (1981), which pushed all Chang Cheh’s concepts to the razor’s edge ... literally. In the Sung dynasty, an evil man hides incriminating evidence in a death-filled pagoda and hires kung fu criminals to guard it. Kuo Chui is the “Black Fox,” a tarnished knight-errant who signs on as a guard, but actually intends to secure the evidence for honorable Judge Pao (an actual Sung Dynasty lawman who also figured in the original Five Venoms film). But first heroes and villains alike must be sliced, diced, and slaughtered by the place’s spike-growing doors, spear-hurling walls, arrow-shooting panels, ax-swinging beams, and most impressively, razor-lined stairs.
By then the Venoms themselves had pretty much had it. There had been some jockeying for space, leading to some films featuring just a few of them, which, in turn, led to a sad realization. Their careers compromised by Chang’s increasingly repetitive, diffident approach, Kuo, Chiang, and Lu returned to Taiwan in 1982 to make the politically-incorrectly-titled Hero Defeating Japs (aka Ninja in the Deadly Trap), leaving Lo Mang behind to help Cheh make his last great movie (while Sun Chien reluctantly jumped ship to work for other Shaw Studio directors).
Five Element Ninja (aka Super Ninjas, 1982) starred new discovery (Fourth Class man?) Chien Tien-chi as a virtuous member of a white-clad kung fu school victimized by a jealous, rival kung fu school who hire ninja to make sure the good guys don’t win their up-coming challenge. After poisoning the heroes’ sifu, who must isolate himself for a month, the ninja issue a new challenge. Expecting the usual, each noble warrior arrives at the predetermined location, only to be massacred by sun ninja using blinding, booby-trapped shields, wood ninja disguised in a forest, water ninja who use liquid as hiding places, fire ninja who burn their ill-equipped adversaries, and earth ninja who disembowel from below (leading to a show-stopping moment when a wounded kung fu student steps on his own hanging intestine). Lo Mang plays an honorable student left to guard his sifu, but foolishly allows in a supposedly abused woman, who’s actually a kunoichi (female ninja) spy.
This is an outlandishly entertaining, strongly structured, thriller. The second section of the film portrays the ninja attack on the heroes’ headquarters, the immolation of the sifu, and the crucifixion of Lo Mang on his teacher’s barricaded door. The third section shows Tien-chi coincidentally finding another sifu in the outlands who just happens to be an expert on the shinobi no mono (shadow warriors). There he turns the surviving hero and three other students into ninjabusters(!).
The fourth and final section is ludicrously enjoyable as the ninja challenge is recreated — only this time by kung fu fighters who know what they’re up against and are prepared to fight sun, wood, water, fire, and earth with sun, wood, water, fire, and earth … or, in this case, with a specially made version of what looks like a six-foot long Swiss Army knife. The finale explodes as Tien-chi sacrifices his life in order to literally tear the ninja master in half. When asked why, he understates, “I don’t know … I guess I was obsessed.”
It was as if the director was answering his growing group of critics and dissatisfied customers. Tired, burned out, and at the mercy of his diversions, Chang Cheh continued working, but made increasingly disjointed, dismissible and even sad films like the aptly-titled The Weird Man (1983) the accurately-titled Attack of the Joyful Goddess (1983), and the unfortunately-titled Dancing Warrior (1984).
Even his anniversary film, Shanghai 13 (1984) — designed to reunite many of the stars he made famous over his career (including Jimmy Wang Yu, Ti Lung, David Chiang, Chi Kuan-chun, Chiang Sheng, Lu Feng, and Cheng Tien-chi, among others) — was embroiled in a rights dispute that kept the inexpensive, but fun and fight-filled, film from ever being shown in Hong Kong or legally released on DVD.
Happily Chang Cheh lived long enough to see his great films rediscovered and rechampioned — taking his rightful place as the “Godfather of the kung fu film.” He wrote his memoir shortly before his death in 2002 at the age of eighty, concluding, in part, “‘It’s easier to advance than to retreat’ is the way of self preservation and ease of mind … it takes a talent to spot a talent … (and) it also takes a talent to judge a talent.” His talent was undeniable.
The most important talent he spotted went on to become the master of kung fu movies. Liu Chia-liang (aka Lau Kar-leung) was born in 1936 and grew up in Guangzhou until his family moved to Hong Kong when he was twelve. His father was Liu Zhan, a well-known hung gar teacher who ran the Hua Chiang Martial Arts Society schools. Liang’s dad was the favorite student of the esteemed Lam Sai-wing (better known by kung fu film fans as “Butcher Wing”), who, in turn, had been the favorite student of none other than the real Huang Fei-hong himself.
So, was it any wonder that Liang excelled in this martial arts family and that he got his start in motion pictures in Kwan Tak-hing’s Huang Fei-hong series? Like Brandon Lee, Liang was first reluctant to toil in his father’s shadow, but he was so bullied at school that his father convinced him to start learning the family style at the age of seven. Not surprisingly, Liang took to it like a duck to water — especially when his father always connected martial arts to “martial virtue.”
In a short time, Liang’s learning became insatiable. His main style was Hung Style Boxing (hung gar, Hung Family Fist), but he also soaked up eagle’s claw, wing chun, choy li fut, baqua, taichi, qigong, and others — to the point that, if he was shown a style, he could immediately replicate it. Thanks to his father, his father’s teacher, and his father’s teacher’s teacher, Liu Chia-liang intrinsically understood that kung fu was a combination of physical logic and psychological understanding. And then experience taught him that serenity powered strength — both inner and outer strength.
The same was true of filmmaking. At that time, there weren’t enough skilled stuntmen to do anything but real martial arts in the Huang Fei-hong films, especially since Kwan Tak-hing came from a background of Cantonese opera. Although he resembled the real Fei-hong, Hing was not very familiar with Hung Style kung fu, so Liang, his father, and Shih Kien (who played the predominant villain in the series) slowly taught him on set. Naturally, Liang was soon featured as a character on screen — usually that of an arrogant punk. But already he knew he wanted more.
“I wanted to be a director as soon as I entered the industry,” he was quoted as saying. And the best way for an ambitious kung fu man to do that was through action choreography. He made his first official foray into the job on the independently produced South Dragon North Phoenix (1963), where he met Tang Chia — the man who was to become known as the “action director’s action director.” Born in 1938, Tang had been working in show business since he was fifteen. His martial arts training in Peking Opera performances led to kung fu work in early Chinese cinema.
Liang and Tang were impressed by each other’s skills, so they agreed to team up. It was perfect timing. There were so few knowledgeable choreographers that their talents were regularly in demand. Within two years, they joined the Shaw Brothers Studio. They started collaborating with a few directors, but soon zeroed in on Chang Cheh. After all, the three seemed made for each other. Cheh admired and appreciated good kung fu, but knew little about it. But he wanted someone who could create on-screen kung fu that matched the quality of his concepts and dramatics.
Liang was so good at it that he was soon promoted to the then-new rank of “action director.” Whenever there was a fight scene, Chang would step aside and Liang would take over, placing the camera, instructing the cast and crew, and even saying the magic words, “camera, rolling, cut.” Liang and Tang worked with Chang on virtually every film up until 1975, contributing substantially to Cheh’s success. By then Liang had also been instrumental in establishing a Shaw Studio kung fu training program and developing the skills of every action star the studio promoted. So it was probably inevitable that Liang’s desire to have total control of his work would lead to friction. It finally came to a head after Disciples of Shaolin (1975).
For years, apparently, Cheh did what he could to keep Liang from being given his own film. For, as Liang quoted: “‘colleagues are like enemy nations.’” In other words, if someone knows you are that good, why would they want you competing with them for the same audience? Finally, on the set of Marco Polo (1975), Chang Cheh and Liu Chia-liang went their separate ways. Tang Chia eschewed the director’s chair, satisfied to remain choreographing films for other Shaw Studio directors.
Tang’s work was prized for its inventive seamlessness and versatility. Chia seemed as comfortable working with two actors as he was with two dozen, and was equally adept at empty-hand fighting as he was with virtually any legendary wushu weapon. He was also known as an exceptional collaborator, willing to work closely with the director rather than insist that his fight scenes be filmed traditionally. The results were movies that pushed the envelope of classical wuxia.
Liang, meanwhile, was sick of studio politics. In fact, he was even threatening to tear up his Shaw contract and go to Los Angeles to open martial arts studios with Tan Tao-liang (aka Delon Tam, the star of such enjoyable independent films as 1977’s Flash Legs, and 1980’s The Leg Fighters). But famed Shaw Studio producer Mona Fong finally gave this essentially untried, unknown talent his own movie. There was method to Mona’s seeming madness. Bruce Lee had shaken up cinema, the city, and the box office with his realistic, convincing, and believable kung fu. Of all the people working in the industry, the one person who might match him, kick for kick, technique for technique, was Liu Chia-liang. Ironically, it turned out that Liang had known Bruce very well when they were both kids.
“Bruce Lee was passionate about kung fu,” Liang said in an interview. “It was his life. He introduced it to the whole world. But he was missing something. That was the ‘wu de’ (martial arts philosophy) and the ‘xiu yang’ (self-control). He hit to hurt, for the pleasure of the strikes. He was too much a Westerner. The traditional Chinese courtesy was alien to him. When you watch his movies, the violence and the power of his blows can’t be missed. For us, the principle is ‘dian dao ji zhi’ (to use chi to power the strike, using ‘soft’ to support and complete the ‘hard’).
“Someone is really strong in kung fu only if he’s able to do that. Bruce Lee was limited in his knowledge. Likewise, his ‘zhaoshu’ (gestures) were also limited. But there were elements derived from aikido, tae kwon do, karate, Western boxing — all that, with a little Chinese kung fu. And Bruce was very smart. He was a superb actor. He applied himself diligently, and when he practiced kung fu, he gave it his all.”
Liang admired Bruce, but did not want to epitomize him. So, instead of a straight-out kung fu thriller, he started his directing career with a then-unheard-of “kung fu satire” called Fighting God in Hong Kong and The Spiritual Boxer (1975) in the United States. He filmed it in a month with a cast of unknowns (save for cameos in the prologue by friends Ti Lung and Chen Kuan-tai). A kung fu comedy? The studio thought he was insane. But it made over a million dollars — an almost unheard-of amount at that time, especially by a first time filmmaker. Master Liang had cemented the kung fu comedy genre.
Given that encouragement, Liang finally felt it was time to show his peers what he could really do. It was time to put all his kung fu on screen and balance it with his love of martial virtue. It paid off in his second film, Challenge of the Masters (1976), which established his reputation for making a trad
itional concept seem brand new. In this case, it was the Huang Fei-hong movies. Liang had seen them all, been in a bunch of them, and figured it was about time that someone made movies about the character’s youth — the all-important genesis of the ultimate Confucian hero.
The film started on a striking note — one that would be repeated throughout the director’s career. The credits played over a stark soundstage. There was no attempt to make the environment realistic. It was a huge white expanse with two towers of Chinese calligraphy around which two fighters practiced their forms and stances. The fighters were Chen Kuan-tai, portraying Huang’s teacher Lu Ah-tsai, and Liu Chia-hui (aka Lau Kar-fai aka Gordon Liu), the adopted brother of the director, playing Huang Fei-hong.
For years, many thought that Hui was Liang’s real brother, but it was not so. “I don’t belong to the Liu family,” Gordon told me, “but when I was nine years old I started to practice at his martial art school. His mother liked me very much and treated me like her son. Then when I was about twenty years old I joined their working family. That’s when I changed my name. My real name is Sin Kam-hei. At first I had no interest in shooting any movies. I started as a messenger, at night I studied accountancy, and then I worked as an accountant for two years.”
But that all changed when Liang gave him the leading role in Challenge of the Masters. The whole film was a family affair — both blood and adopted — with Hui as the star, the director playing the villain, and his real brother, Liu Chia-yung (Lau Kar-wing), playing the policeman who dies trying to capture the killer. But, more important than merely the plot, Liang used it as a vehicle to introduce a strong current of martial virtue into his movies, and set out to make a film that was actually about the relationship of a kung fu student to his or her sifu.
