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glaurungIn my ongoing quest for movies in which heroines kick ass, I checked out several older Hong Kong martial arts films that predated the "Girls with Guns" genre movies I investigated extensively a couple years ago. It's not possible to go too far back in time with HK movies, as the film studios there tended not to take care of their back catalog. Some films from the pre-Bruce Lee era no longer exist, and most have never been published in any video format. So these are mostly from the late 60's and 70's.
The setting for all of these ranges from ancient China to the early 20th century. Common to all of them, though, is a fantasy element, with the best martial artists possessing magical powers, so they all belong more or less to the Wuxia genre. While most of these are deservedly regarded as classics, only one really worked for me.
Glossary term: "Goat Boy syndrome" is when a film or TV show that is ostensibly about an action heroine turns out instead to be a show about the heroine's male sidekick. Often, the male sidekick seems to perpetually have a one week old stubble beard, hence "goat boy." The examples that inspired Morgan and I to name the syndrome were shows like "Highlander: The Raven," "Dark Angel," and "Sheena."
Come Drink With Me (1966)
A gang of bandits have captured the governor's son and demand the release of their leader or else. The governor's daughter, known as Golden Swallow, who spends the first half of the movie being mistaken for a boy, goes after the bandits. With the help of a minstrel beggar, she kicks their asses most thouroughly.
This is a swordplay movie instead of a kung fu movie, but what the swordfights remind me of most are the gunfights in Sergio Leone's spagetti westerns. There's a lot of long shots of combatants slowly circling each other warily while glaring, and then extremely brief instants of slashing and stabbing that end with one or several bad guys collapsing, dead or wounded, and Golden Swallow moving on to the next set of opponents. Definitely not your typical swashbuckling Hollywood swordfight choreography.
As usual for movies in the genre, martial artists are depicted as having magical powers - they can half run/half fly up a vertical wall, leap from rooftop to rooftop, catch dozens of tossed coins in mid air, and throw a handful of coins so hard they embed themselves in the wall like tiny chakrams. But the really heavy magical abilities are the domain not of those skilled with the sword, but those who have studied Kung Fu. At one point the movie veers away from "bandits vs Golden Swallow" into a side plot about two buhddist monks, one good, one bad, who are able to break swords like dry twigs, project hurricanes of superheated air from their outstretched palms, break boulders in half with a single fingertip, and are impervious to being stabbed by anyone not on their level.
Another noteworthy bit is how many fights end in this film with one side being only wounded, rather than dead. Hollywood tends to portray major characters as insensible to pain and well-nigh unkillable - they take horrific beatings and keep on swinging, while minions die instantly. Here, in contrast, at least half the time, losers retreat, hors de combat - and this applies both to major characters and minions.
The way the film veers off into a conflict between two male monks towards the end is a little unfortunate, but it's very definitely a side plot - Golden Swallow remains a heroine with agency in her own storyline, and as a pleasing bonus, in the climactic battle, she gets helped by a platoon of other swordswomen.
The movie exists on hi-def as well as DVD, and (at least the edition I watched) has subtitles prepared by someone fluent in English.
Golden Swallow (1967)
Despite being named after the protagonist of the previous film, this is a film about boys, and Golden Swallow plays the role of sidekick and love interest. While it's a watchable movie with literate subtitles, it's best avoided if you're looking for a movie about an action heroine.
In brief, Golden Swallow is injured by a poisoned needle dart in the first minute of the film. She is nursed back to health by the hero. Meanwhile, the sociopath antihero goes around the countryside killing bad people and sticking a golden swallow dart in the ground next to each corpse, causing all the local warlords and gangs to think that they need to find and kill Golden Swallow for vengeance and/or self-preservation. He does this because he is infatuated with GS and, being a sociopath, has no idea how to go about finding her in a less violent and counterproductive manner. Matters come to a head when the various gangs finally figure out who has actually been killing them off. Golden Swallow does get to kick a bit of butt, but she never gets to be the main character.
Note that this film was released in some markets under the highly misleading title "Girl With the Thunderbolt Kick" - there's no kicking or kung fu in this movie, just tons and tons of people getting stabbed. Also of note, while the previous movie was semi-realistic, with more people getting wounded than killed, this one seems to think that even a shallow slash with a sword is enough to kill you dead.
The Angry River (1971)
Someone is poisoning the followers of the local lord. Now the lord himself has been laid low by the same poison darts. The castle's doctor says only one thing can save him: a black herb from Soul Valley, beyond the Angry River and the Merciless Pass.
A series of henchmen head off to get the herb, but each one comes back dead in the saddle only moments after leaving (time and distance are not this movie's strong points). Finally the lord's daughter goes. She sucessfully fights through the bandits who were killing everyone else, gets to the deadly river, crosses it, and undergoes a series of trials set her by the guardian of the herb. She prevails and wins a tube of the precious herb from the guardian. The price, however, is that she must surrender her martial skills and not seek to restore them until after she returns home.
This herb is not only a cure all for poison, it also can restore or enhance martial abilities. So lots of nasty people, on learning that this woman has the precious herb, start trying to mug her every step of the way home (which is dozens of times longer and more difficult than the trip out, it seems). At this point, the movie becomes much less intersting, because the daughter has to either hide from muggers and rapists, or else rely on a kind goat boy to rescue her from them. Things pick up a bit at the end, after she restores her powers and goes after the poisoners, but the bulk of the movie is basically all about taking away the heroine's independence and agency.
A Touch of Zen (1971)
The first hour of this film follows Gu Sheng-zhai, a nosy small town calligrapher and artist who reads about military strategy in his spare time. He and his mother live rent-free in an abandoned building next to a deserted temple. Some new people come to town, including Yang Hui-zhen, a young woman who settles in the abandoned temple. Gu spends a ton of time snooping and sneaking around in the dark, trying to learn more about his new neighbour. Eventually he and Yang sleep together. Then some imperial envoys arrive and the plot (involving an attempt to cover up corruption at court by killing everyone related to the whistleblower, including Yang) is finally revealed in a series of flashbacks. Yang and her two male friends are exceptional warriors, as are the assasins sent to kill them. Gu insists on helping by providing strategic planning. The resulting fight scene in the grounds of the abandoned temple is much copied and homaged.
Once again, we learn that while any general can be good with a sword, the true masters of martial arts, the ones with truly magical abilities, are Bhuddist monks.
While a classic of Chinese cinema and of the Wuxia genre, this isn't a good example of kick ass heroine movies. While clean shaven and less of an annoying prick than most Goat Boys, Gu still displaces Yang from what ought to be her story.
The Shadow Whip (1971)
The heroine, Yang Kai-yun, is forced to break out her whip in order to deal with some ruffians on a visit to town to buy supplies for her uncle's inn. Several people see her lethal prowess with the whip and instantly suspect that she was taught by The Shadow Whip (because masters of the whip are so rare). Since the Shadow Whip is wanted for banditry and murder associated with the theft of a jewel shipment fifteen years prior, there are lots of people who suddenly want to talk to her, some of them nice, others very much not nice. A lot of fight scenes and a lot of running around take up the first hour of the movie. It's not until the last fifteen minutes (of an hour and fifteen minute film) that her uncle, who taught her to fight with a whip, sits down and explains that he was framed for banditry and murder all those years ago, and that's why all these thugs are popping out of the woodwork and trying to kill them both.
Sadly, Yang Kai-yun plays second fiddle throughout to her uncle and to Wang Jianxin, Yet Another Swordsman who wants to find and kill the Shadow Whip, but he's handsome and polite instead of thuggish and murderous about it, which is at least something.
A couple things: first, this film is set in the dead of winter - all the location shots were done in the winter with lots of real snow on the ground, which definitely makes it stand out compared to your typical "it's always summer in movie land" HK fare. Second, this film is basically a Chinese spagetthi western - everything, from the music to the camera work to the way everyone rides horses everywhere, is a very clear, very affectionate love letter to Italian made Westerns. Third, this is another film where the true masters of martial arts have superpowers - they leave no footprints in the snow and can leap over rooftops with a single bound.
It's a good movie and the heroine gets to pwn a lot of zero level minions in the many sprawling fight scenes. But the boys own the narrative and overall it wasn't the kind of thing I was looking to find.
Lady Whirlwind (1972)
The presence of Japanese gangsters suggests that this film is set in the early 20th century, but take out that bit of specificity about the villains and everything else could be from a story set a thousand years ago. Just pretend it's an alternative universe 20th century in which firearms and 20th century technology do not exist, and people with advanced kung fu training have magical powers.
A young woman enters a casino. She wins repeatedly at a dice game, despite the croupier's switching to loaded dice. She taps the top of the dice container after each shake before the dice are revealed, and the implication is that she has the magical power to cause the dice to be in her favour every time. When she tries to claim her huge pile of winnings and leave, members of the gang that run the casino try to stop her, and she kicks all of their asses most thoroughly. She tells the cowering gang lieutenant to tell his boss, "Lady Diao," that she is looking for Ling Shih Hao.
Lady Diao and her Japanese lover send more gang members to find this annoying woman and bring her back to them. More fights happen, and in between, we learn that Ling Shih Hao was beaten and left for dead by the gangsters three years ago, and that the woman, Tien Li Chun, blames him for making her sister pregnant and then dumping her, leading to the sister committing suicide.
Another young woman, Hsuang Hsuan, rescued Ling when he was left for dead, and he has been hiding out at her cabin in the woods for the past three years, during which time they have become lovers. Learning that Tien is looking for him pricks his conscience, and he decides that now is the time to seek out the gang leader who left him for dead and kill him, not for revenge but to liberate the town from the gang. Tien finds him first, though, but agrees, reluctantly, to give him time to kill the gang leader before she takes her revenge for the death of her sister and kills him in turn.
The next hour of movie simply recycle this sequence of events a few more times - Ling attacks the gang, gets his ass kicked, and has to be rescued by Tien, who says "No need to thank me, I just couldn't let someone else kill you." Ling begs for time to recover from his injuries so he can try again to kill the gang leader before she executes him, she reluctantly agrees, and so on.
The fight scenes with Tien are magnificent, but she is a complication in Ling's story rather than the central character.
One thing I noticed in this film is that when a person is beaten to death with kung fu, they almost invariably struggle to sit up again, then suddenly go limp, and this is what indicates that they are in fact dead rather than just wounded.
The setting for all of these ranges from ancient China to the early 20th century. Common to all of them, though, is a fantasy element, with the best martial artists possessing magical powers, so they all belong more or less to the Wuxia genre. While most of these are deservedly regarded as classics, only one really worked for me.
Glossary term: "Goat Boy syndrome" is when a film or TV show that is ostensibly about an action heroine turns out instead to be a show about the heroine's male sidekick. Often, the male sidekick seems to perpetually have a one week old stubble beard, hence "goat boy." The examples that inspired Morgan and I to name the syndrome were shows like "Highlander: The Raven," "Dark Angel," and "Sheena."
Come Drink With Me (1966)
A gang of bandits have captured the governor's son and demand the release of their leader or else. The governor's daughter, known as Golden Swallow, who spends the first half of the movie being mistaken for a boy, goes after the bandits. With the help of a minstrel beggar, she kicks their asses most thouroughly.
This is a swordplay movie instead of a kung fu movie, but what the swordfights remind me of most are the gunfights in Sergio Leone's spagetti westerns. There's a lot of long shots of combatants slowly circling each other warily while glaring, and then extremely brief instants of slashing and stabbing that end with one or several bad guys collapsing, dead or wounded, and Golden Swallow moving on to the next set of opponents. Definitely not your typical swashbuckling Hollywood swordfight choreography.
As usual for movies in the genre, martial artists are depicted as having magical powers - they can half run/half fly up a vertical wall, leap from rooftop to rooftop, catch dozens of tossed coins in mid air, and throw a handful of coins so hard they embed themselves in the wall like tiny chakrams. But the really heavy magical abilities are the domain not of those skilled with the sword, but those who have studied Kung Fu. At one point the movie veers away from "bandits vs Golden Swallow" into a side plot about two buhddist monks, one good, one bad, who are able to break swords like dry twigs, project hurricanes of superheated air from their outstretched palms, break boulders in half with a single fingertip, and are impervious to being stabbed by anyone not on their level.
Another noteworthy bit is how many fights end in this film with one side being only wounded, rather than dead. Hollywood tends to portray major characters as insensible to pain and well-nigh unkillable - they take horrific beatings and keep on swinging, while minions die instantly. Here, in contrast, at least half the time, losers retreat, hors de combat - and this applies both to major characters and minions.
The way the film veers off into a conflict between two male monks towards the end is a little unfortunate, but it's very definitely a side plot - Golden Swallow remains a heroine with agency in her own storyline, and as a pleasing bonus, in the climactic battle, she gets helped by a platoon of other swordswomen.
The movie exists on hi-def as well as DVD, and (at least the edition I watched) has subtitles prepared by someone fluent in English.
Golden Swallow (1967)
Despite being named after the protagonist of the previous film, this is a film about boys, and Golden Swallow plays the role of sidekick and love interest. While it's a watchable movie with literate subtitles, it's best avoided if you're looking for a movie about an action heroine.
In brief, Golden Swallow is injured by a poisoned needle dart in the first minute of the film. She is nursed back to health by the hero. Meanwhile, the sociopath antihero goes around the countryside killing bad people and sticking a golden swallow dart in the ground next to each corpse, causing all the local warlords and gangs to think that they need to find and kill Golden Swallow for vengeance and/or self-preservation. He does this because he is infatuated with GS and, being a sociopath, has no idea how to go about finding her in a less violent and counterproductive manner. Matters come to a head when the various gangs finally figure out who has actually been killing them off. Golden Swallow does get to kick a bit of butt, but she never gets to be the main character.
Note that this film was released in some markets under the highly misleading title "Girl With the Thunderbolt Kick" - there's no kicking or kung fu in this movie, just tons and tons of people getting stabbed. Also of note, while the previous movie was semi-realistic, with more people getting wounded than killed, this one seems to think that even a shallow slash with a sword is enough to kill you dead.
The Angry River (1971)
Someone is poisoning the followers of the local lord. Now the lord himself has been laid low by the same poison darts. The castle's doctor says only one thing can save him: a black herb from Soul Valley, beyond the Angry River and the Merciless Pass.
A series of henchmen head off to get the herb, but each one comes back dead in the saddle only moments after leaving (time and distance are not this movie's strong points). Finally the lord's daughter goes. She sucessfully fights through the bandits who were killing everyone else, gets to the deadly river, crosses it, and undergoes a series of trials set her by the guardian of the herb. She prevails and wins a tube of the precious herb from the guardian. The price, however, is that she must surrender her martial skills and not seek to restore them until after she returns home.
This herb is not only a cure all for poison, it also can restore or enhance martial abilities. So lots of nasty people, on learning that this woman has the precious herb, start trying to mug her every step of the way home (which is dozens of times longer and more difficult than the trip out, it seems). At this point, the movie becomes much less intersting, because the daughter has to either hide from muggers and rapists, or else rely on a kind goat boy to rescue her from them. Things pick up a bit at the end, after she restores her powers and goes after the poisoners, but the bulk of the movie is basically all about taking away the heroine's independence and agency.
A Touch of Zen (1971)
The first hour of this film follows Gu Sheng-zhai, a nosy small town calligrapher and artist who reads about military strategy in his spare time. He and his mother live rent-free in an abandoned building next to a deserted temple. Some new people come to town, including Yang Hui-zhen, a young woman who settles in the abandoned temple. Gu spends a ton of time snooping and sneaking around in the dark, trying to learn more about his new neighbour. Eventually he and Yang sleep together. Then some imperial envoys arrive and the plot (involving an attempt to cover up corruption at court by killing everyone related to the whistleblower, including Yang) is finally revealed in a series of flashbacks. Yang and her two male friends are exceptional warriors, as are the assasins sent to kill them. Gu insists on helping by providing strategic planning. The resulting fight scene in the grounds of the abandoned temple is much copied and homaged.
Once again, we learn that while any general can be good with a sword, the true masters of martial arts, the ones with truly magical abilities, are Bhuddist monks.
While a classic of Chinese cinema and of the Wuxia genre, this isn't a good example of kick ass heroine movies. While clean shaven and less of an annoying prick than most Goat Boys, Gu still displaces Yang from what ought to be her story.
The Shadow Whip (1971)
The heroine, Yang Kai-yun, is forced to break out her whip in order to deal with some ruffians on a visit to town to buy supplies for her uncle's inn. Several people see her lethal prowess with the whip and instantly suspect that she was taught by The Shadow Whip (because masters of the whip are so rare). Since the Shadow Whip is wanted for banditry and murder associated with the theft of a jewel shipment fifteen years prior, there are lots of people who suddenly want to talk to her, some of them nice, others very much not nice. A lot of fight scenes and a lot of running around take up the first hour of the movie. It's not until the last fifteen minutes (of an hour and fifteen minute film) that her uncle, who taught her to fight with a whip, sits down and explains that he was framed for banditry and murder all those years ago, and that's why all these thugs are popping out of the woodwork and trying to kill them both.
Sadly, Yang Kai-yun plays second fiddle throughout to her uncle and to Wang Jianxin, Yet Another Swordsman who wants to find and kill the Shadow Whip, but he's handsome and polite instead of thuggish and murderous about it, which is at least something.
A couple things: first, this film is set in the dead of winter - all the location shots were done in the winter with lots of real snow on the ground, which definitely makes it stand out compared to your typical "it's always summer in movie land" HK fare. Second, this film is basically a Chinese spagetthi western - everything, from the music to the camera work to the way everyone rides horses everywhere, is a very clear, very affectionate love letter to Italian made Westerns. Third, this is another film where the true masters of martial arts have superpowers - they leave no footprints in the snow and can leap over rooftops with a single bound.
It's a good movie and the heroine gets to pwn a lot of zero level minions in the many sprawling fight scenes. But the boys own the narrative and overall it wasn't the kind of thing I was looking to find.
Lady Whirlwind (1972)
The presence of Japanese gangsters suggests that this film is set in the early 20th century, but take out that bit of specificity about the villains and everything else could be from a story set a thousand years ago. Just pretend it's an alternative universe 20th century in which firearms and 20th century technology do not exist, and people with advanced kung fu training have magical powers.
A young woman enters a casino. She wins repeatedly at a dice game, despite the croupier's switching to loaded dice. She taps the top of the dice container after each shake before the dice are revealed, and the implication is that she has the magical power to cause the dice to be in her favour every time. When she tries to claim her huge pile of winnings and leave, members of the gang that run the casino try to stop her, and she kicks all of their asses most thoroughly. She tells the cowering gang lieutenant to tell his boss, "Lady Diao," that she is looking for Ling Shih Hao.
Lady Diao and her Japanese lover send more gang members to find this annoying woman and bring her back to them. More fights happen, and in between, we learn that Ling Shih Hao was beaten and left for dead by the gangsters three years ago, and that the woman, Tien Li Chun, blames him for making her sister pregnant and then dumping her, leading to the sister committing suicide.
Another young woman, Hsuang Hsuan, rescued Ling when he was left for dead, and he has been hiding out at her cabin in the woods for the past three years, during which time they have become lovers. Learning that Tien is looking for him pricks his conscience, and he decides that now is the time to seek out the gang leader who left him for dead and kill him, not for revenge but to liberate the town from the gang. Tien finds him first, though, but agrees, reluctantly, to give him time to kill the gang leader before she takes her revenge for the death of her sister and kills him in turn.
The next hour of movie simply recycle this sequence of events a few more times - Ling attacks the gang, gets his ass kicked, and has to be rescued by Tien, who says "No need to thank me, I just couldn't let someone else kill you." Ling begs for time to recover from his injuries so he can try again to kill the gang leader before she executes him, she reluctantly agrees, and so on.
The fight scenes with Tien are magnificent, but she is a complication in Ling's story rather than the central character.
One thing I noticed in this film is that when a person is beaten to death with kung fu, they almost invariably struggle to sit up again, then suddenly go limp, and this is what indicates that they are in fact dead rather than just wounded.