Final batch of Hong Kong heroine films.
Apr. 27th, 2020 07:02 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
glaurungOk, this final batch of films are all set in the 30's with no fantasy elements. The first two are set in Korea and pull out all the stops in depicting Japanese characters as greedy, cruel bullies and rapists. Be warned, massively negative ethnic stereotyping fills both of them.
*Hapkido (1972)
A movie set in the insular, weapons-free world of martial arts schools of the 1930's. Three Chinese students (two men and our heroine) are in Japanese-occupied Korea, studying Hapkido. They have a run-in with a thuggish Japanese lecher, and the master of the school decides to send them back to China to open a Hapkido school there, on the theory that this will save them from being arrested by the occupying forces.
But there's a Japanese Karate school in the town in China where they open their school, and inevitably they have more altercations with thuggish Japanese martial arts students (and the treasonous Chinese who join the Karate school, who just happen to also be a bunch of violent thugs). As the movie would have it, Japanese martial arts students do nothing except harass young women, steal from local food merchants, and beat people up when they complain.
There's a series of escalating conflicts between the karate students and the junior (hot headed and impetuous) member of our trio of heroes, ending with a fight in the market that leaves two of the Karate students beaten to death. The senior member of the trio sends his hotheaded junior into hiding and goes to the Karate school to apologize. This ends poorly for him as he's badly beaten and left with a crippled arm. A few more fight scenes and both of the Hapkido men are dead. It's left to our heroine to defeat the entire membership of the karate school and exact vengeance for her comrades, which she does most thoroughly.
While the first two thirds of this movie is mostly about the boys, the final half hour is totally owned by the heroine. The fight scenes are superb and numerous, and the ending did not leave me feeling that the heroine had been sidelined or that it wasn't her story. Recommended, if you can deal with the massive amounts of anti-Japanese prejudice.
*When Taekwondo Strikes (1973)
Again set in the insular, gun-free world of martial arts schools, this is the story of bad blood between a Japanese Karate school and a Taekwondo school in Seoul, Korea. The plot is extremely simple, but a lot of extended fight scenes stretch it out into a 90 minute film. The taekwondo school is headed by Korean nationalist and resistance leader Li Jundong. His students include a western woman named Marie and her not quite boyfriend, another Korean resistance fighter, Jin Zheng Zhi. They have a friend in town, a Chinese woman named Huang Li Chen.
Zheng Zhi gets in a street fight with the Japanese, and their superior numbers force him to run away - he flees to a Catholic church where his master works as a gardener (I guess under Japanese occupation teaching martial arts did not make ends meet) and where Marie's uncle is the priest.
There's a series of confrontations ending with fight scenes which demonstrate once again the origin of the D&D concept of levels - the level 3 or 4 Taekwondo students mop the floor with the level 1 karate students, but they in turn get their asses handed to them by the level 10 or so Karate masters and need their 20th level master to intervene to bail them out.
The Koreans force the Japanese to run away, but then they leave as well before the Japanese return with more high level opponents. The priest stays behind because he's an idiot. The Japanese (who don't give a fuck about his status as a foreign national with whom they are not yet at war) take him captive and torture him - the Karate school works for the Japanese secret service, and to the extent that this movie gives a damn about the actual war, it appears that the karate masters are trying to obtain a list of the names of resistance fighters in Seoul.
Li Jundong gives himself up in an attempt to secure the priest's release, because he is a noble Hero of the Resistance. Naturally the Japanese kill the priest instead of releasing him (this is another one of those movies in which even a shallow sword slash across the back is instantly fatal).
Meanwhile Li Chen tries to help her Korean friends, wiping the forest floor with the asses of a gang of Japanese who try to force her to tell them where the fugitives are hiding. So more Japanese armed with swords show up at her mother's restaurant to wait for her to return. Li Chen shows that she knows how to use a sword as well as kick ass, and the Japanese are forced to retreat... but one of the higher level Karate men kills her mother on the way out.
Now everybody has strong motivations to go in and kick the asses of everyone in the karate school. And it turns out that Li Chen is level 30, so she gets to rescue Marie and Zheng Zhi when they are outmatched by higher level karate masters. Sadly the narrative really belongs to Li Jundong, so this was another movie that didn't deliver the kind of story I was hoping to find.
The fight scenes in this are very different from your typical movie-fu, probably because the cast has some actual martial arts masters in it, so you get a higher proportion of real martial arts and less visually impressive but fake stage fighting than usual. The unreal conventions of martial arts movies really come to the fore in this -- in addition to the way all the level 1 minions just vanish once the protagonists start fighting a higher level opponent, you also have the bad guys respectfully ceasing to attack so the students can kneel at the feet of their master in the middle of the fight scene to tearfully explain why they disobeyed orders in order to come save him.
My Young Auntie (1981)
This is also set in the 30's, but in a part of China where the war may as well not exist. It's another blend of comedy and action that never works very well for me, but it has a very prolonged final fight scene which makes up in part for the not-actually funny comedy.
During his final illness, the family patriarch marries his young caretaker Jing Dai-Nan. She becomes family elder, with the task of passing on the deeds to the family estate to her new husband's nephew Yu Jing-Chuen, cutting out his criminally involved younger brother. Unfortunately, the criminals need merely steal the deeds and forge a few signatures, and the inheritance becomes theirs (unspoken background is the dysfunctional state of government in China at this time). Fortunately, Dai-Nan knows a lot of kung fu.
So we get a lot of not-actually-funny gags about a young, beautiful woman being hit upon or talked down to by men who then realize to their dismay that she is in fact their senior relative aunt or great-aunt.
Her late husband's nephew has a son her age, who goes to school in Hong Kong, is very westernized (tossing lots of English into his conversation even with people who know no English, because he's a jerk), and has several friends who are also enamoured of Western culture. So first the nephew makes a fool of himself not realizing that this girl who could be his daughter is his elder, then his son Ah-Tao makes the same mistake and gets his ass handed to him in the movie's first fight scene.
After a while the criminals finally show up (arranging for the authorities to arrest Ah-Tao and Dai-Nan in order to get everyone out of the house so they can steal the deeds). Then we meet Jing-Chuen's brothers, who, while old, also know lots of kung fu. After a training scene of "old guys trying to get back in shape" gags, they storm the evil uncle's compound to get back the deeds. Because this is a lighthearted comedy, the good guys eventually win the fight and nobody dies.
Dai-Nan gets to kick some ass, but unfortunately for those who came to see a woman kicking ass, the final act of the movie mostly belongs to her nephew and grand-nephew, with her in a helper role.
*Hapkido (1972)
A movie set in the insular, weapons-free world of martial arts schools of the 1930's. Three Chinese students (two men and our heroine) are in Japanese-occupied Korea, studying Hapkido. They have a run-in with a thuggish Japanese lecher, and the master of the school decides to send them back to China to open a Hapkido school there, on the theory that this will save them from being arrested by the occupying forces.
But there's a Japanese Karate school in the town in China where they open their school, and inevitably they have more altercations with thuggish Japanese martial arts students (and the treasonous Chinese who join the Karate school, who just happen to also be a bunch of violent thugs). As the movie would have it, Japanese martial arts students do nothing except harass young women, steal from local food merchants, and beat people up when they complain.
There's a series of escalating conflicts between the karate students and the junior (hot headed and impetuous) member of our trio of heroes, ending with a fight in the market that leaves two of the Karate students beaten to death. The senior member of the trio sends his hotheaded junior into hiding and goes to the Karate school to apologize. This ends poorly for him as he's badly beaten and left with a crippled arm. A few more fight scenes and both of the Hapkido men are dead. It's left to our heroine to defeat the entire membership of the karate school and exact vengeance for her comrades, which she does most thoroughly.
While the first two thirds of this movie is mostly about the boys, the final half hour is totally owned by the heroine. The fight scenes are superb and numerous, and the ending did not leave me feeling that the heroine had been sidelined or that it wasn't her story. Recommended, if you can deal with the massive amounts of anti-Japanese prejudice.
*When Taekwondo Strikes (1973)
Again set in the insular, gun-free world of martial arts schools, this is the story of bad blood between a Japanese Karate school and a Taekwondo school in Seoul, Korea. The plot is extremely simple, but a lot of extended fight scenes stretch it out into a 90 minute film. The taekwondo school is headed by Korean nationalist and resistance leader Li Jundong. His students include a western woman named Marie and her not quite boyfriend, another Korean resistance fighter, Jin Zheng Zhi. They have a friend in town, a Chinese woman named Huang Li Chen.
Zheng Zhi gets in a street fight with the Japanese, and their superior numbers force him to run away - he flees to a Catholic church where his master works as a gardener (I guess under Japanese occupation teaching martial arts did not make ends meet) and where Marie's uncle is the priest.
There's a series of confrontations ending with fight scenes which demonstrate once again the origin of the D&D concept of levels - the level 3 or 4 Taekwondo students mop the floor with the level 1 karate students, but they in turn get their asses handed to them by the level 10 or so Karate masters and need their 20th level master to intervene to bail them out.
The Koreans force the Japanese to run away, but then they leave as well before the Japanese return with more high level opponents. The priest stays behind because he's an idiot. The Japanese (who don't give a fuck about his status as a foreign national with whom they are not yet at war) take him captive and torture him - the Karate school works for the Japanese secret service, and to the extent that this movie gives a damn about the actual war, it appears that the karate masters are trying to obtain a list of the names of resistance fighters in Seoul.
Li Jundong gives himself up in an attempt to secure the priest's release, because he is a noble Hero of the Resistance. Naturally the Japanese kill the priest instead of releasing him (this is another one of those movies in which even a shallow sword slash across the back is instantly fatal).
Meanwhile Li Chen tries to help her Korean friends, wiping the forest floor with the asses of a gang of Japanese who try to force her to tell them where the fugitives are hiding. So more Japanese armed with swords show up at her mother's restaurant to wait for her to return. Li Chen shows that she knows how to use a sword as well as kick ass, and the Japanese are forced to retreat... but one of the higher level Karate men kills her mother on the way out.
Now everybody has strong motivations to go in and kick the asses of everyone in the karate school. And it turns out that Li Chen is level 30, so she gets to rescue Marie and Zheng Zhi when they are outmatched by higher level karate masters. Sadly the narrative really belongs to Li Jundong, so this was another movie that didn't deliver the kind of story I was hoping to find.
The fight scenes in this are very different from your typical movie-fu, probably because the cast has some actual martial arts masters in it, so you get a higher proportion of real martial arts and less visually impressive but fake stage fighting than usual. The unreal conventions of martial arts movies really come to the fore in this -- in addition to the way all the level 1 minions just vanish once the protagonists start fighting a higher level opponent, you also have the bad guys respectfully ceasing to attack so the students can kneel at the feet of their master in the middle of the fight scene to tearfully explain why they disobeyed orders in order to come save him.
My Young Auntie (1981)
This is also set in the 30's, but in a part of China where the war may as well not exist. It's another blend of comedy and action that never works very well for me, but it has a very prolonged final fight scene which makes up in part for the not-actually funny comedy.
During his final illness, the family patriarch marries his young caretaker Jing Dai-Nan. She becomes family elder, with the task of passing on the deeds to the family estate to her new husband's nephew Yu Jing-Chuen, cutting out his criminally involved younger brother. Unfortunately, the criminals need merely steal the deeds and forge a few signatures, and the inheritance becomes theirs (unspoken background is the dysfunctional state of government in China at this time). Fortunately, Dai-Nan knows a lot of kung fu.
So we get a lot of not-actually-funny gags about a young, beautiful woman being hit upon or talked down to by men who then realize to their dismay that she is in fact their senior relative aunt or great-aunt.
Her late husband's nephew has a son her age, who goes to school in Hong Kong, is very westernized (tossing lots of English into his conversation even with people who know no English, because he's a jerk), and has several friends who are also enamoured of Western culture. So first the nephew makes a fool of himself not realizing that this girl who could be his daughter is his elder, then his son Ah-Tao makes the same mistake and gets his ass handed to him in the movie's first fight scene.
After a while the criminals finally show up (arranging for the authorities to arrest Ah-Tao and Dai-Nan in order to get everyone out of the house so they can steal the deeds). Then we meet Jing-Chuen's brothers, who, while old, also know lots of kung fu. After a training scene of "old guys trying to get back in shape" gags, they storm the evil uncle's compound to get back the deeds. Because this is a lighthearted comedy, the good guys eventually win the fight and nobody dies.
Dai-Nan gets to kick some ass, but unfortunately for those who came to see a woman kicking ass, the final act of the movie mostly belongs to her nephew and grand-nephew, with her in a helper role.