Return to Beautiful Beatings
Chinese martial-arts fest 'Heroic Grace II' kicks yet more butt at UCLA
By Andy Klein
It's been two and a half years since the UCLA TV and Film Archive presented Heroic Grace: The Chinese Martial Arts Film - a hugely popular series, and not just for geeks obsessed with action films (like me), with Asian films (like me), or with Asian action films (like, you guessed it, me).
The reason I bring up "me" as a sort of negative example is to head off any of you out there who might already be thinking, "Oh, yeah. That guy. Raving about those silly movies again, with the stiff dialogue and people always flying through the air slicing each other's heads off. Next page!"
Really ... honestly ... I have rarely seen audiences so consistently thrilled with an entire historical retrospective, the only exceptions being a few of the oldest, most obscure films: happy, happy crowds.
In the tradition of Hong Kong producers, who always follow a big hit with a sequel (even if grotesquely inappropriate), the Archive has now programmed Heroic Grace: The Chinese Martial Arts Film, Part II. (If they really wanted to acknowledge the old-school HK tradition, they would have entitled it something like Return to Heroic Grace or New Heroic Grace. Ah, well.)
This series - 19 films over the course of four weeks - is likely to be even more non-buff-friendly, since it doesn't have any of the very early films that were included in the original for historical perspective. While four of Heroic Grace I's 18 films were curiosities from 1929, 1930, 1949, and 1965 - I wouldn't have missed them for the world, but they were strictly for scholarly interest - Heroic Grace II has nothing earlier than 1970.
There is some temporal overlap: The rest of the first series covered 1966-1980; the new batch dates 1970-1991. If Heroic Grace I showed the rise of the martial-arts film at the powerful Shaw Brothers Studio, Heroic Grace II covers the rivalry between Shaw and the upstart Golden Harvest, with the latter trumping Shaw, not merely by signing Bruce Lee and Jackie Chan, who dominated their respective eras, but also by properly framing and exploiting their talents.
The series kicks off with 1972's King Boxer (Thur. at 7:30 p.m.) - directed by transplanted Korean filmmaker Chung Chang-Wha, who will be on hand to present the film - which, dubbed and retitled 5 Fingers of Death, became the first martial-arts hit in the U.S., just barely edging out the arrival of Bruce Lee. In its American version, it's always struck me as an okay revenge flick that meanders a bit too much. But there's no denying the intensity of star Lo Lieh - who later initiated the role of Pai Mei, the fearsome monk revived by Quentin Tarantino in Kill Bill, Vol. 2 - and it will be interesting to see if the film as a whole plays better in its rarely seen original form than in the familiar mucked-up American release. (Indeed, like most fans, I've seen several of these only in their dubbed, sometimes cut, form, often with audiences who took them as camp; the opportunity to see them on the big screen in their intended form may never arise again.)
Three of the directors who dominated Heroic Grace I are back again with multiple entries. Chang Cheh (One-Armed Swordsman, Golden Swallow) is represented by three titles: 1971's New One-Armed Swordsman (Sat., Nov. 26, 7:30 p.m.), 1972's The Boxer from Shantung (Sat., Dec. 3, 7:30 p.m.), and his 1978 classic The Five Venoms (Sun., Dec. 11, 7 p.m.). The latter is one of kung-fu cinema's immortals: A dying master sends his last pupil to deal with five earlier disciples, each an expert in a different technique, who have turned bad.
Lau Kar-Leung is the only one of these older masters to still be active; over 70, he was recently stunt choreographer for Tsui Hark's epic Seven Swords. For years, he was Chang Cheh's action choreographer, before striking out on his own as a director. While his knowledge of martial arts has always been second to none, his own films - including the 1980 My Young Auntie (Fri., Dec. 9, 7:30 p.m.) - revealed a wild sense of humor that rarely came through in Chang Cheh films.
Chu Yuan - whose work was practically unknown in the U.S. prior to Heroic Grace I and the contemporaneous (and ongoing) release of the Shaw Brothers catalog on DVD - was the big discovery last time around, with the incredibly intricately plotted Killer Clans (1976) and the bizarre Intimate Confessions of a Chinese Courtesan (1972), another of those Hong Kong productions where all the active figures are women, with the men little more than window dressing. In addition to 1977's The Jade Tiger (Sat., Dec. 4, 7 p.m.) and his early non-Shaw Cold Blade (Sun., following The Magic Blade), he is represented by 1976's The Magic Blade (Sun. at 7 p.m.) and 1977's Clans of Intrigue (Sat., Dec. 12, following The Valiant Ones), which, like Killer Clans, are adapted from the novels of Gu Long. Again, both have almost more plot than a film can bear, and The Magic Blade is simply delirious.
There is only one film from the revered King Hu this time around, 1975's The Valiant Ones (Sat., Dec. 12, 7:30 p.m.), one of his "exterior" films, where the action is designed to exploit nature, as opposed to his "chamber" films, where everything is based on advantages and disadvantages of fighting in a confined space. Sammo Hung served as both action choreographer and lead villain.
A curiosity in the series is The Deaf and Mute Heroine (Sat., Nov. 26, following The New One-Armed Swordsman). Director Wu Ma's 1971 variation on the Zatoichi/blind swordsman concept concerns a brilliant swordswoman (Helen Ma), who is, not surprisingly, deaf and mute. In order to compensate for her hearing impairment, she wears reflective metal arm-shields that give her a rear view in battle.
The rest of the festival is filled out with four reliable star-oriented crowd-pleasers that should prove more interesting for novices and dabblers and less interesting for hardcore fans, who will have seen them all multiple times. Bruce Lee - who, yikes!, would now be turning 65 - stars in 1972's Fist of Fury (Sun. at 2 p.m.), directed by Lo Wei; released here as The Chinese Connection, it is often confused with the previous Lee/Lo collaboration The Big Boss (1971), which was - probably through a marketing screwup - released in the U.S. as Fists of Fury. There is also 1972's The Way of the Dragon (Sat. at 7:30 p.m.), the only complete film for which Lee served as director and star.
Jackie Chan is represented by 1985's Police Story (Wed., Nov. 30, following Hapkido), the first and arguably best of his contemporary cop comedy/thrillers. (Numbers 2 and 3 are also so great that it's hard to make a definitive call.)
And finally there is Tsui Hark's 1991 Once Upon a Time in China (Fri., Dec. 9, following My Young Auntie), which revitalized the traditional kung-fu genre and made an international star out of Jet Li. Half political thriller, half martial-arts film, it's filled with archetypal, yet emotionally layered, characters and moments that - like so many of the films in Heroic Grace II - make you yell at the screen with excitement.
Published: 11/17/2005
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