Made in Hong Kong: Geoffrey O'Brien on the films of Shaw Brothers studio

ArtForum, Sept, 2004 by Geoffrey O'Brien

These were movies in which skill was central, a skill not merely alluded to but constantly demonstrated, and to see them was to encounter not simply a foreign language but a foreign body language, shaped by skills that were made explicit at every moment, with no latent capability left to surmise. Those Shaw Brothers stars who were not themselves martial-arts adepts made up for it with a choreographic grace--augmented by wires, trampolines, and intricately deceptive editing--that made Hollywood action scenes of the time seem curtailed and mechanical. "I'm impressed with your whip technique," an admiring warrior tells the beautiful Cheng Pei-pei in The Shadow Whip (1970), in what amounts to a refinement of lovemaking. No combat is too closely fought not to allow time for those interjected bits of analysis--"Someone having such guts must be skilled" or "If you were kidding you wouldn't punch so hard"--that establish a backbeat for the blows and parries. Whatever takes place on-screen is informed and enlarged by language; every duel is partly verbal. The wily magistrates, unctuous monks, and rapacious bandits are all masters of both hypocritical courtesies and baroque vituperation, and there is always an ample supply of comically fearful, vainglorious, or simply dim-witted henchmen for additional theatrical flavor.

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To see the Shaw Brothers stock company demonstrate how an acting technique of nearly total artificiality--a technique based on rigidly defined character types and a repertoire of fixed gestures--can create as convincing an illusion as supposedly more naturalistic styles would alone make these movies endlessly watchable. These are ensemble works in which no player, however minor, ever relents for a second: All villains are transparently villainous, all heroes self-evidently sincere. Lechery, cowardice, senile weakness, low cunning, and wounded pride are all displayed in the manner of puppet theater, with decisive figuration and vigorous grace seemingly more valued than nuance or ambiguity. Only seemingly, because nuance and ambiguity creep in anyway, as the avenging loyalists incarnated by Jimmy Wang Yu (The One-Armed Swordsman [1966]) and Ti Lung (The Blood Brothers [1973]) become increasingly nihilistic and conflicted, and even David Chiang, the impishly smiling, sometimes lute-strumming hero of so many films, acquires intimations of a psychopathic edge.

The earlier releases have a particular charm; they are stylized in ways that would be phased out as Hong Kong movies reached wider markets, and their combat scenes are leavened by romance, domestic comedy, and musical diversion. These are wonder tales, in which a mysterious stranger can walk without leaving footprints in the snow (The Shadow Whip) or in which a slain warrior may rise out of his body, ascending heavenward in astral form (The Trail of the Broken Blade [1967]). The Temple of the Red Lotus (1965), a huge hit that sealed the popularity of wuxia pian, culminates in a long sequence in which the hero--owing to the arcane rules of the clan he has married into--must confront in combat his wife's sister, mother, and grandmother.