Shaw Brothers Movies by Sarah Wheatley Introduction The Reviews: Five Shaolin Masters Men From the Monastery Heroes Two The Shaolin Temple Duel of Fists The New One Armed Swordsman Chinatown Kid The Boxer From Shantung Eight Diagram Polefighter Shaolin Challenges Ninja Legendary Weapons of Kung-Fu Executioners From Shaolin 36 Chambers of Shaolin They Call Him Mr Shatter Legend of the Seven Golden Vampires Bibliography About the Author This button takes you back to this Index.
Introduction "The only god worthy of mans' veneration is a graceful, dancing god." Friedrich Nietzsche In the hope of bringing to your attention the wonderful movies made by Shaw Brothers, I give you my opinion on the limited selection that I have seen. There are so many more I’d love to see. I dream of the day when they are all released with their original soundtracks and given the respect that they deserve as the Golden Age of martial arts filmaking. The movies in this list are all lurking in your local local video store released by Warner Home Video, although some may be easier to find than others. More are available from Eastern Heroes Video, but being British they are constrained by very archaic censorship rules which result in a lot of weapons scenes (especially Nunchaku) being cut. All praise to Black Tauna whose superb Shaw Brothers site first alerted me to the existence of these classics. Thanks also to Andrew at Trash Video whose selection of Shaws movies is the best in Brisbane.
The Shaw Brothers kept a stable of actors and it is very satisfying to see the same talented individuals reappear in movie after movie. After a while they begin to feel like family. Their foremost director was the prolific and talented Chang Cheh who, with his stars Ti Lung and David Chiang, formed the mainstay of martial arts movie making. Hung Gar master Liu Chia Liang was his martial arts director and the sifu of an instudio school. His favourite disciple was Alexander Fu Sheng, a young man whose meteoric rise to stardom was fully justified by his charisma and his kungfu skills. These are some of the greatest films ever made as well as being a collection of highly trained talent such as we may never see again. While I do concentrate on the aesthetic charms of these films (due largely to a subversive desire to interest women in kungfu), I want to make it clear that anyone interested in the martial arts will find them as fascinating and educational as I do.	Ti Lung   Alexander Fu Sheng
The Reviews   FIVE SHAOLIN MASTERS (1975) Dir: Chang Cheh Fu Sheng oozing boyish charm, Ti Lung looking very dreamy and lots of shirtless warriors with sculpted torsos and improbable pigtails demonstrating their excellent kungfu. A star-studded, charismatic cast are set in scenes which artfully complement their awesome manly beauty. Gorgeous silk clothes in flattering cuts, Fu Sheng's trademark colour is white, but they all get it on at the end of this splendid movie. Chang Cheh specializes in bands of muscly boys bonding dramatically amongst rivers of their own blood. He was John Woo's sifu and doesn’t it show.
This film begins with the burning of the Shaolin monastery by the Manchus, an attempt to quell the rebellion of the Han. The five are the only surviving masters and the legendary ancestors of the Triads. They encounter five Manchu dogs but realise they must brush up their skills if they are going to beat them, so they retreat to the forest to practise.	Five Shaolin Masters
This is where Liu Chia Liang's talents as a Martial Arts Director really come to the fore. When combined with Chang Cheh's taste in scene and setting it makes for magical cinema. The scene of Ti Lung swinging his pole in the woods is, IMO, one of the most aesthetically and technically pleasing kungfu scenes in the history of celluloid. Also truly amazing are David Chiang's skills with a knife on a long sectioned chain.
MEN FROM THE MONASTERY (1974) Dir: Chang Cheh This movie stars Fu Sheng, Chen Kuan Tai and the guy with the cheekbones from Five Shaolin Masters (Chi Kuan Chun, a Five Animals expert) and boasts the ultimate MAD team of Liu Chia Liang and Tang Chia. Fu Sheng's character Fong Sai Yuk is virtually indestructable apart from his achilles arse, having been soaked in a huge pot and he makes up for being the only real star in sight by putting on one of his finest performances, fluttering about in white robes with a large white fan. The final scenes are horrific, even for Chang Cheh.	Chen Kuan Tai in Men From the Monastery
HEROES TWO (1974) Dir: Chang Cheh The manchu manage to trick Fong Sai Yuk (Fu Sheng) into capturing Hung Si Quan (Chen Kuan Tai) and he spends the rest of the movie tearing his hair out and trying to rescue Hung. It is a great opportunity for Fu Sheng to do some serious emoting. The fan and the radiant personality are much in evidence. He is an exquisite combination of wide-eyed cheekiness and ferocity and without doubt the original kungfu comedian.   THE SHAOLIN TEMPLE (1976) Dir: Chang Cheh This stunning epic is central to the whole series, dealing with the period of time leading up the burning of the temple, during which the Shaolin monks take more students from outside as a precaution to preserve their kung-fu in the face of an imminent attack from the qing forces. All the actors Chang Cheh ever used are in this one, including the big three, Fu Sheng, Ti Lung (who gets to show off his Wing Chun) and David Chiang, and they are all superb. Lots of tortuous training scenes! Even more endless fighting scenes especially the fiery cataclysmic finale.
DUEL OF FISTS (1971) Dir: Chang Cheh Another masterpiece starring David Chiang as the son of a kung fu master, who, on his dying bed, reveals the existance of a half-brother (Ti Lung) in Thailand. David sets off to Bangkok wearing the most outrageous seventies cowboy suit and as the movie progresses his outfits become more and more eccentric and psychedelic. All he knows about his brother is that he is a professional kickboxer with a tattoo on his right arm. Thai boxing is accompanied by demented pipe band and the combatants do a ritual dance beforehand. They then commence beating each other senseless using every weapon except the head, and every target except the groin. As they fight the music gets faster and more intense and the crowd roars. It's all very dramatic, especially as it requires Ti Lung to wear nothing but a pair of the most microscopic silk boxershorts. The plot is the usual mix of triad baddies and brotherly bonding, but the stellar presences, the scenery and the costumes set this movie apart. The functional side of tight polyester flares is finally revealed!	Ti Lung in Duel of Fists
THE NEW ONE ARMED SWORDSMAN (1972) Dir: Chang Cheh A very brooding David Chiang chops his own arm off after losing a duel. He gives up being a swordsman, gets a job as a waiter and basically sulks until the incandescant Ti Lung turns up. These two bond in an orgy of brotherly love which sets the stage for the one armed swordsman to go really mental when Ti Lung is chopped in half by the same guy who originally caused him to chop his own arm off. Both stars look even more spectacular than usual in Ming dynasty top-knots.	David Chiang in The New One Armed Swordsman
One of the best things about the Shaws movies was the huge stockpile of costumes and scenery in their backlot. They had a whole Ming dynasty village in their backyard and an endless supply of cheap labour. The results are glorious.
CHINATOWN KID (1977) Dir: Chang Cheh A classic epic set in San Fransisco starring a slightly chubby Fu Sheng as an illegal immigrant fron the mainland, who gets set up by the local Triad in HK and has to go on the run. The plot is basically Boxer From Shantung in America. It has a superior funkadelic soundtrack and lots of groovy triad boys wearing tight seventies clothes. They have to have torso checks before Chang Cheh lets them on the set but I'm sure he's already passed The Five Deadly Venoms, who fill the other major martial roles with considerable style. These actors went on to be Chang Cheh's next great gang and made quite a few classics that I am dying to see. They are all incredibly skillful. Check out the pic to the right for a glimpse of Fu Sheng's little denim waistcoat thing and those skintight denim flares. It's incredible that he can even move let alone fight, but he does and he’s in fine form. Wah!	Fu Sheng in Chinatown Kid
THE BOXER FROM SHANTUNG (1972) Dir: Chang Cheh A classic tale of the rise and fall of a triad leader in 30's Shanghai. Yokel Ma Wing Jing (Chen Kuan Tai) uses his martial skills to become a powerful gangster, like his idol Tam See (David Chiang), who has a natty wardrobe and a flash coach. When Tam See is killed by the bad triads, the stage is set for one of Chang Cheh's most unremitting gorefests. Shere attention to detail is what makes his movies the classics that they are. Every scene is so artfully arranged and photographed that you really find yourself enjoying the most gorey scenes. The famous finale of this film features twenty minutes of furious hand to hand after Chen Kuan Tai already has an axe imbedded in his stomach. This movie was remade in 1997 as Hero, starring Takeshi Kaneshiro and Yuen Biao. Typically the remake was a very pale imitation of this classic. Chen Kuan Tai began his training at eight years old and is a master of Monkey style kungfu with a career as a professional fighter. Takeshi is a slightly vapid refugee from WKW films with a career in Cantopop... Even Yuen Biao, whose skills cannot be doubted, is a bland replacement for the stylish David Chiang.
EIGHT DIAGRAM POLEFIGHTER (1984) Dir: Liu Chia Liang This movie is all about what happens when you have too much Yang energy. It opens with most of Fu Sheng's family (the Yangs) being massacred by the Mongols, an event which sends him disturbingly crazy. Unfortunatley he fades out of the plot at this stage, due to the fact that he broke both his legs in reality, but there is still never a dull moment in this frenetic masterpiece. His only surviving brother (Liu Chia Hui) goes into hiding at a monastery, biding his time to seek revenge on the traitors who betrayed his family. The monks aren't too keen on his violent (Yang) nature so the will not induct him as a monk, leading to the classic scene where he applies the incense himself. They also specialize in polefighting, which they use against wolves, but they do not believe in killing the wolves, only knocking their teeth out.	Liu Chia Hui in Eight Diagram Polefighter
It all culminates in one of the most spectacular mass fight scenes I have ever seen, Lui Chia Liang at his MAD best overlayed with a very dark humour. What a pity Fu Sheng didn't get to fight the finale. In fact, the whole production was put on hold until he recovered but before they could finish it he died in a carcrash in 1983. Liu Chia Liang was so distraught that he gave up working for nine months, and when he finally recovered he resurrected the production in 1984 as a tribute to Fu Sheng, which accounts for the grim tone of the finale. One ironic fact was that Fu Sheng had bought the house of Bruce Lee, famed for the dubious Feng Shui that some believe caused his demise. Hong Kong had again lost its brightest star in Alexander Fu Sheng.	Fu Sheng
SHAOLIN CHALLENGES NINJA (1979) Dir: Liu Chia Liang As a director, Liu Chia Liang was more interested in women than Chang Cheh, especially powerful fighting women, like the Yang sisters in the previous movie and the Japanese wife of Liu Chia Hui in this classic. He is a Chinese kungfu master whose father has arranged a marriage for him, and he resists at first until he sees how pretty his new bride is. He wakes up on the bridal morning only to find she's already been out practising her karate for hours. When he won't give her any boards to break, she starts demolishing his brick garden walls and marble statues. Then all her weapons arrive and it turns into the ultimate domestic, and an excuse to show off a whole lot of Chinese and Japanese styles and ponder the amoral nature of Ninjitsu. "Is it nessecary to yell like a barbarian?" he asks her.   LEGENDARY WEAPONS OF KUNG-FU (1982) Dir: Liu Chia Liang Another superbly dramatic movie, full of spooky Taoist magic, more fierce women and exceptional action. Fu Sheng has a minor role but it is a ridiculous one, as he plays an idiot who is controlled by a magician's voodoo doll to perform kung-fu. This does allow for some amazing physical moments and gives Fu Sheng a chance to display his awesome comedic talents, but it isn't a very lush role. He has only just recovered from his terrible accident and suffering seems to have wrought a palpable change in his demeanour. Liu Chia Liang doesn't have the aesthetic taste of Chang Cheh, but in every other way he is a more adventurous filmmaker, ironic, witty and possessed with a talent for telling stories and debunking myths. He fell out with Chang Cheh in 1975 during the filming of Disciples of Shaolin and went on to direct his own films shortly after, debuting with Spiritual Boxer, a film widely regarded to have begun the craze for kungfu comedy.   EXECUTIONERS FROM SHAOLIN (1977) Dir: Liu Chia Liang Here we have Hung Si Quan (Chen Kuan Tai) hiding out in the Red Junks after escaping the burning of Shaolin. Hung Si Quan is the founding father of Hung Gar, the style which Liu Chia Liang had inherited from Wong Fei Hung himself. The Red Junks are full of revolutionaries posing as Chinese Opera troupes and travelling the waterways fighting against the Manchu. Yet again a truly impressive fighting female and a profound plot makes up for the lack of boyz. The moral of this story is that you should never be too pig-headed to learn your wife's kung-fu. Integration of Yin and Yang and being flexible and open-minded like a child is required to defeat the eunuch Bai Mei (white eyebrow, played superbly by Lo Lieh). But whatever you do, don't kick him in the groin or you will never retrieve your foot!   36 CHAMBERS OF SHAOLIN (1978) Dir: Liu Chia Liang Lui Chia Hui plays famous killer monk San Te whose family has been wiped out by the Manchu. The scenes of his Shaolin training are fascinating and this movie is widely considered to be the ultimate chopsockie. After he graduates he becomes a wandering vigilante monk cleansing the evil Manchu off the face of the earth and teaching other folk to do the same. Lui Chia Hui is no toy-boy, but his kungfu is highly impressive, and there is something endearing about his pointy head and his pointy nose. He is without doubt the archetypal Shaolin Monk.   THEY CALL HIM MR SHATTER (1974) Dir: A really stupid Gweilo Who says Hollywood has the exclusive right to exploit and patronize Asian stars? Here we have a Hammer House of Horror/Shaw Brothers co-production whose only highlight is Ti Lung. All of his fans will want to see this luscious performance, including his delightfully accented English, even if they have to suffer through the excruciating Mr Shatter himself not being properly impressed with Ti Lung's kungfu and wincing his way through the whole movie.
THE LEGEND OF THE SEVEN GOLDEN VAMPIRES (1973) Dir: Some other stupid Gweilo The second of the horrifying Hammer/Shaws co-productions, this time starring David Chiang and Shih Szu as members of a family of martial artists, whose home village is being terrorized by vampires (no hopping allowed, unfortunatley). Peter Cushing plays Van Helsing and luckily he is too genteel to be patronizing, but the plot and the stereotypical characterizations still manage to provide the squirm factor.
For some reason Chiang and his family can't find a good Taoist priest, and instead they have to rely on big white daddy to sort it all out for them. Also annoying is the subtext that David Chiangs' affair with the white girl is bound to end in tears, while it is quite acceptable for Shih Szu to end up with a white guy. On the whole, a better film than Shatter, but not much. I guess we can only be thankful that they ran out of funds before they could give Fu Sheng the treatment!   Bibliography Eastern Heroes Magazine: See Issue No.6 for articles about Fu Sheng and Liu Chia Liang and Issue No.2 for one about Chang Cheh. The Making of Martial Arts Films - As Told by Filmakers and Stars. Hong Kong Film Archive. (Highly recommended) Hong Kong Action Cinema by Bey Logan, The Overlook Press, New York. Hong Kong Cinema: The Extra Dimensions by Stephen Teo, BFI Publishing, London. (A crucial tome in every respect) Links Shaw Brothers: The Kings of Asia's Film Industry by Black Tauna Chang Cheh: The Godfather of the Kung Fu Film by Steven Feldman     ©  2000-2001 Sarah Wheatley   SARAH WHEATLEY is an artist and a writer with a fascination for all aspects of Chinese culture. She is currently working on several projects, including a book on Hong Kong cinema and an esoteric martial arts film script. This is her third appearance on Heroic Cinema - she also gave us her Brisbane report on the 1999 Hong Kong Film Festival, and her Top Ten Stephen Chiau Sing Chi Movies. For more of her reviews, see her great site Chiaumania, or head to the HKMDB Contributor's Page and look under "sarah".

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