Tony Williams
Apart from some positive, but relatively brief references by Stephen Teo in Hong Kong Cinema: The Extra Dimensions (1997: 99–101, 103–104, 108–109) and Chinese Martial Arts Cinema (2009: 68–69,103–105, 146–147), the star status of Jimmy Wang Yu has remained relatively neglected by most Western explorations of Chinese cinema. Although kung fu fans and collectors still remember his key achievements, most Western scholarship tends to concentrate on his more charismatic successor Bruce Lee, despite the relatively small number of films he made during his career. Bruce Lee was the Eastern equivalent to James Dean. Dying at a relatively early age and leaving four films (The Big Boss [Lo Wei, 1971], Fist of Fury [Lo Wei, 1972], Way of the Dragon [Bruce Lee, 1972], and Enter the Dragon [Robert Clouse,1973]) that achieved worldwide distribution, especially in America and the United Kingdom, Lee did not live to face the different challenges of ageing, audience changes in taste, and cinematic industrial developments that affected stars such as Marlon Brando, Peter Fonda, Dennis Hopper, and others who embodied the young rebel aspect of cinematic stardom. By contrast, Jimmy Wang Yu began his career earlier than the young adult Bruce Lee and continues working today, as his recent appearance in Peter Chan’s Wu Xia (2011) shows.
The purpose of this article is not to belittle the achievements of Bruce Lee but instead focus upon a much more complex star who has been overshadowed by his more charismatic rival. Despite the fact that Wang Yu has been associated with many shoestring Taiwanese action films that appear to tarnish the achievements of the first wave of kung fu cinema by their repetition of stock action sequences, poor acting, and bad dubbing in international versions, many of these elements often used to denigrate the star status of Wang Yu appear in the limited output of the “Little Dragon” himself. As well as the travesties Western distributors have inflicted on Lee’s Hong Kong films, certain sequences in Way of the Dragon appear little different from their prolific generic contemporaries. Also, had The Big Boss been the only Bruce Lee film to survive would we remember the star today? Although released in the West following the success of Fist of Fury, The Big Boss contains little that may not be found in its contemporary competitors. Had no other films followed then he would probably be remembered today in the same way Alexander Fu Sheng is.
Jimmy Wang Yu lived to continue his career and see it change and decline. Like many other contemporary stars, he coped with the decline of martial arts cinema both in the East and the West following the death of Bruce Lee but continued making swordsman, contemporary, period, and kung fu movies as a major star well into the late 1970s. Both stars made different types of international films. While Lee’s biggest Western success was Enter the Dragon, Wang Yu’s The Man from Hong Kong (Brian Trenchard-Smith, 1975) did not achieve the critical and commercial acclaim of Lee’s venture into international co-production. Although the two stars differed physically, Lee having the most appeal for Western audiences with his Beatle-style haircut and handsome features, in other ways they complemented each other. A two page centerfold color still reproduced in the special issue of Oriental Cinema 19 (Foster 2001) devoted to Wang Yu shows both stars together occupying the same frame as equals shaking hands. Bruce Lee had signed a contract with Golden Harvest rather than subject himself to the greater control of Shaw Brothers, Wang Yu’s studio up to 1970. Although no date is given for this photo, it may have been taken in 1970, the year which Wang Yu both starred in and directed his epoch-making The Chinese Boxer (Wang Yu, 1970). This film may have influenced Bruce Lee into gaining control over his own career as well as wishing to direct as he did, with Way of the Dragon and would have done with the posthumously released The Game of Death (1978) later finished by Robert Clouse who directed the unsatisfactory, but breakthrough film for Western audiences, Enter the Dragon.
Although Wang Yu’s career declined, and he is more well-known today for scandals recorded in the Taiwan tabloid press, the circumstances of Lee’s death in the apartment of a well-known starlet have never been satisfactorily explained. It is doubtful if Lee’s own reputation would have survived untarnished had he not died suddenly. While the trajectory of Lee’s future career remains hypothetical, that of Wang Yu is not. Both before and after the death of Bruce Lee, Wang Yu embodied a particular version of transitional stardom, one embodying not only changes in star persona and generic representation but also having much to do with changing cultural and historical circumstances in both China and Hong Kong. These involved the changing aspects of masculine representation that made possible the future careers of later stars such as Bruce Lee and Jet Li performing more varied roles than the archetypal hero of Chinese culture. Even when Wang Yu relocated to Taiwan after breaking his contract with Shaw Brothers, he was able to continue refining the star status he had carefully established in his Hong Kong films under the more restrictive censorship of the Guomindang government-in-exile established by Chiang Kai-Shek and his successors. Anti-authoritarian elements appeared in several Wang Yu films directed by Chang Cheh. The actor continued this in his later films, especially The Invincible Sword (Hsu Teng-Hung, 1972), in which his heroic sacrifice to save an honest general from execution by corrupt government forces comes to nothing due to the attitude of the authoritarian and stubborn victim he is trying to save. Several of Wang Yu’s interesting achievements, whether as star and/or director, involve subversive attacks on authoritarian structures. Whether conscious of this or not, this Eastern star often functions in a manner that Patrick McGilligan has defined as one of the interesting features of James Cagney’s career: the actor as auteur, a term suggesting that the actor had full control over his star status no matter how many directors he worked under (McGilligan 1982; Teo 2009: 147).1 But while Cagney only directed one film, the ignominious remake of This Gun for Hire (Frank Tuttle, 1941), Short Cut to Hell (James Cagney, 1957), Wang Yu directed at least 12 films during his career, produced nine, and scripted five. He is also a key example of what may be termed “transitional stardom.” Whereas competitors such as Bruce Lee, Ti Lung, and David Chiang embodied definable traits that make their star personae easily identifiable, no matter how many different genres and historical period dramas they appear in, Wang Yu’s stardom is more diverse and interesting in conception. He began his star career in 1964 and preceded Bruce Lee in directing his own film, The Chinese Boxer (Wang Yu, 1970), which switched the emphasis of Hong Kong wuxia from swordsmanship to unarmed combat. During his Hong Kong career Wang Yu’s star status changed from being the gentlemanly fighter of the traditional Temple of the Red Lotus films to the dark brooding, masochistic hero of Chang Cheh’s pessimistic version of his heroic bloodshed films, a figure who either overcame deadly odds (as did most wuxia heroes) or succumbed to a bloody demise following his own code of honor. If Bruce Lee’s “Little Dragon” revealed to the world that China was no longer the “Sick Man of Asia” by destroying that demeaning racist sign, “No Dogs. No Chinese,” in Fist of Fury, Wang Yu also performed a heroic role but at the same time revealed the physical and psychological costs associated with it. Significantly, Bruce Lee dies off camera in Fist of Fury as the film ends in a freeze frame and the sound of bullets that we never see penetrating his body. Wang Yu lived longer, saw his stardom reach a peak before its decline in the mid-1970s onwards, leading to cameo roles and Taiwanese potboilers that were pale shadows of his earlier achievements. Wang Yu films dealt with a more varied number of issues in historical and modern periods, really making him a more complex star than Lee. Wang Yu acted in and directed many films, to say nothing about his behind-the-scenes involvement in The Sword (Lei Pan, 1971) and other films such as Knight Errant (Ting Shan-His, 1973) in which he may have contributed more than just martial arts choreography, a striking contrast to Bruce Lee, who only directed one film, Way of the Dragon.
Wang Yu also represents a particular form of “regional imagination” as defined by Yingjin Zhang in Chinese National Cinema, but not in terms of an abstract “cultural ideal” mentioned by Stephen Teo in his chapter on Bruce Lee in Hong Kong Cinema: The Extra Dimensions. Rather, it is one related to challenging changing cultural and historical circumstances affecting Chinese masculinity resulting in crisis situations affecting definitions of a hero. (Teo 1997: 112; Zhang 2004: 187–188) This first appears in One-Armed Swordsman (Cheh Chang, 1967), in which the hero is torn between loyalty to his adopted sifu in a dysfunctional family situation and his decision to leave his potential life as a peaceful farmer to rescue his master. In Golden Swallow (Cheh Chang, 1968), Wang Yu’s Silver Roc is torn between conflicting desires for his lost love Golden Swallow and destructive sado-masochistic tendencies that lead to his ingrained desire for a violent death as the only way to resolve contradictions affecting his own personality. As Stephen Teo has also shown, The Sword is a devastating critique of the martial arts ethos. It focuses upon the deadly conflict between duty and contradictory desires to avoid traditional obligations. This feature may explain the masochistic element that critics such as Tony Rayns have seen in his films (Rayns 1980: 99–100; Rayns 1996: 155–158; Williams 1999: 20; Teo 2009: 147–148).2 He gained from his association with Chang Cheh, but he also developed elements within this collaboration as well as sometimes repeating them with little variation, as in One-Armed Boxer (Wang Yu, 1972).
Born in the Wuxi Jiangsu Province of China on 28 March 1943, Wang Yu and his parents re-located to Taiwan following the Maoist seizure of control of his homeland. He performed his military service in Taiwan and achieved celebrity status in Hong Kong by winning several swimming and water polo championships before joining Shaw Brothers in 1963. Known also for his expertise in karate and interest in racing cars, the Mandarin-speaking young actor would become a valuable addition for Shaw Brothers, a studio producing Mandarin films as well as beginning to develop wuxia movies at this time that emphasized swordsmanship rather than unarmed combat. According to most publicity reports, Wang Yu took the leading role in the black and white, widescreen action film Tiger Boy (1966), directed by Chang Cheh, after winning a competition. The film was shot in 1963, released a year later, and re-released in 1966 following Wang Yu’s appearance in Temple of the Red Lotus (Hsu Teng-Hung, 1965) and its sequel Twin Swords (Hsu Teng-Hung, 1965). Co-starring Margaret Tu Chuan, and also featuring several actors the young star would work with at different times of his career, such as Chin Peng, Lo Lieh, and Ku Feng, Tiger Boy was a period drama dealing with a wandering knight-errant’s quest for revenge on those responsible for his father’s death fifteen years before and the romantic entanglements he encounters on the way. Tiger Boy’s release may have been hindered by the fact that it was made in black and white at a time Shaw Brothers were releasing mostly color films. Unfortunately, this film is difficult to access and Celestial Pictures inform me that they have no plans to re-release it on either DVD or VCD formats. It is difficult to ascertain whether Tiger Boy contained intimations of the tormented hero and masochistic bloodshed that became a hallmark of later collaboration between star and director. However, The Temple of the Red Lotus and its successors have been re-released on DVD, providing critics and viewers with an early example of Wang Yu’s career in which he exhibits a very different type of star persona from that he would be exclusively associated with in later films made with Chang Cheh and other directors.
Although prominently featured as leading star on the DVD cover of Temple of the Red Lotus, Wang Yu does not really belong to this category in this, one of his early film roles. He is more of a supporting player in an ensemble film featuring the talents of Ivy Ling Po, Chin Ping, Lily Ho, Lo Lieh, Ku Feng, and Fung Bo-bo (known affectionately as the “Shirley Temple of Hong Kong cinema”). The Temple of the Red Lotus is a film revealing the influence of huangmei music (as seen in the solos sung by Ivy Ling Po of Love Eterne fame) and the female narrative chorus heard at several points of the film. It also introduces the wuxia influence that would soon rapidly displace such earlier traditions in Hong Kong cinema. The 1928 Shanghai production of Burning of the Red Lotus Monastery (Zhang Shichuan, 1928) had actually stimulated wuxia influence in literature and film, so it is not surprising that earlier Hong Kong films such as Strange Hero, Parts One and Two (Wong Tin-lam, 1950 and 1956), Three Swordswomen from Guandong (Ren Pengnian, 1961), Burning of the Red Lotus Monastery Parts One and Two (Ling Yun, 1963), and The Golden Hairpin (Chan Lit-ban, 1963), also influenced this 1965 film derived from the 1928 Shanghai novel by Xiang Kairin, Legend of the Strange Hero. Wang Yu’s Gui Wai represents the Confucian hero of a gentle, scholarly hero, deferring to his elders who marries into the Gan family (no longer evil as in the earlier version). He aids them in their fight against bandits masquerading as Red Lotus Temple monks. Realistic swordplay sequences take over from the special effects palm power and magical displays of earlier versions (Lau 1981: 261–266).
The Temple of the Red Lotus is a transitional film in terms of generic development. It reflects the emergence of swordsman action scenes that will take a more prominent role in Shaw Brothers narratives in the future, but the same cannot be said for Wang Yu’s performance. Despite the fact that he is an accomplished swordsman, his role in this film is one of respectful acknowledgement of family traditions and female rule. He is a “kinder and gentler” version of the heroes he will portray in later films. Co-starring as the aptly named “Little Wu,” Wang Yu’s role bears little relation to his later, more familiar roles. A young, scholarly swordsman, deferential to his elders, Little Wu resembles the type of Confucian scholar-hero familiar from any of the popular historical Mandarin Ducks and Butterfly novels of the period. Having lost his family years before, he visits the Jin Clan in Dragon Valley to learn new skills and marry his betrothed Lianzhu (Chin Ping), the granddaughter of clan leader Dragon Jin (Tien Feng). Although nominally headed by Dragon Jin, the clan is female-dominated, with grandmother, mother, daughters, and great daughter Xioling (Fung Bo-bo) playing prominent roles in decisions and participating in battles. Gui Wu has to work as part of a team that will soon be known as the “Yin and Yan Swordsmen,” a duo anticipating the husband and wife team of Bai Ying and Hsu Feng in King Hu’s The Valiant Ones (1975). At this stage, “Little Wu” resembles the “greenhorn” or “tenderfoot” of a Hollywood western often needing his more skilled wife to protect him in difficult situations.
During certain points of the film, the mysterious Scarlet Maid (Ivy Ling Po) appears, aiding characters whenever things get difficult. She reappears in the sequel Twin Swords, and we learn that she is Wu’s aunt, the sole survivor of a massacre organized by a rival clan that has taken over the Red Lotus Temple and are masquerading as monks. When the sequel begins Wu and Lianzhu have managed successfully to leave her family, who are not as dangerous as their predecessors in earlier versions. Ignoring Scarlet Maid’s advice to “mind your own business,” Lianzhu persuades a reluctant Wu to rescue a group of women now held in the Temple. But it turns out that the kidnapping has been staged for their benefit. The heroic couple become victims of a trap that results in Lianzhu’s capture. A distraught Wu returns to the Dragon Clan to make tearful pleas for help, something unimaginable in a post-1967 Wang Yu character. He is imprisoned while the resilient females (including Fung Bo-bo) decide to rescue Lianzhu. Despite overwhelming odds, and thanks to the last-minute intervention of Wu, and Scarlet Maid’s welcome appearance, the Red Lotus Clan is defeated and Wu finally manages to avenge himself on the murderer of his family. As in Temple of the Red Lotus, Wu is really a subordinate player in the drama who owes much to the help of the female community in this film.
The Sword and the Lute (Hsu Teng-Hung, 1966) concludes the trilogy. Once again, Wu becomes marginalized in a film emphasizing its central female characters portrayed by Ivy Ling Po, Fung Bo-bo (wielding a magic sword), and Lily Ho playing Mei-erh, the femme fatale daughter of the rival Flying Tiger clan. Once again Lianzhu disobeys Wu and allows the powerful magic lute to fall into the hands of enemies before Scarlet Maid again intervenes to prevent the worst from happening. Wu participates in the final battle but as a complementary member of the Yin and Yang Swordsmen. The film ends not with a closing shot of Wu but rather Scarlet Maid saying farewell to Xioling.
In this final part of the trilogy, Wang Yu’s character was mostly conspicuous by his absence. However, two films directed by Chang Cheh that precede One-Armed Swordsman – The Magnificent Trio (1966), and The Trail of the Broken Blade (1967) – compensate for this deficiency and take the star in new directions that will eventually lead to the achievement of One-Armed Swordsman. As a Shaw Brothers color version of the black and white film Three Outlaw Samurai (1964) directed by Hideo Gosha, The Magnificent Trio reunites the director and stars of Tiger Boy in a film set in the closing years of the Ming Dynasty. Three heroes help a group of peasants who have kidnapped the daughter of a devious local magistrate. Although the credit sequence and DVD cover emphasizes the prowess of Wang Yu, Lo Lieh, and Cheng Lei, the film’s actual credits list three females as the stars, the males appearing in a co-starring capacity. This film is another of Wang Yu’s transitional star entries in terms of referencing a previous tradition while subtly breaking away from it, a common feature in his trajectory, always appropriating a tradition but then refining it in specific ways. This time female stars Margaret Tu Chuan, Chin Ping, and Fanny Fan exhibit no swordsmanship prowess at all. Instead, the males now carry the burden of action as they will in future Chang Cheh films. Returning veteran Fang Lu (Wang Yu) decides to aid a group of impoverished villagers resisting the excessive demands of county magistrate Wu Huarie. He is joined by Master Yen (Lo Lieh) and Huang Liang (Cheng Lei) who are initially on opposing sides. At one point of the film Fang berates the kidnapped daughter Wei Wen-chen (Ping Chin) for having no idea of the hunger that the villagers and soldiers fighting the Ching forces endure. The three heroes decide to unite in a common cause of honor. As the doomed Huang later tells his lover, “Loyalty is very important to me. Forget me and go home.” Although Fang survives at the end of the film, The Magnificent Trio is the first Wang-Yu Chang Cheh collaboration to emphasize torture of the male body, as seen in the 100 lashes he endures as a deal to ensure the safety of the villagers. Although the film explores the corruption of institutional power foreshadowing the devastating analysis in Blood Brothers (Chang Cheh, 1972) and intimates that visiting Minister Yan may not restore order at the end, expectations are reversed when government forces do return to save Fang and Yen and execute Wu. However, unlike The Temple of the Red Lotus trilogy, there will be no happy ending for Fang and Wei as foreshadowed in the final parting of Huang and Chieh Ying (Margaret Tu Chuan). Powerless to prevent the execution of her father, Wei decides to become a Buddhist nun. The closing shot of the film shows the poignant silent final meeting between Wei at her father’s grave and Fang about to ride again into battle against the Ming forces.
Scripted and directed by Chang Cheh, The Trail of the Broken Blade (1967) not only reunited Wang Yu with Chu Ping but again cast him in a more secondary role against Chuang Chiao as swordsman Fang. This time, the psychological tensions between following the dictates of family honor and desiring another direction, themes that will be developed in the following two One-Armed Swordsman films, become more pronounced. Wang plays Li, a fugitive wanted for killing an official who framed his father. Sought after by Fang who loves Liu (Chi Ping) but who still loves Fang (a plot motif anticipating the eternal triangle motif of Golden Swallow), Li is seen in disheveled condition on discovery, attempting to hide away from the world, like David Chiang’s character in The New One-Armed Swordsman (1971). Returning to his former prowess, Fang engages in a final deadly bloody battle leading to his death. However, in a remarkable ending borrowed from Li Han-Hsiang’s Love Eterne (1963), the two deceased lovers are transformed into ghostly figures at the end and ascend into heaven leaving Fang to ride away into the distance. Did the so-called “ogre of Hong Kong cinema” really have a sentimental streak in his make-up? This is an echo of the old huangmei tradition familiar from The Temple of the Red Lotus, and such a transcendental climax will never again appear in the works of this director. Like The Temple of the Red Lotus trilogy, The Trail of the Broken Blade mixes traditional and new features. During one scene Liu remembers how Li trained her in the past. As she remembers her beloved, the flashback begins with a shot framing Li within an arch. The camera performs an iris-in to Li, filtered in red as a female chorus chants in the background. It ends as the camera tracks out; blue smoke concludes the sequence. Wang Yu is the handsome object of the traditional female gaze characteristic of pre-Chang Cheh cinema. After Liu commits suicide over the body of her dead lover, a huangmei female chorus begins. Li hopes that Liu will forget him and marry the devoted Fang but his chivalric hopes come to nothing. Darker elements that will be developed in the later Chang Cheh/Wang Yu collaborations now enter the film, intimating that a more bloodthirsty type of representation will soon affect this heroic tradition. When Li takes on the lower-class persona of a groom to conceal his real identity, Wang Yu’s character wears his Eastern version of a Clint Eastwood beard for the first time. Although Li’s death is filmed in a less bloody manner than succeeding films such as The Assassin (Chang Cheh, 1967), a rapid shot by the camera reveals he has been disemboweled. The times were now changing in Hong Kong wuxia representations and One-Armed Swordsman was to herald this change.
One-Armed Swordsman not only provided the breakthrough stardom for Wang Yu but also radically altered the rules of Hong Kong martial arts cinema. Co-scripted with Chang Cheh’s frequent collaborator Ni Kuang and choreographed by Tong Gaai and Lau Kar-leung, One-Armed Swordsman represents a devastating interrogation of the conflict between Confucian values of loyalty and righteousness, featuring penetrating insights into a corrupt institutional world that has made martial arts values both redundant and dangerous to its practitioners. Such elements occur in early films such as The Magnificent Trio and will reach their peak in Blood Brothers.
One-Armed Swordsman opens with the dying Fang Cheng receiving a promise from Master Swordsman Qi Rufeng, whose life he has saved in a deadly attack, that his son Fang Gang will become a student at the Golden Sword School. But, far from providing him with dignity and upward mobility, the older Fang Gang (Wang Yu) finds himself humiliated by richer students and scorned by Rufeng’s daughter Pei-er, who slices off his arm in a fit of vicious jealousy. He falls off a bridge into the barge of peasant woman, Xiaoman, who nurses him back to health. Like Fang Gang, she is also a victim and orphan of the martial arts world, since her father’s values led to downward mobility and poverty. However, when Fang learns that his former master is threatened by two enemies who use unfair techniques he returns to the Golden Sword School to save them, having learned how to use his left arm by following the instructions in a partially destroyed parchment – a training manual left to Xiaoman by her father. The film ends with Fang reunited with Xiaoman walking into the distance in the only location shot of the entire film.
Although celebrated for its introduction of elements that would soon define the martial arts genre, One-Armed Swordsman is less affirmative than it may initially appear. Virtually all the positive characters in the film are negatively affected by martial arts values in one way or another. Qi Rufeng’s noble tradition has actually spawned a dysfunctional family made up of petulant daughter and resentful students. Although Fang Cheng believes that the Golden Sword School will bring his son future eminence it actually causes as much pain as the knightly values of Xiaoman’s father does to his own family. The broken sword that Fang Cheng left to his son, and the partially destroyed parchment kept by Xiaoman, cause pain and suffering rather than enhancing honor. Also, Xiaoman’s family chooses rural poverty rather than face the type of unceasing revenge evoked by the enemies of the Golden Sword School who not only use unheroic methods but also plan the extermination of an entire family. Far from being honorable, the swordsman tradition evokes constant violence as well as psychological pain to those who follow its rules. Towards the end of the film, Fang tells Xiaoman that he has to return to save his former master or “I’ll never find peace for the rest of my life.” Unlike the doomed heroes of The Assassin and Golden Swallow, Wang Yu’s character survives. He rejects the role of hero in the concluding scene of the sequel, Return of the One-Armed Swordsman (Chang Cheh, 1969), in which he finds that those who pleaded with him to save them are in fact dishonorable. The final overhead shot of One-Armed Swordsman reveals Master Qi Rufeng and the surviving members of his school standing before the sword he has just broken as if finally conscious of the brutality of a tradition he has espoused as well as the illusionary nature of a retirement he once thought would be graceful and under his control. By contrast, Fang is now free to follow a different lifestyle, and the final shot of the film that breaks away from the studio-bound claustrophobic world that has trapped all its characters shows that for at least two a more positive future emerges.
One-Armed Swordsman is a key achievement for both director and star. Wang Yu’s later films will build on this tradition in several ways, ones which also recognize the dangerous nature of the martial arts world and the physical and psychological costs affecting the hero. The Assassin, Golden Swallow, and Sword of Swords (Cheng Kang, 1968) are three such examples. They are interesting variations on motifs contained in One-Armed Swordsman, suggesting a particular type of collaborative authorship between director and star.
Written and directed by Chang Cheh, The Assassin is one of the most stylish achievements of its director as well as a continuation of that dark interrogation of heroic values begin by One-Armed Swordsman. Set in China, 2,300 years ago, The Assassin begins with a palace dispute between two rival politicians leading to the exile of Yen Chung-tzu (Tien Feng) and the victory of the malevolent Premier Han Kuei (Huang Chung-Hsin) who takes advantage of an inexperienced young Emperor to betray Chinese interests. The sequence ends ominously with a caption foretelling that the palace intrigue will “cost the life of a young man.” Like his predecessor in One-Armed Swordsman, Wang Yu’s Nieh Cheng comes from a lower-class background. Forced to go into hiding as the sole survivor of his martial arts school and supporting his mother and unmarried sister Nieh Rong (Li Hsiang-Chun) by taking on the humble occupation of a butcher, Nieh’s filial piety impresses Yen Chung-tzu, who sees him as the ideal candidate to assassinate his political rival. The casting of Tien Feng is significant since he usually plays villains in Hong Kong cinema and his role here suggests Chang Cheh’s skepticism about political establishments also seen in Blood Brothers. Following the death of his mother and marriage of his sister, Nieh is freed from family responsibilities and ready to undertake a suicidal mission. Before, he had fallen into alcoholism signified by filthy clothes and a “Clint Eastwood” beard, telling Nieh Rong that “Without the Sword, my life’s over.” Despite the fact that he has an opportunity to choose to live with his reunited sweetheart Xia Ying (Chiao Chiao), he chooses his ordained path. Though he succeeds in his mission against overwhelming odds, he not only commits suicide by the most graphic form of disembowelment yet seen in a Chang Cheh film but also slices his face off to prevent retaliation against his family. This does not prevent his sister going to reclaim his body, announce his identity so that his heroic status will be known, and then committing suicide. The Assassin ends with the bereaved and pregnant Xia Ying mourning her lover in a similar manner to the heroine of Blood Brothers, having has lost everything as a result of the destructive wuxia code.
This film, along with Golden Swallow, reveals Wang Yu’s great accomplishments as an actor. Playing a hero with a self-destructive streak, tied to a code of honor that will lead to his bloody and painful death, Wang Yu’s self-aware and tormented character significantly displays the psychopathological tensions beneath the heroic mask of the hero and the spiritual devastation he leaves behind, as seen in the different fates of Nieh Rong and Xia Ying who are psychologically scarred in different ways. We know nothing about Nieh Rong’s family but it is possible she has left husband and children behind her, while Xia Ying will be left alone to bring up Nieh’s child. It is one of the bleakest endings of any Hong Kong wuxia film.
Despite the fact that Golden Swallow is a very different sequel to Come Drink with Me, the focus on Wang Yu’s Silver Roc rather than Cheng Pei-pei’s heroine belongs to the collaborative critique by both star and director of the male heroic tradition (Teo 2009: 102–104). Silver Roc is perhaps the most masochistic, self-destructive hero in Chang Cheh’s gallery so far. Dominated by an overwhelming death wish far exceeding that of any of the characters he played so far, he not only desires his own death but expresses his morbid love for Golden Swallow by incriminating her in his own murderous activities. His bloody death leaves Golden Swallow and Roc’s mistress to waste their lives mourning a seriously disturbed character despite the love Han Tao (Lo Lieh) has for Swallow. In Cheng Kang’s Sword of Swords (1968), Wang Yu’s Ling Tseng-Hsaio does survive at the end although blinded by the villain. Left with his baby son to care for, this betrayed hero does manage to recover a secret weapon stolen from him by someone who has also slaughtered his family. Again, the cost of the heroic ideal is questionable, a theme that the star later explored in his co-directed (with Pan Lei) Taiwan–Hong Kong co-production The Sword (1972) that Stephen Teo has described as another “ambitious critique of the knight errant’s worship of swords, a fundamental prop in the whole mythology of wuxia” (Teo 2009: 147). It is another film questioning the values of the heroic tradition that the star had explored in his films with Chang Cheh.
During the time One-Armed Swordsman appeared Hong Kong was affected by the Star Ferry Riots and Maoist demonstrations, the latter featured in one prominent scene of John Woo’s Bullet in the Head (1990). Even before these events, Chinese values were under threat both from the anti-Confucian campaign and the subsequent development of what became the Cultural Revolution in China and from the rapid modernization in Hong Kong that saw changes in lifestyles and capitalist development. Although no direct historical influences can be traced to the Wang-Yu/Chang Cheh films of this era, it must be noted that this was a period of rapid change; the instabilities, both psychological and institutional, may have indirectly affected these films.
Wang Yu finally persuaded Run Run Shaw to allow him to write and direct a film – The Chinese Boxer (1970). Despite this first full-time credit, one source also lists Ng See-yeun and Yang Jingchen as assistants, probably indicating the cautious and watchful eye of Run Run Shaw (Lau 1980: 202). Set in the early Republican era, the film changed the face of wuxia by concentrating on unarmed combat rather than swordsmanship. Although eclipsed by succeeding films that make its premises appear dated, The Chinese Boxer, both scripted and directed by Wang Yu, was the archetype and key example for what followed. Directed in a more functional and sparse manner than Chang Cheh, The Chinese Boxer uses excessive zooms and close-ups while also framing the beginning of the final combat in long shot with all protagonists (except for the treacherous Tao Erh) in an impressively placed mise-en-scène structure. Like The Magnificent Trio, The Chinese Boxer is both a reworking and a challenge to the 1965 Japanese film Judo Saga (Lau 1980: 202; Palmer, Palmer and Meyers 1995: 71–72, 178, 299).3 It appropriates contemporary Japanese traits of bloodshed and violence, while at the same time espousing the values of the Chinese martial arts tradition. As Lei Ming’s doomed teacher tells his students, karate actually originated in the Tang Dynasty before it was developed into a more aggressive and hostile form in Japan, with its goal becoming the crippling or killing of the opponent. By contrast, the more disciplined form of Chinese martial arts emphasizes control and good citizenship. It is not surprising that Japanese sympathizer and renegade disciple Tao Erh is certainly not a good citizen but has allied himself with the more aggressive form of karate. He has collaborated with Japanese experts whose nation will pursue a more aggressive policy towards China in the following decades.
The film is based on a well-known novel by Tsuneo Tomita set in the Meji era that began the process of Japan’s militarization and modernization that would culminate in World War It appears that Wang Yu and his collaborators may have been fully aware of the nationalist aggressiveness that lay behind the original versions and decided to contrast the values of Chinese martial arts to those of its more dangerous nationalistic counterpart. As others have noted, this is one of the first martial arts films to show the Japanese taking over a Chinese town, an obvious reference to Manchuria, and to make it clear that they plan to acquire more territory before they are stopped (Palmer et al. 1995: 57). Featuring Chen Kuan-tai and Yuen Woo-ping as imported Japanese fighters, the film also casts Lo Lieh as Lei Ming’s Japanese arch-enemy Kitashima, with whom he fights a bloody duel at the climax. The Chinese Boxer appropriates elements from many sources, for instance the falling snow from One-Armed Swordsman and from Hollywood Westerns the gunfight where the antagonists stare at each other before the final draw (in this case of knives rather than revolvers). But by placing detailed emphasis on the unique values of Chinese martial arts training and emphasizing the positive qualities of national identity before foreign invaders, well before Bruce Lee’s Fist of Fury, The Chinese Boxer, despite its crudities and emphasis on bloody violence, deserves credit as a key film. It anticipated elements like the importance of Chinese solidarity that would occur a year later in Bruce Lee’s first major Hong Kong film The Big Boss (1971) and King Boxer (1972) another multiethnic Shaw Brothers film directed by a Korean with a Chinese cast headed by Lo Lieh and Wang Ping, who had both appeared in The Chinese Boxer.
By this time, Wang Yu had broken his contract with Shaw Brothers and relocated to Taiwan, where he made films of varying quality, often formulaic conceptions, for the remainder of his career as a leading star. However, there were exceptions. In 1971, he scripted and directed One-Armed Boxer. Although shamelessly borrowing the main idea from One-Armed Swordsman, One-Armed Boxer was also a development of themes initially explored in The Chinese Boxer. This time a noble Chinese school faces competition from a rival one. Defeated in combat by the sifu of star pupil Liu Li-Tung (Wang Yu), the embittered loser imports a multiethnic group of fighters including two Thai boxers, a lama, deadly Sikh, and a Japanese fighter with fangs resembling Count Dracula (an image that may well have inspired Run Run Shaw to launch The Legend of the 7 Golden Vampires). Losing his arm in combat with this character, Liu Lu-Tang recuperates and learns from an old training manual how to use his other arm. Fully regaining his powers, he challenges the villains to battle in a quarry resembling the one from the opening scenes of The Chinese Boxer and ends the film restoring Chinese honor against all other national adversaries.
Scripted and directed by Wang Yu, Beach of the War Gods (1972) in Stephen Teo’s words, “offers a kind of coda to the passing of the old genre” (Teo 1997: 108) in being the swordfight movie to end all swordfight movies. Set in the Ming Dynasty period of 1556, it again deals with the theme of Japanese invasion, now placed in historical times. First seen in long shot as a solitary figure walking along a deserted beach, Wang Yu’s Hsia Feng again evokes his Eastern appropriation of Clint Eastwood’s Italian Western hero. But, unlike Eastwood and one of Feng’s future allies (a critique of Eastwood, perhaps?), he is not in it for money but to protect a vulnerable village from Japanese aggression. Clearly indebted to Kurosawa’s Seven Samurai (1954) as well as other international remakes of that film, Beach of the War Gods is really a film featuring every weapon every seen in a swordplay movie as well as representing a “last hurrah for chivalry” of the swordplay movie by featuring extended combat sequences one lasting as long as twenty minutes (Teo 1997: 108–109).4 As the film ends, Feng defeats his most dangerous foe in bloody combat. The villagers rush after the fleeing Japanese, leaving Feng standing erect momentarily before falling to the ground.
In these Taiwanese films, Wang Yu’s heroes either die or defeat their enemies, who inflict bloody wounds upon them. A masochistic dimension is common to both his Hong Kong and Taiwanese films, but it operates in different ways. Whereas Tony Rayns sees the star as trapped by the star persona Chang Cheh constructed for him, leading to the failure of his attempts “insofar as his subsequent work remained locked within precisely the same syndrome,” certain variations occur in his later screen career that suggest attempts to resolve the dilemma of the masochistic hero (Rayns 1980: 99). Whereas films such as The Sword continue the process begun by Chang Cheh interrogating the psychological instability of the martial arts hero (The Assassin, Golden Swallow), others attempt either to find some resolution of this dilemma or focus indirectly upon the institutional forces that cause such dilemmas.
In One-Armed Boxer vs. The Flying Guillotine (a.k.a. Master of the Flying Guillotine), a sequel to One-Armed Boxer written and directed by Wang Yu in 1975, the hero’s energies are directed less towards bloody masochism than in a patriotic direction, continuing motifs found in The Chinese Boxer. Set in 1730, the film pits Wang Yu’s hero against the blind, but deadly, master of the flying guillotine who enlists a Thai boxer and Indian fighter in his entourage in much the same way as the renegade sifu of the earlier film. Although the patriotic motif may seem a cop-out from the dark explorations of the Chang Cheh films, it develops some of the positive nationalistic aspects of the Chinese martial arts tradition initially seen in One-Armed Boxer. Wang Yu’s sifu looks after his students, using them only to prevent the barefooted Thai boxer from escaping a heated floor during combat, and then dismissing them to fight the deadly master on his own. Unlike Chang Cheh, Wang Yu develops the philosophical dimensions of Chinese martial arts. He realizes that neither escape nor reliance on the technical abilities of kung fu can ensure victory. Other methods are important. One of these is espousing the values of the defeated Ming Dynasty against the occupying forces of the Ching and their foreign allies.
Return of the Chinese Boxer, produced and directed by Wang Yu in 1975, shows the hero defeating Japanese ninjas by superior kung fu skills. Set in the Ching dynasty it deals with Japanese territorial designs on China, and contains a line ominously foreshadowing Japanese commercial exploitation in the next century. “Greater Prosperity, that’s what we want for both of us.” Despite its patchy nature, the film features several interesting innovations. Opening with a credit sequence demonstrating Jimmy Wang-Yu’s martial arts skills in a way similar to those of Jackie Chan are exhibited in Snake in the Eagle’s Shadow (1978), it contains many strokes of originality, such as the hero battling kung fu zombies and a climax evoking the hall of mirrors sequence in The Lady from Shanghai (1948) with identical waxwork images replacing the reflections in the original film. The hero, Sau Pai-lung (Wang Yu), easily overcomes the firepower deployed by his opponent, Black Crane, by employing waxwork dummies modeled on himself.
Although not ascribed to the star as director, two other Taiwanese films contain interesting variations on Wang Yu’s heroic role. In both Blood of the Dragon (1971) and The Invincible Sword (1972), he portrays variants on the lone swordsman who is let down in various ways by the representatives of institutional patriotic values. The first film sees him aiding a prince during the era of Mongol control of China by allowing him to escape the deadly machinations of treacherous prime minister. Like his earlier counterparts, he dies in bloody combat against his foes. However, the film contains certain ironies. Due to the treacherous techniques used by the prince in combat (resembling those of the evil school in One-Armed Swordsman) Lung Ti suffers a wound, making him as vulnerable as Cole Thornton in El Dorado (1966). Although he forgives the prince, recognizing him as a true patriot, this action does not affect his prowess but leads to a death that could be avoided, something that a young boy character (modeled on the Brandon de Wilde character in Shane) tearfully recognizes at the end. In The Invincible Sword, Wang Yu’s Ling Yu-fong’s patriotic efforts to save his beloved general from unjust execution come to nothing. After Ling Yu-fong gives his life to rescue the general, the latter decides to submit to the arbitrary customs of his society, rendering the final battle completely wasteful.
Directed by Gam Sing-yan (but sometimes credited to Wang Yu) with martial arts choreography by Liu Chia-Yung, One-Armed Chivalry Fights Against One-Arm Chivalry (Gam Sing-yan, 1977) typifies many of the formulaic productions Wang Yu made during his Taiwan period. Influenced not just by One-Armed Swordsman but also One-Armed Swordsmen, this film again offers two swordsmen for the price of one but this time supplying background information about their condition. “Disability” is too strong a word to use for the condition represented in this film since both Wang Yu’s character Chi Chu-Chang and his younger counterpart Lu Tien-Chu (Liu Chia-Yung) both make rapid recoveries following their respective losses – unlike the characters played by Wang Yu in One-Armed Swordsman and One-Armed Boxer. Set in the Ching Dynasty, Wang Yu plays the top fighter in the patriotic Kuang Wah Association who has to amputate his arm due to a poison dart inserted there by a treacherous female agent. This does not stop him killing all his adversaries as well as the key antagonist, who has engineered his entrapment by impaling him on a tree with his sword while the woman escapes. The film then moves into two complicated sub-plots. One deals with the machinations of Ching agent Pan Keung-yan trying to destroy Kuang Wah group unity by framing Chi for a crime he did not commit; the other deals with the vengeance quest of the younger one armed swordsman who is a survivor of a past family massacre engineered by Pan, who adopts a baby from the victim family as his own son – a plot motif borrowed from the Italian Western Seven Dollars on the Red (Alberto Cardone, 1966). After a series of complicated plot maneuvers the two brothers are reunited. Chi finally battles Ching mastermind Lord Hu Ta in an abandoned mill. This final sequence represents the type of climactic set-piece usual in Wang Yu’s Taiwanese films, but utilizes items such as a water sluice and flour, the type of everyday items that Jackie Chan will later use for his fights in 1980s Hong Kong films, in a highly effective manner. Unlike most of his Taiwan films, the wounded Chi tends his wounds after the death of Hu Ta and walks away to live and fight another day. Like El Cid, he passes from history into legend.
Although Wang Yu is often associated with period films, he has also made contemporary films throughout his career. While the intriguingly titled A Cookbook of Birth Control (Chen Hao, 1975) remains difficult to find, other films are not. In Yueh Feng’s Auntie Lan (1967), he plays the doomed fiancée of the title character in a film dealing with the serious problem of single parenthood in Hong Kong. Although he only appears during the first 33 minutes of the film, Wang Yu delivers a convincing performance of contemporary modern youth in a world torn between traditional and changing values. Shot in the same year as The Chinese Boxer (Wang Yu, 1970), Lo Chen’s My Son (1969) features Jimmy as a contemporary juvenile delinquent at odds with his detective father (Tien Feng) and torn between conflicting values paralleling those in his period films directed by Chang Cheh. Although Asia-Pol (Akinori Matsuo, 1967) belongs to the Hong Kong James Bond/Jane Bond cycle of imitations, it does contain certain interesting variations on well-known themes. Wang Yu plays adopted Japanese-Chinese agent Ming Hua. Set in exotic Tokyo, Hong Kong, and Macao locations, Asia-Pol blurs national boundaries by pitting Ming Hu against a Japanese-Chinese villain determined to ruin the Japanese economy in revenge for the abandonment of his Malayan-Chinese mother by her Japanese husband. Diverted from his flirtations with fellow agent Sachiko (modeled on Miss Moneypenny from the Bond films), Ming Hua arrives in Hong Kong too late to be reunited with his father but encounters his younger sister again before saving the Japanese economy by eliminating the villain and flying off to Bangkok with Sachiko for his next assignment. This is a very unusual Wang Yu film showing him equally at home in the modern day and wearing stylish suits. Thus his encounter with former James Bond George Lazenby now playing a villain in The Man from Hong Kong, directed by Brian Trenchard Smith is less unusual than it seems. As Hong Kong Inspector Fang Sing-leng, he not only gets to sleep with two different Caucasian females, thus breaking another screen taboo and doing something that Bruce Lee never did on screen, but also defeats Lazenby’s heavily armed, racist villain in unarmed combat.
The Man from Hong Kong could have been Wang Yu’s breakthrough film in the West, as Enter the Dragon was for Lee, but it never succeeded critically or commercially, possibly due to rapidly decreasing Western interest in kung fu films following the death of Bruce Lee. Other Hong Kong action stars such as Angela Mao Ying, Ti Lung, and David Chiang also faced problems in films designed for Western audiences at this time, as low-budget productions of Stoner (Huang Feng, 1974), and Hammer-Shaw Brothers co-production The Legend of the 7 Golden Vampires (Roy Ward Baker, 1974) all show. Despite such problems Wang Yu films remained popular with Eastern audiences until his star status declined, scandals in his personal life reached the headlines, and his lithe, body eventually changed, leading to his taking cameo or supporting roles in later films.
Many later Wang Yu films reflect memories of the Japanese Occupation of China, as seen in the villainous Japanese antagonists in films such as One-Armed Boxer, Ten Fingers of Steel (a.k.a. Screaming Ninja/The Screaming Tiger) (Kim Lung, 1973), and Knight Errant, but none of his films engage in gratuitous Jap-bashing. In Seaman No.7 (a.k.a. Wang Yu’s 7 Magnificent Fights) (Lo Wei, 1973), seaman Wang Hai-Lung stows away on a ship bound for Japan, is reunited with his Chinese cousins and defeats Japanese smugglers led by Golden Hair (played by Chinese actor James Tien!) with the aid of the Japanese police. Although many films reveal lingering memories of an unhappy historical period involving Chinese–Japanese relations, other films do realize the importance of now maintaining more positive connections. In Lo Wei’s A Man Called Tiger (1976), Jimmy’s character joins the yakuza in a search for his missing father parallel to that undertaken by heroine Maria Yi. Like Asia-Pol, the film touches on the complex nature of transnational associations that may explain why Wang Yu is also very popular in Japan, since, like Jackie Chan’s later explorations, he often deals with the changing nature of a developing global economy, challenging national definitions and relationships. Similarly, Lo Wei’s The Tattooed Dragon (1973) borrows motifs from his earlier Bruce Lee film The Big Boss to show again the exploitation of Chinese immigrants in Thailand. This time, they are helped by Jimmy’s wandering knight errant who, like the later Jackie Chan, will use whatever object is handy to confront his enemies such as a bench (paralleling Jimmy’ use of a fountain in a brothel in the 1972 Furious Slaughter) as well as re-employing the trick from an earlier film of wiggling his ear to detect the role of dice. This latter action is a key example of “the actor as auteur” since it occurs in films directed by two different directors.
Many innovative moments occur in the actor’s Taiwan films that make them interesting to watch but, unfortunately, many of his late 1970s and 1980s vehicles range from the mediocre to the bizarre, such as his role as Viet Cong guerilla war expert “Jimmy” involved in a plot masterminded by IRA terrorist George Lazenby and members of the Japanese Red Army to assassinate the Queen in A Queen’s Ransom (Ting Shan-His, 1976) and leading a team in Chu Yen-Ping’s aptly named Fantasy Mission Force (Chu Yen-Ping, 1979). However, several of these films show the actor re-employing his techniques as a former champion swimmer (as he does in My Son) in certain sequences seen in Four Real Friends (a.k.a. The Dragon Squad) (Wang Yu, 1976) and the extended underwater swimming battle in Deadly Silver Spear (a.k.a. The Silver Hermit from Shaolin Temple) (Sung Ting-Mei, 1977).
From 1980, following a series of scandals in Taiwan, one involving a charge of murder, Jimmy Wang Yu directed no more films and his appearances became sporadic (Chan and Yang 1998: 246, 248; Down 2001; Gendron).5 His period of stardom was now finally over. In 1984, he appeared as Black Hat in Chang Cheh’s Shanghai 13, reuniting the veteran director with many of the Shaw Brothers stars whose career he made possible such as Danny Lee, Ti Lung, David Chiang, Chen Kuan-tai, and two of the Five Deadly Venoms. 1986 saw him playing Master Wong, the father of the legendary Wong Fei-hong in Sammo Hung’s “Who’s Who in Hong Kong Cinema?” movie, The Millionaire’s Express. 1990 saw him working again with the bizarre Taiwanese director Chu Yen-Ping in Island of Fire, a prison drama bringing together Jackie Chan, Andy Lau, Sammo Hung, and Tony Leung Kar-fai in which he played the small, but significant, role of prison boss Kui/Lucas who ends up betrayed by the Sammo Hung character. Now aged, with a body no longer as slim as in his heyday, it was clear that his star period was over. Two years later he would appear in an even shorter role as a hired assassin in Chu Yen-Ping’s underrated Taiwanese crime film Requital (1992). Also in 1992, he delivered a convincing performance as the millionaire businessman father of Leon Lai in Ronny Yu’s melancholy comedy Shogun and Little Kitchen that revealed his capacity to move into supporting roles. Due to his breach of contract with Shaw Brothers, Wang Yu supposedly could not return to Hong Kong due to threat of legal action but a 2002 photo shows him together with Run Run Shaw in a photo taken at Chang Cheh’s funeral. Since Shaw Brothers were no longer making films and over 35 years had passed since the original incident perhaps Sir Run Run felt generous towards his former star, or perhaps the statute of limitations had passed? It is difficult to tell but Wang Yu was certainly not completely confined to Taiwan: he was in Hong Kong during the filming of The Man from Hong Kong.
Wing Shan’s Taiwanese production The Beheaded 1,000 (1993) could easily have been Wang Yu’s swansong. No longer portraying the young hero, he now plays elderly executioner Ren Detie in a film very much indebted to the Hong Kong Chinese Ghost Story series and featuring everyone’s favorite female ghost, Joey Wong. Set in the Ming Dynasty, Executioner Ren cannot enjoy the retirement he plans due to the vengeful activities of a clan he has executed years ago. Intending to save his daughter and future son-in-law, he decides to perform a deed of self-execution thus ensuring a positive karma when he will return to earth as a hero. However, his gracious deed receives a far greater reward when Ren becomes reincarnated into a spiritual hero who will pursue the cause of justice throughout eternity. Despite being overwhelmed by special effects, The Beheaded 1,000 revealed that the former actor-star was capable of delivering a dignified performance espousing the values of heroism and patriotism characteristic of his earlier roles but far removed from their tormented aspects.
The star persona of Wang Yu is less easy to define that that of either Jackie Chan or Bruce Lee since, due to its longevity, it exhibits several complexities. He began his career in the mid-1960s playing the young Confucian hero, before graduating to his best-known roles as the tormented hero of the Chang Cheh films, torn between duty and desire for a different life. Then, after becoming the first actor–director–star in Hong Kong cinema with The Chinese Boxer he relocated to Taiwan and became associated with many poor formula films and personal scandals. However, Wang Yu deserves greater recognition. His star status has always been transitional and never entirely fixed in the manner of his more prestigious contemporaries. Apart from one attempted breakthrough into Western audience recognition, he has always espoused a commercial cinematic vision of Chinese values whether patriotic or reflecting the tensions inherent within changing definitions of masculinity and their relationship to institutional values. Beginning his career as the dutiful Confucian hero of The Temple of the Red Lotus, he pioneered the role of the masochistic hero of the “heroic bloodshed” world of Chang Cheh in characters who displayed tensions between obedience to traditional codes and resentment against their imposition. It is not surprising that his recent appearance as the deadly master in Wu Xia sees him playing a variant of those patriarchal forces his younger self fought against in the formative years of his career.
Wang Yu’s stardom displays cultural tensions between restraint and rebellion (whether implicit or explicit). It is within these realms that his star significance lies, ones that should receive further exploration despite the varied, uneven achievements of an actor who is now approaching veteran status as a living legend in Hong Kong and Taiwanese cinema.