Aka - Hongxia
In a sense it is all here right from the beginning of wuxia or in this case
nuxia (female heroine). This silent film was released in 1929 as part of
a 16-film serial but apparently it is the only one to survive. In 1928 The
Burning of the Red Lotus Temple kicked off a wuxia craze that lasted until
the genre was banned by the Kuomintang in the early 1930s. Many of the Shanghai
film studios were producing wuxia films often based on literature going back
hundreds of years. The vast majority have been lost. This film is given credit
as the first female wuxia film or certainly the first of those that have
survived. It is directed by Wen Yimen and stars his wife Fan Xuepeng as the
Red Heroine. Obviously, wuxia and film technology has come a long ways since
1929, but much of what came to be standard in the genre is present here.
Flying, martial arts, magic, catching arrows and throwing them back, special
effects, the knight-errant and the hermit master taking on a student for
the sake of revenge. In this case a female though. Asia the Invincible can
be traced back to Red Heroine.
There is a copy of this up on YouTube with a soundtrack composed specifically
for it that is quite good if at times a bit modernistic - ie surf music.
The intertitles are interesting - they are bilingual and perhaps from the
original release as the English is quite poor. And two times in the film
a letter is shown - first in Chinese and then morphs into English. This seemingly
was to some extant common in the 1920 Shanghai films. The print is watchable
if often washed out. Besides the interesting historical aspects, it isn't
a bad plot with warlords, conquest, refugees on the run, women in bikinis,
forced marriage, revenge and much filial devotion. The wuxia for the
most part doesn't appear till the final 20-minutes of a 90-minute film -
till then it is a melodrama.
It begins with a man running through the street of a small village warning
everyone that the Warlord's army is coming and for them to run away. It is
an epic scene of villagers fleeing and the army chasing them. Except for
the young woman Yun Mei who refuses to leave her elderly blind grandmother.
A neighboring family tries to convince her to come with them but she won't
go. Finally, a cousin picks up the grandmother and they all run into the
chaos ahead. The grandmother falls to the ground and is trampled to death.
Yun Mei is captured by the army and taken to the Warlord's home where he
plans to make her an addition to his harem of bikini clad women. She is saved
by an old hermit named White Monkey who is the one who catches an arrow and
throws it back killing the archer. When she discovers that her grandmother
has died, Yun Mei wants to kill herself, but White Monkey asks her "Wouldn't
you rather get revenge?" "How could I?" "I will teach you".
And she disappears from the film for nearly 45 minutes. Or three years according
to the film. In the meantime, the village people have returned to their homes
including the neighbors who tried to help her. The Warlord is now a General
in the army (the period of the film is hard to discern but before guns) and
he still has an eye for the ladies. He accuses the father of the family of
treason in order to get the daughter to marry him. She agrees and is deflowered
- but he still plans on executing the father. Time for the Red Heroine to
show up, now a master of martial arts and flying. In the original print,
they painted her in red. In the end like the Lone Ranger, she says farewell
and flies away.
