Vengeance!
Reviewed by Yves Gendron
The theme of vengeance lies at the very heart
of Hong Kong kung fu cinema. Heck, it was even dubbed "Cinema of Vengeance".
It is so completely prevalent in fact and so crudely applied at times that
it is usually taken as something of a derisive cliché even by the genre
regulars. It's your usual "You killed my father/brother/master NOW
YOU DIE". With this 1970 Shaw Brother pot boiler production titled well...
VENGEANCE, less levity would be in order however - as not only the theme
of vengeance is being displayed at its strongest and purest here but also
as the very first of the "Blood Brothers" movies by martial art cinema masterful
director Chang Cheh that paired David Chiang and Ti Lung. It's a major watershed
movie of the then nascent kung fu genre and remains a damn good movie to
this day.
In Shanghai during the days of the early Republic (1911-48), hot tempered
Peking Opera actor Kuan Yu-lou (Ti Lung) is infuriated by the sight of gang
boss Feng Kai-sheng (Ku Feng) flirting with his beautiful but flighty actress
wife and Kuan lets him know of his displeasure by ransacking the martial
art school Feng owns and beating-up his boys. In retaliation Feng plots Kuan’s
murder which is encouraged and sanctioned by all the local bigwigs - rich
man Chin Chieh-kuan, corrupt police captain Kao and the powerful local warlord
who has his own sights on Kuan's wife. Kuan is ambushed in a teahouse and
dies after a savage bloody battle. Shortly afterwards Kuan's brother Kuan-
Hou-yu (David Chiang) also a Peking Opera actor comes back from the south
with the steely resolve to avenge his brother’s death and he has the fighting
skills as well as the canniness to back-up his plans, with the help of his
love the beautiful Hua Chang-Feng (Wang Ping).
VENGEANCE could be rightfully considered as one
of Chang Cheh’s sharpest directorial efforts ever as he used the settings,
cinematography, music and sound effects to create a heavily claustrophobic,
tension-filled, moody atmosphere of gloom, menace and tragedy which regularly
explodes into action scenes of raw, furious mayhem, performed for the most
part as whirlwind like bloody operatic brawls. Occasionally however a sad
melancholic mood sets in with sweet jazz tunes for quiet, tender scenes between
David Chiang and his sweetheart. Chang makes ample use of graceful, lingering
camerawork such as pan and travelling, running across the scenery making
an organic whole of the entire space, which further increases both the tension
and the atmosphere. Chang however also used further stylistic tricks for
the same purpose. There are plenty of slow motions in the action scenes for
example. Halfway through Ti Lung’s ambush, the scene switches from colour
to black and white. Also during the ambush, there are impromptu flashbacks
of Ti Lung performing an opera fight where his character is grievously hurt
yet continued to fight on as he does in the teahouse ambush. All this contributes
to making the scene even more dramatically haunting.
Of course, the film’s appeal does not just lie in its cinematic gracefulness;
the intense charisma of its top performers is just as crucial. Furious, majestic,
Ti Lung first, then David Chiang and lets not forget Wang Ping who plays
the sweet yet determined Hua Cheng Feng, who flirts superbly in order to
get close to one of the killers. Both Ti Lung and Chang were sensibly different
heroes from their martial predecessor Wang Yu - much less stoic and far more
expressive. Chiang is especially - intense and grim certainly but with his
peculiar, slightly scholarly look and a floating mane of hair. Something
of an effete, romantic leading man, one however who unlike all other traditionally
wimpy characters of this sort could kick major ass, slit a throat or pierce
a heart without blinking. Yet for all his single-mindedness of purpose and
ruthlessness, he still was a tender, melancholic lover. In a way he was a
precursor to the likes of Tony Leung Chiu-wai as well as Leslie Cheung in
their action parts, except of course that unlike them his action skills were
real. Needless to say this was a new, fantastic novelty for the audience
at the time. Chiang won an acting award for his part in a regional film festival,
and it made him a top martial star during the first half of the seventies.
The movie may actually suffer from one drawback though - the plot is perhaps
a bit too convenient for the avenging hero, almost to the point of being
too obviously contrived. For example, after killing one of his targets in
a hotel David Chiang uses the elevator and the front entrance to get out
of the premise without much trouble even though his victim’s men swarmed
around all over the place. Also, a couple of characters are bluntly dispatched
once their narrative usefulness is ended so as to close a plot thread. The
film is also quite slowly paced at times with many moments of silences and
dramatic stops. Some may say that it makes the film a bit dull in places
but it does serve the purpose of increasing the dramatic tension and atmosphere.
At the time Chang Cheh made VENGEANCE, he already had nearly a dozen swordplay
films under his belt as well as a couple of gangster movies like DEAD END.
He then somehow mixed up the two together and thus created a new breed of
martial art movie the likes of which had never been seen before. It was not
quite a kung fu movie however (a term that would not get coined for two more
two years in the USA when the Bruce Lee movies were all the rage), more like
a prototypical version of it, with swords, daggers and hatchets instead of
fists and no emphasis on the fighting art in itself. It had many of those
characteristics however like a Republican era setting, an emphasis on raw
physical combats and the prominence of the vengeance theme. While vengeance
was indeed a major plot point in earlier martial movies, these tended to
be more like empowering fantasy where the stoic heroes stood-up and fought
back against oppressors.
With VENGEANCE however, perhaps for the first time, an angst-filled enraged
hero was aggressively going after an adversary who was the object of his
anger. Who these targets were in VENGEANCE was most significant: a gang boss,
a rich landowner, a corrupt police officer and a warlord. These types in
the good old Republican day tramped over the common people as if they were
only ants to be crushed and there is a crucial cathartic scene when the David
Chiang character has his foot on the neck of his top level enemy, and asks
him who he is. There can be no greater vindication/gratification for an avenging
hero then to force an oppressor to acknowledge him. And while the movie was
set in Republican times, it had a most contemporary ring to it with the notable
exception of the warlord. The sorts of villains VENGEANCE’ s hero had to
deal with - thugs, corrupt cops, rich people, were still alive and well within
modern Chinese society, making the need and catharsis for revenge quite intimately
felt by the viewing public.
VENGEANCE’ s tale prominently features Peking opera which is quite fitting
considering that with it’s mixture of operatic-like action and intense drama,
the film pretty much works as a sort of cinematic derivative of Peking opera
itself. That the Kuan brothers were opera actors was equally significant
as they went, in their actions, against the established tradition that actors
passively accepted oppression (tradition seen in such films as Chen Kaige’s
FARWELL MY CONCUBINE) and it created a link between the VENGEANCE protagonists
and the legendary sword heroes of the past featured in Chinese operas - a
point further emphasised of course by the flashbacks done during Ti Lung’s
ambush as well as David Chiang’s introductory scene.
At the beginning of this review VENGEANCE was actually called the first “blood
brothers” movie, which were a series of angst-filled, bloody martial dramas
by Chang Cheh pairing David Chiang and Ti Lung together, but actually that's
half the truth. Yes, Chiang and Ti Lung are in the same movie and do play
brothers but Ti Lung is dispatched 20 minutes into the movie and except for
a still photo and a brief flashback they have no scenes together. Regardless,
the film most definitively cemented Chang Cheh’s cinematic style and themes
with which he would continue for nearly a decade - well after his "blood
brothers" period was over - until the later part of the seventies with his
"Venom” films when his work would get more gimmicky than tragic heroic. But
because Ti Lung and Chiang were not together, instead of Chang Cheh’s usual
male bonding theme, Chiang’s crucial on screen relationship was with his
sweetheart. Contemporary western viewers may find these scenes where
the two are together quite slow and dull but they do anchor Chiang’s character
as a caring lover instead of a mere killing machine, and it enhance the drama
as the audience figures out that of course they are not destined to live
happily ever after.
VENGEANCE’s fight choreography is being credited partially to Chang Cheh
regular choreographer Tang Chia but instead of his usual partner Lau Kar-leung,
some fellow credited as Yuan Xiangen has taken his place. Where was Lau at
the time, who is this Yuan fellow (who doesn't seem to be credited anywhere
else) and if had any relationship with the famed Yuen clan is not know. Many
of the Yuen brothers can be actually glimpsed in the movie however including
Yuen Shun-Yi (a gambling henchman in the hotel hall), Yuen Woo Ping and Yuen
Cheung-yan (as uniformed guards), as well as a couple of unknown Yuens who
this reviewer did not recognise. Tang Chia and the Yuen brothers had
a special relationship as Tang was their fathers (famed Peking Opera performer
and future DRUNKEN MASTER titular character Simon Yuen Siu Tien) favourite
student and thus their own "elder brother". At least some of them, including
Yuen Woo-Ping, worked as his top assistant. Other recognisable faces are
the future "Charles Bronson of Asia" Chang Sing as a sniper, future kung
fu star Chen Kuan Tai seen sporting a moustache and guarding a door before
being killed, and future bad guy Fung Ark-onn as a henchmen at the very end
of the film.
In conclusion, it should be well remembered that
VENGEANCE is most definitively not like the balletic kung fu extravaganzas
created by Jackie, Sammo and the Venoms but feels more like the heroic bloodshed
movies that John Woo would do in the late eighties. Unfortunately, seventies
kung fu movies are not as well appreciated or remembered as heroic gun plays
and are to this day widely seen just as somewhat silly chopsockies by many.
A sole viewing of VENGEANCE however would be enough to convince nearly anyone
of the utter fancifulness of such presumptions. For no matter the age, the
poor preservation or the horrid dubbing that one may come across, the films
pure tragically dramatic heart as well as it's burning hot action are both
still so massively powerful to this day that even the most jaded contemporary
viewer ought to be quite engrossed by this movie as it truly deserves to
be.
Rating: 8.0