A Hero's Tears
Director: Li Chao-yung
Year: 1979
Rating: 5.0
Dubbed - badly
I can guarantee that you will never see a kung-fu flick with more massages
and more fake sunsets. Not to mention the screen turning bright red every
time the hero kills someone. There is also as one expects from a Taiwanese
kung-fu film a lot of action. Much of it fairly standard but in the end there
is an excellent sword match-up and the way it is filmed with people lunging
at the camera in rapid succession looks very cool. This at least isn't a
revenge film but a straight out assassin film to help a girl that he had
blinded by accident. Wait a second. Why does that sound familiar. Must be
my imagination.
I picked this one out of the millions of martial arts films on YouTube because
it stars Doris Lung Chun-erh who I saw a few weeks ago in Heroes of Shaolin
and I wanted to check her out in a few others. This wasn't exactly what I
was hoping for. She plays the blind girl and she is no Zatoichi - she has
no action scenes and does a lot of crying instead. She is the sister of Ling
Yun who blinded her years before and became a killer to support her. Ling
Yun was a big star at Shaw from 1964 till 1978 when his contract ran out
and he went independent. He was in a fair number of martial arts films but
I think he did better in contemporary settings such as Love Without End,
The Purple Shell, King Drummer or Dark Rendezvous but at Shaw everyone had
to do action and he was in some good ones.
It begins with him killing two men for reasons unknown - later we learn he
is a paid killer - and two times the screen goes dramatically red. He sends
a message to his next target - very polite of him I think - that he has three
days to live. The local massage boy decides he wants to follow Ling Yun (nicknamed
Three Days Left) because it is a good career change and so becomes a bodyguard
to the next victim and when Ling shows up he helps him. Turns out being a
masseuse is good training in kung fu. He is played by Bao Shao-feng. Never
heard of him? For good reason. He only appeared in one other film. Which
is odd because his acrobatic skills are quite good - and he looks so much
like Alexander Fu-sheng that you have to take a double look. He also basically
does kung-fu comedy so I wonder if he was being groomed but something went
wrong.
The plot is all over the place but in the end Ling realizes that his agent
is trying to kill him - played with evil glee by Chung Wah, another ex-Shaw
actor. There is also Lily Li Li-li who also gets no action in the film -
well none on her feet - plenty on her back as she sleeps with everyone. Ling
not only gets paid to kill people, he also gets paid by Lily to sleep with
her. Tough job. There are some strange set designs in the film - Lily's home
is all weird ravishing colors as is Chung's - clearly they hired the same
interior designer - and Doris's home in the middle of nowhere is like Shangra-la.
But plenty of action and a convoluted plot. Hopefully, my next Doris
film will have her partaking of some action.
