Amazing 'Grace': Chinese martial arts films

By Kenneth Turan

Feb. 27, 2003 12 AM PT

Times Staff Writer

When I think of Chinese martial arts films, my mind goes not to a director like King Hu or a star like Jackie Chan or Bruce Lee or even to Ang Lee’s breakthrough “Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon,” which gave the genre a worldwide presence. I think instead of a waiter whose name I never learned in a hotel restaurant in the Chinese city of Kaifeng, where I spent a few days in the early 1980s.

The waiter did not speak English and, as is often the case in places that deal with foreign tourists, did not seem especially pleased to be taking my order. But when I pointed to a beverage on the bilingual menu, his face broke into a wide smile of instinctive understanding and complicity. For what I’d selected as a kind of unspoken tribute to martial arts cinema was a drink called Shaolin Cola, named after the Chinese monastery that was a legendary repository of secret fighting knowledge.

“Ah, Shaolin,” the waiter said, immediately dropping his pad and going into an elaborate comic burlesque of martial arts moves right in the middle of the restaurant, something that made me laugh and him laugh even harder. For the next few days, I ordered Shaolin Cola with every meal, each time eliciting the same moves and the same pleasure at an unexpected shared enthusiasm across a wide lingual and cultural divide.

“Heroic Grace: The Chinese Martial Arts Film,” the unprecedented five-years-in-the-making UCLA Film and Television Archive series that opens Friday, is a chance to do many things, not the least of which is to share the joy of these exhilarating films, which bring visual poetry, acrobatics and athletic grace to a fighting world. Joining myth, drama, pageantry, ritual and style to an exuberant physicality of action, they represent pure cinema in an irresistible form.

The series is also an opportunity for even the most washed-in-the-blood fans to see something that’s been elusive for two decades: new 35-millimeter prints, digitally remastered and freshly subtitled, of classic films from the library of the colossus of Hong Kong studios, Shaw Brothers. Until the recent sale of their films to Celestial Pictures, the Shaws point-blank refused to have their output screened theatrically overseas; even a personal request by Prince Charles on behalf of London’s National Film Theater was, or so the story goes, turned down flat.

Helped by a thoughtful catalog underwritten by the Hong Kong Economic & Trade Office (which is sending many of these films on a 15-city tour), “Heroic Grace” is also an opportunity for those whose familiarity with the martial arts world doesn’t go much further than Jackie Chan to fill in the gaps in their knowledge. Everything from “Crouching Tiger” to Hollywood’s favorite martial arts choreographers can be put into cultural and historical perspective. Even John Woo, a big-budget studio action director of choice, got his start directing this kind of film, and as catalog editor David Chute reminds us, Woo “has often said that the self-sacrificing gangsters in ‘A Better Tomorrow’ and ‘The Killer’ were really wuxia in modern drag.”

Wuxia, the Chinese name for this kind of film is usually translated as knight-errant or martial chivalry, a generic catch-all phrase pressed into service because, as one authority puts it, it’s “the least misleading of several possible translations.” It refers to a hero, or paladin -- think Richard Boone’s Paladin in TV’s “Have Gun Will Travel” -- who combines exceptional fighting skill with a moral compass that insists he, or she, must always do the right thing.

In fact, it’s been one of the characteristics of this world from the very beginning that women are just as likely as men to be possessed of exceptional combat moves. The central delight of these films, whether they feature realistic hand-to-hand kung fu fighting or more magical sword and sorcery duels, is watching individuals with jaw-dropping reflexes and astounding skills holding their own against a dozen attackers or facing off against each other.

Not only do these well-matched adversaries often compliment each other (“You’re quite nimble”/ “You’re not so bad yourself”), they have so much control of their qi, or life force, that they’ve acquired powers on the order of flying and directing energy beams that seem to Western eyes to be next door to supernatural.

These paladins operate in a scruffy, hard-scrabble, anarchic universe that shares characteristics with everything from American westerns to Japanese samurai films of the 1960s, a cross-pollination that led to items like “The One-Armed Swordsman,” a riff on the celebrated Japanese Zatoichi series.

If you see enough Chinese martial arts films, the genre’s conventions start to take on the look of old friends. For instance:

* The protagonists, though they operate in a dusty, Godforsaken world, invariably wear spotless, immaculately pressed clothing that looks like it just came from the dry cleaner.

* If a weaving drunk enters the scene, it’s as likely as not that he is a martial arts master who either drinks as a disguise or because he is disgusted by the pressures engendered by the exercise of his great skill.

* Poisoned darts with names like “the seven-star needle” are often the villain’s weapon of last resort. Antidotes are invariably hard to come by, and sometimes the only intimacy hero and heroine are allowed to share is sucking the poison out of an otherwise fatal wound.

* Those villains, who are often foreign aggressors like the Manchus or the Mongols or corrupt authority figures like renegade abbots or degenerate eunuchs, are liable to have greater martial arts skill than the good guys, who have to use morality and strategic thinking to win the day.

The key thing to keep in mind about these wuxia tales is how deeply rooted they are in Chinese history and tradition. Similar heroes have been noted in Chinese literature from time immemorial; as Sam Ho notes in the catalog, “He is a figure deeply ingrained in the Chinese psyche. He is our Robin Hood, our knight-errant, our ronin samurai and our Westerner, all rolled into one. And he is over 2,000 years old.”

Even if you didn’t know this, it’s virtually impossible to watch these films and not to intuit the complexity and longevity of the universe in which they exist. The integrity of Chinese martial arts movies flows directly from the strength of the tradition they are rooted in. Not surprisingly, the modern versions of the stories that became films were first published early in the 20th century, when China was at its weakest and desperate for heroes.

Though silent martial arts films were made in Shanghai as early as 1925, few of them survive because both Westernizers and Communists considered them vulgar, anti-progressive crowd-pleasers. UCLA is showing two of the survivors, both episodes of multipart serials featuring female protagonists, with a modern music accompaniment provided by KCRW deejay Ann Litt.

“Swordswoman of Huangjiang” (1930) features a battle with a monster bird that looks suspiciously like a refugee from “Sesame Street,” while “Red Knight-Errant” has a heroine who flies through the air as well as a supporting cast that incongruously includes numerous women in abbreviated two-piece bathing costumes.

Also of historical interest is 1949’s “The Story of Wong Fei-hung,” an early post-war kung fu movie from Hong Kong based on the life of a celebrated herbalist and friend of the common people whose saga proved so popular that nearly 100 sequels followed in this film’s wake.

Those interested in Woo’s early career can take a look at his 1979 “Last Hurrah for Chivalry.” More interesting is “Vengeance!,” a 1970 film for which Woo was an assistant director. Directed by Woo’s mentor, Zhang Che, it’s known for a bravura set piece intercutting an actor’s death on stage with his real life slow-motion murder in a tea house, a scene that Woo himself paid homage to in his later “Hard Boiled.” Incidentally, the film’s scenes of a Beijing opera recital show how much that style of performance influenced the martial arts world.

The UCLA series opens at the Writers Guild Theater with one of the series’ two Shaolin-themed films, “Executioners From Shaolin.” (There were to be three Shaolin films, but Miramax, as mercurial as any Manchu ruler, pulled “Shaolin Temple” after the schedule was printed). Directed by Lau Kar-leung and tentatively set to be introduced by Quentin Tarantino, “Executioners” features a charming wedding night sequence in which the hero finds out that his “Tiger” technique is no match for his bride’s mastery of the “Crane.”

“The 36th Chamber of Shaolin” is also directed by Lau Kar-leung, who had a hand in the martial arts directing in both films. “Chamber” devotes almost a third of its running time to the rigors an apprentice monk must go through on the way to learning the secrets of Shaolin. Compared to this, Navy SEAL training is something for the Brownies.

Trivia collectors will want to know that director Lau is a third-generation disciple of the real-life herbalist and friend of the common people Wong Fei-hung and that star Lau Kar-fai is set to play the villain in Tarantino’s upcoming “Kill Bill.”

“Heroic Grace” has opted not to screen the most celebrated and most widely seen of vintage martial arts films, King Hu’s “A Touch of Zen,” but it is showing the director’s terrific first two martial ventures, 1966’s “Come Drink With Me” and 1967’s “Dragon Inn.”

Both films showcase the elegance, acrobatic vigor and sense of wide-screen choreography King Hu brought to the genre. “Dragon Inn” has a marvelous villain, a eunuch of overwhelming powers; “Come Drink With Me” features the popular Zhang Peipei in a splendid role as a woman warrior who spends the first part of the film pretending to be a man. Those with sharp eyes will recognize Zhang as evil governess Jade Fox in “Crouching Tiger” 35 years later and see Jackie Chan as one of a group of young urchins.

Two of the most energetic and entertaining films of the series were directed by Chu Yuan, a filmmaker little known in the West. “Killer Clans” is a marvel of treachery, intrigue and atmosphere that features hidden chambers, secret weapons and characters who introduce themselves by asking, “Are you swordsman Li, who shook nine states and killed 108 in a single night?” With martial arts choreography partially by Yuen Cheung-yan, who went on to “Charlie’s Angels,” this 1976 film is one of the ones that Ang Lee said inspired him in the making of “Crouching Tiger.”

Wild as “Killer Clans” is, 1972’s “Intimate Confessions of a Chinese Courtesan” is crazier still. It’s a delirious exercise in controlled hysteria as a newly enslaved prostitute learns both martial arts and sexual skills from the lesbian madam who loves her so much she first has her caned and then licks the blood from her wounds.

Elaborate costumes share the screen with soft-core sensuality and a parade of dirty old men in this baroque fantasy version of an abused woman’s revenge fantasy a la “Ms. 45.” Would that waiter in Kaifeng have enjoyed it as much as I did? A cold bottle of Shaolin says the answer is yes.

‘Heroic Grace: The Chinese Martial Arts Film’

UCLA Film and TV Archive series: “Heroic Grace”

Friday -- 7:30 p.m.

“Executioners From Shaolin”

Opening night screening hosted by Quentin Tarantino, Writers Guild Theater, 135 S. Doheny Drive (at Wilshire Boulevard), Beverly Hills. Parking $2.75 in the lot on Doheny just north of the theater.

Where: All other screenings will be at James Bridges Theater, 1409 Melnitz Hall UCLA campus, Westwood

Parking: On-campus lots, $7

Info: (310) 206-3456 or www.cinema.ucla.edu.

Saturday -- 7:30 p.m.

“Killer Clans”

“The Six-Fingered Lord of the Lute, Part I”

Sunday -- 7 p.m.

“Red Heroine”

“Swordswoman of Huangjiang”

Monday -- 7:30 p.m.

“From the Highway”

“Story of Wong Fei-hung, Part I”