THE MAGNIFICENT CHANG CHEH: THE MAGNIFICENT TRIO [1966] and MAGNIFICENT WANDERERS [1977]

Magnificent Wanderers, The Magnificent Trio (1966, 1977)
Directed by: Chang Cheh
Written by: Chang Cheh, Chiang Tzu-Nan, Eizaburô Shiba, Gin'ichi Kishimoto, Hideo Gosha, Li Yung-Chang
Starring: Alexander Fu Sheng, David Chiang, Jimmy Wang Yu, Kuan-Chun Chi, Lei Cheng, Li Yi-Min, Lo Lieh, Ping Ching

THE MAGNIFICENT CHANG CHEH: THE MAGNIFICENT TRIO [1966] and MAGNIFICENT WANDERERS [1979]

HONG KONG

AVAILABLE ON BLU-RAY. NOW, from EUREKA ENTERTAINMENT

REVIEWED BY: Dr Lenera

THE MAGNIFICENT TRIO [1966]

AKA BIAN CHENG SAN XIA

RUNNING TIME: 108 mins

Three men – Gao Bao-shi, his son Gao-Ji-xian and a friend Li Chu-yen – kidnap Wei Wen-chen, the daughter of tyrannical magistrate Wei Huai-Yuan who’s causing poverty with his excessive taxation. The villagers have prepared a petition to give to Minister Yuan who’s soon going to be visiting, but Wei only tightens his grip further and recruits a motley crew of bandits, assassins  and a martial arts expert named Huang Liang to get his daughter back. Into this situation wanders Lu Fang, a swordsman who’s just returned from battle but, despite wanting some rest, is increasingly drawn in to helping the villagers. When the two eventually meet, Huang quickly recognises Lu as a fellow soldier from the frontier and joins him in opposing Wei, who’s prepared to resort to cruel means….

So we’re back with even more films from Shaw Brothers head director Chang Cheh, and it’s been an interesting and fulfilling adventure so far. Cheh may have churned them out on the Shaws assembly line, but he was seemingly always able to maintain a level of quality which he often exceeded. So will these next two continue the trend? I’d actually seen and owned the first on video many years ago, back when us Hong Kong movie fans had to resort to obtaining bootleg copies of many films. However, I distinctly recall that it was a much shorter version, with a lot of the dialogue scenes shortened or removed, and it seemed disjointed even back then. Cutting a slow-moving film down so it becomes a more fast-moving one often doesn’t work, because the rhythm has been mucked about with. The Magnificent Trio, a remake of the Japanese Three Outlaw Samurai [which I chose not to see in the course of preparing for this review to avoid the temptation of relying a lot on comparisons], is Cheh’s oldest surviving martial arts film, and was made before the kung fu boom, when swordplay movies were king though rarely released in the West and their stories were told in quite a leisurely way, with action not as central and melodrama taking up more time. Jimmy Wang Yu, before he made it big with The Chinese Boxer, starred in several of these, the most famous and influential being The One-Armed Swordsman, which began his odd obsession with playing one-armed fighters. I can’t say if this is the best, but it’s probably typical – which of course means to say that it’s definitely good. The longwinded handing of the quite involved plot allows it be properly breathe and isn’t hard to become used to, while the fights are fine going by the standards of the time.

Our trio get a “magnificent” introduction. We first see a burning Ming dynasty flag being lowered to be replaced by the Ching dynasty flag courtesy of our three, who are then seen running towards the screen in slow motion. Is us knowing that Cheh was homosexual the reason for their being a slight homoerotic feel to this? We see the trio battling soldiers, some of whom are whipping some prisoners, before we get a lovely shot of Wang Yu’s character Lu walking towards some mountains with the sun rising behind one of them, all set to rousing music which I didn’t recognise but which screams classic Hollywood. Inside a nearby house, three men have just kidnapped a woman. Lu picks up a gold hairpiece and puts it down his top, then goes and confronts the capturers, who are the chief of the local village Gao Bao-shi, his son Gao-Ji-xian and a friend Li Chu-yen. They explain to him; “the Imperial Court has exempted us from paying taxes but the county magistrate keeps pressuring us to pay”. People are getting poorer and poorer and these men have kidnapped Wei Wen-chen, the daughter of Wei Huai-Yuan, as leverage to get the cruel magistrate to change. Wei Huai-Yuan is obviously angry and orders Master Xin to take some men and “show these scoundrels no mercy”. Xin wants skilled martial artist Yan Zi-quin to come but Yan thinks that “Master Qian and his men will suffice” and isn’t too happy with the order anyway, being there “to protect, not kill”, while maid Wu Jing-Li is worried because Gao Ji-xian is her friend. Meanwhile Lu learns that people in other villagers couldn’t pay and were taken away and killed, and says he’ll leave tomorrow and tell Minister Yuan if he sees him, but is drawn into staying when Xin, Quin and their gangs of soldiers turns up.

Lu quickly dispatches one bunch with his sword and the other flees, in the first and briefest of the film’s fights. Wei Huai-Yuan decides to recruit an array of dodgy and dangerous folk. All this has already been taken a quite a stately pace, and now we get a portion that goes on for ages, the main bad guys talking about extra villains they could recruit, then some of these miscreants arriving, bickering and one even trying to kill someone but getting quickly dispatched by Yan/ He has a ladyfriend called Xiao Qing with whom he’s having an intimate relationship with, but is clearly troubled judging by her saying to him “I don’t want you to get drunk and angry”. Another supposed villain is Huang Liang, but upon seeing Lu joins the side of good because they both served together, in a scene that could have come across as silly but which just about works. The three kidnappers are having food sent to them provided by Jing Jiang, Gao Bao-shi’s daughter, but unfortunately the guy who brings it, Gao-Ji-xian’s brother, is killed by Liang. When Gao Ji-xian hears the news he cries for a long time, in a good example of a scene which a martial arts film from the following decade would either not show or not linger on considering that this isn’t one of the main characters, but which is shown and emphasised here because that was the convention. We can say that this epitomises the way the film moves slowly, but we can also say that it’s nice that we’re allowed to really be invited to care here, elsewhere even more when the bound Wei Wen-chen is offered a drink, then Lu has Gao Bao-shi quickly consume the first food he’s had in ages right in front of her “But you live in luxury feeding on these poor people” says Lu, and her tears flow. A powerful scene, yet without melodramatic excess, that show’s what this story is most about.

Unsurprisingly things heat up more and more, the bad guys eventually deciding to also kidnap a lady and Lu then offering himself to be whipped one hundred times instead of somebody else. Wang Yu in these films tended to be a noble, not to mention very serious, with not a sign of cockiness in sight, and I think I prefer him in this mode, even if the other might be truer to how he really was. He then spends some time out of action while others are given the opportunity to shine, while the plot brings in more romantic entanglements and, as was already common in Shaws movies, deaths – and often of people whom we like. Clarity remains, because we’ve been allowed time to fully take in everything. Action-wise it’s really disappointing relatively early on when Wang Yu and Lo Lieh’s characters meet, clash swords for a few seconds, then leap into the air – and that’s it, both retreating. We really wanted to see the two going at it, though of course later films fulfilled that itch. After this, there’s almost no fighting until Cheng Lui gets to battle loads of soldiers several times and even cauterise an arrow wound, though of course we’re just as excited as to when Leih’s character will totally break away from evil. The climactic battle, as the three fight against great odds, is as exciting as we want it to be, though with little of the Cheh blood that later became almost a trademark. The rougher, less complexly choreographed nature of the swordplay – with a bit of spear action and lots of butterfly knives flying – seems rather realistic until we get the odd and to be honest rather intrusive shot of somebody or two people leaping into the air. Tony Kai and Lau Kar-leung did the honours here, their first of many for Cheh.

I’ve thought for some time that the talents of Lieh were underused. Sure, he was often cast, though usually as bad guys despite his leading role as King Boxer which was the first martial arts movie that made an impact in the West. His role here, as a villain who’s increasingly uncomfortable with his position, is one which he really seems to delve into, even though it has a lot of other subplots to compete with. In terms of expressivity he emphasises restraint, but it works, and Lieh also gets a decent amount of time with his character’s romantic interest, unlike Wang Yu, where we’re expected to believe in a very strong man/woman connection very quickly. But then we’re also supposed to believe that another lady, in a film containing several females who are all important to the story, can quickly fall for the guy who killed her husband. Nonetheless the plot becoming increasingly centred on a difficult father/daughter relationship is really involving, and the wordless conclusion has a rather strong emotional effect, helped immensely by Wang Yu showing some considerable emotion in a restrained fashion – which of course to some of us makes it more moving.  while what we’re really seeing is a father/daughter relationship conclude itself in the most bitter of ways. The bittersweet finale is filmed mostly in long distance shots which may have been a result of necessity yet still has the desired effect. Elsewhere Cheh,  despite his style not really worked out yet [no snap zooms!] is generally already pretty assured, despite a very large amount of out of focus shots, which are probably not cinematographer Wang Yung-Lung’s fault considering how quickly these films were made, which makes it easier to appreciate things such as pans from a garden into the interior of a house. And there’s a great example of how beautiful Shaws sets could sometimes be, the exterior of a house with a watermill constantly on the go; it’s almost ethereal.

Music-wise credited composer Wang Fu-ling supplies the right cues in the right places. The three romantic pieces back up the three romances without overdoing matters, while Tchaikovsky’s Swan Lake is heard during one powerful moment. We could have done with a recurring heroic main theme though. Nonetheless The Magnificent Trio, despite containing one really daft story element – a letter that floats down a river without smudging hardly any of the ink – is one of those films that might disappoint for the first quarter or so but increases in richness as things go along, and end up being a rather rich and fulfilling viewing experience.

SPECIAL FEATURES

Original Mandarin mono audio 

New audio commentary by East Asian film expert Frank Djeng (NY Asian Film Festival) and martial artist and filmmaker Michael Worth
“This magnificent audio commentary”, as it’s jokingly introduced by Djeng, is a typically fine one from him and Worth, who really have developed a great chemistry, something which allows them to joke around a little while providing us with lots of information. Djeng tells us about Cheh’s first martial arts movie Tiger Boy which is lost but which we’d very much like to see, what with the actors doing their own choreography! The story of actress Margaret Tu Chuan [Chieh Ying] is very sad; she and a girlfriend killed themselves only three years after this film, and her wish that they be buried together wasn’t fulfilled. Interesting also that recorded box office of Hong Kong films only began in 1969, so Djeng is unable to tell us how well it did. Meanwhile Worth really gets into the filming style, noticing for example that characters sometimes move about pointlessly while talking so things are less static, and that Cheh already likes to start scenes on a cut. He also suggests a different potential conclusion for one particular character which made me chuckle.

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MAGNIFICENT WANDERERS [1977]

AKA JIANG HU HAN ZIANG

RUNNING TIME: 98 mins

Three con men Lin Shao You, Guan Fei and reluctant companion Shi Da are struggling to make ends meet. At the moment Lin is pretending to be a fortune teller but little money is made despite the rather persuasive manner with which Guan gets him customers. It’s during the time of the Mongol rule, and the Mongol Prince hears that wealthy swordsman Chu Te-Sa is spending time with and probably funding rebels from attacks on tax collectors, so orders his arrest. Lin, Guan and Shi are accidentally mistaken for merchants by Chu who’s holding a meeting with a number of seeming supporters. However, they fun at the first sign of trouble and only really want his money. However, Lin, Guan and Shi can also fight, so Chu soon has some allies who are actually trustworthy and useful….

Eureka almost always put these sets of two or three films together with titles that nicely contrast each other. This one is very much a case in point, with Magnificent Wanderers being a very different viewing experience to The Magnificent Trio. The 1966 effort was a serious and densely plotted affair; this one is a silly comedy kung fu movie with a very simple plot. Technically it’s also a Venom film, with three of the Venom Mob appearing in it, though if you’re a fan don’t get too excited; they’re only in cameo parts, the real stars being David Chiang, Alexander Fu Sheng, Yi-Min Li and Chi Kuan-Chun As is often the case with Hong Kong humour, the laughs are generally very unsophisticated, and here relying on a fair bit of repetition of gags. Nonetheless I was kept smiling as our pretty goofy good guys – with the exception of Chiang – pit not just their skills but also their wits against extremely goofy bad guys, a setup which means that we don’t fear the villains at all for all the talk of executing people. Cheh and his two screenwriters Chiang Tzu-Nan Chiang and Li Yung-Chang Li obviously set out to create something a bit different. Even though the comedy martial arts craze hadn’t began yet, there had already had been a fair amount of fight movies full of laughs; however, they usually still contained some serious elements, such as a death for a hero to avenge. Here, nobody on the side of good dies at all. The chuckles are also mingled into the fights very well too, though the latter are rather short except till near the end. And we are by now well into the portion of Cheh’s career where women, in comparison with the previous film, barely appear at all.

As usual we get some cool titles, here cutouts of our four heroes flashing up on the screen against differently colour tinted backgrounds fighting soldiers. This time the music is lighter, which is appropriate though it’s also perhaps overly contemporary in feel. We meet Lin Shao You, Guan Fei and their somewhat reluctant companion Shi Da on the street, trying to make some money. Lin ducks behind a table to reappear sporting a truly fake-looking beard, then Guan accosts a passerby, even pushing him towards the table and hitting him on the back of the head to make him want to have his fortune told. “Today, the heavens will fall and then you’ll want to be here” says Lin, and sure enough the man senses a sign from above, which is actually Guan jumping over him. However, the evening’s takings aren’t great, partly because Shi doesn’t cheat. We’re in the time when the Mongols ruled China, so now we switch to the court of the Prince, as he’s known in the English dub; as usual when such a soundtrack is available, I watched the majority of the film with that soundtrack. He’s with his incompetent underlings Lu Bo-Hua and Zhu Da-Cheng, and things aren’t going great because tax collectors keep getting robbed. The person who’s probably responsible for this is kung fu expert Chu Te-Sa, who’s both rich and suspected of conspiring with rebels. He’s first seen fondling his balls, or some of them; he goes around with lots of little gold ones which he keeps in a belt and either fires them from a bow or just throws them. Re-used in The Crippled Avengers, they’re are an ununsual weapon because it’s hard to actually kill with them, even though Chu’s introduction sees him knock out four teeth with a couple of them.

Lin and his companions have earned just enough money to go and eat at the Man Yu restaurant which also doubles as a brothel, so they set off, but once there the manager isn’t pleased to see their kind there and threatens to kick them out. Lin understandably doesn’t take kindly to this and it seems like a fight’s going to break out until a saviour appears, Chu., who’s hired out a private room to have a meeting with a number of merchants. Chu mistakes them for merchants and invites them to join him. Of course the three accept, though of course all they really want to do is eat loads. The merchants agree to help him because they’re “honourable men”, but they all make excuses and leave as soon as some soldiers turn up to arrest them. Chu is in the position of being able to offer money for him not to be taken away, but he’s turned down. However, he, plus Lin, Guan and Shi Da, make a break for it in the first of the film’s fight scenes and one of the best. Chu kips with the others; unfortunately soldiers take all the treasure he’d amounted – well actually they didn’t, it was actually stones that they found, the treasure having been hidden somewhere else, though it’s now being denied to him by the person with whom he stored it with. Said treasure becomes virtually the centre of things for a while, treasure which of course was taken from people – those lowest-of-the-low types we know as tax collectors – for a good cause. Chu was being a real Robin Hood-type, robbing from the rich to give to the poor. Will our trio of con-artists join the cause? I’m sure that you know the answer to that particular question, yet the plotting isn’t bad for what’s an essentially such a straightforward tale.

The action, done again by Tony Kai and Lau Kar-leung, is pretty smooth and incorporates humour rather well. Obviously Chiang has to remain noble with a cheeky glint in his eye, but he’s so good at doing this we can hardly complain,  and of course here he has golden balls. However, Alexander Fu Sheng, who usually has a spear, Philip Kwok and Li Min-yi are all given the opportunity to goof around as well as fighting – and while they fight. Of course Fu Sheng is playing a typical character for him really, very much in the Jackie Chan mold before Chan became huge, and gets a bit more fighting than the others, though some might say that Li steals the show with his amazing acrobatics which are only very occasionally doubled. The first melee in the restaurant sees all four fight loads of soldiers inside and outside, and it’s properly exciting while emphasising the silly side of things; we see nose pinching, a spear that miraculously wedges itself between two walls so lot of bad guys bump into it, Chiang using his bow like a club and a whole group of soldiers falling from a balcony. A short while after that our heroic trio have to fight off some soldiers who turn up at their table; the resulting battle is similar. Action is then held off for a while until Chiang has to battle loads and loads of soldiers and the others help out elsewhere. The final act, unusually, takes place in a tournament-like environment, the Mongol camp where the four good guys have to battle men with whips, wrestlers, just other bloody good fighters and archers on horseback. The sequence is a great showcase for the skills of all four leads, though it finishes a bit awkwardly and one bit of comical brutality, where four soldiers are impaled on the same spear, seems almost out of place considering the bloodless,  kid-friendly nature of the rest of the action.

One of the main sources of humour is the Prince. He constantly stutters [yes I know mocking people who stutter isn’t PC these days but this is old Hong Kong cinema that we’re talking about here and I think I can laugh at it because I sometimes stutter myself], and is therefore never able to complete a thought when talking to Lu and Zhu, who keep bowing and promising to do as he asks or receive punishment, though they don’t know the nature of this punishment because the Prince is only able to say what it is once they’ve left; perhaps the funniest bit regarding this is when the Prince finally gets the words out, thinking that he’s alone, but the words are heard by a passing couple who are terrified that he’s got it in for them. A major reveal of a different kind for the character is both very funny and the closest the film come to political commentary, mocking leaders who have an inflated opinion of themselves. Lu and Zhu are also a major source of humour, total idiots who repeatedly bungle what they’re supposed to do, to the point of even unintentionally helping the enemy at one point. The only female characters who we see is a courtesan who seems to be having sexual relations with several guys in the palace, and the only two we hear about are another courtesan whom an official tries to sell to Chu, and the Prince’s concubine who’s nearly 17 so the merchants have to all bring her gifts. Yes, it’s a far cry from The Magnificent Trio, but I really don’t think that this should be taken as misogyny on Cheh’s part; he just became a filmmaker who didn’t have a place for women in his films because they were about men.

This time Cheh’s filming style is everything that we’re used to, even feeling free enough to use his trademark snap zooms for comical use. He really seems to be enjoying doing a comedy for a change, not to mention a film where none of the good guys are killed. I can’t imagine that anybody would consider this to be one of Cheh’s best or defining works, but it’s a rather infectious romp that kids would probably love.

SPECIAL FEATURES

Original Mandarin mono audio track

Optional English dub

New audio commentary by action cinema experts Mike Leeder and Arne Venema
It’s perhaps fitting that Leeder and Venema get to the film on this disc which is comedic, and they have their usual fun despite Magnificent Wanderers obviously not being something that they hold in high regard, Venema remarking that one section is “the weakest section of any Chang Cheh film”. Leeder begins by revealing something very interesting indeed; Wu Ma was probably the real director. Then the discussion goes to fortune tellers, and how Venema once went to one and was told “you will become the king of the land that you’re from”, to which Leeder replies “well you are wearing a crown at the moment”, an exchange that epitomises the good natured banter of the pair. These days Venema has as much to say as Leeder, and here he maybe has more. Being reminded of Fu Sheng’s car crash death only five years later was sad, while Leeder tells us that Cheh was an awkward position at this time, having lost a lot of his crew and some of his power, things that affect the films. Leeder and Venema say how they’ll “do a certain audio commentary for a million dollars”, but I want them to do one on Fantasy Mission Force, because Leeder loves that crazy movie just like I do.

Chang Cheh Style – new video essay by Gary Bettinson, editor-in-chief of Asian Cinema journal [29 mins]
Bettinson gives us an observant and intriguing look at Cheh’s trademarks as shown in The Magnificent Trio and Magnificent Wanderers which virtually bookend the main part of the career of a director who virtually gave birth to the traditional martial arts movie. He describes, with of course relevant clips, how The Magnificent Trio doesn’t have the full Cheh style which the director himself said he didn’t reach until Golden Swallow in 1969, with symmetrical compositions being something else besides snap zooms that became a Cheh technique which is totally absent here. Of course Cheh’s theme of “staunch masculinity” and “chivalric notions of brotherhood” is already in evidence, yet it’s a Cheh ingredient that’s toned down in Magnificent Wanderers, which even has some trademarks absent because of its comedic nature. The comparing is interesting and this featurette really shows how complex and well thought out Cheh’s filmmaking is, from the title sequences to tucking characters into particular spaces, yet also notes influences such as Sergio Leone on his work. A really fine piece.

PRODUCT DETAILS

Limited Edition [2000 copies]

Limited edition O-Card slipcase featuring new artwork by Grégory Sacré (Gokaiju) [2000 copies]

1080p HD presentations on Blu-ray from masters supplied by Celestial Pictures
Both films look good, not really suffering from being put on one disc, Magnificent Wanderers being the slightly weaker of the two due to the picture being a little softer, though some may find the way that the HD restoration makes the makeup in The Magnificent Trio so very obvious is distracting; I can’t say that it was a problem myself though. Colours pop out in both films and grain management is usually excellent.

Original mono audio tracks

Optional English subtitles, newly translated for this release

A limited edition collector’s booklet featuring new writing on Chang Cheh by writer and critic James Oliver [2000 copies]

Two more fine Chang Cheh films of similar titles but different approach, As usual with these releases, the audio commentaries are an essential ingredient, but the featurette on here is also worthy of another mention. Highly Recommended!