Welcome to my new project, which I’m tentatively calling The 36th Chamber of Shaw Brothers but I hope to find a better name soon.
I didn’t grow up watching Shaw Brothers movies. I caught a few at weekend matinees or on late-night TV, but didn’t really think of them as anything more than “kung fu movies that Bruce Lee didn’t make.” When I got older I’d occasionally watch a crappy VHS from the video store. That low quality, it turns out, was actually the Shaws’ own fault; they had a policy against re-releasing old films, even in theaters, so most of those videos were pirated. They were indifferently edited and extremely poorly dubbed, and I (like most of my generation) thought they were just something mildly interesting, possibly impressive in the sense of what the actors were physically capable of doing, but mostly just a good laugh. The funny thing was that I was always interested in Chinese culture, was already a huge fan of Wong Kar-Wai and Jackie Chan and Chow Yun-Fat, but the Shaws never really found a place in my consciousness.
A few years ago, though, Netflix decided to stream high-quality versions of a few of the studio’s classics. I watched The 36th Chamber of Shaolin for the first time since adolescence less because I was interested in the film itself than because I'd already watched all the Jackie Chan and Jet Li movies they were showing, and wanted something new but still Chinese. I only picked that specific movie because of fond memories of the Wu-Tang Clan album.
But it blew me away, and sent me on a rampage through the very few other Shaws Netflix was streaming (Return to the 36th Chamber, Disciples of the 36th Chamber, The Five Deadly Venoms, Crippled Avengers, Heroes of the East, Five Elements Ninjas, Avenging Eagle, Masked Avengers, The Kid with the Golden Arm, Come Drink With Me, Clan of the White Lotus, Two Champions of Shaolin, and Invincible Shaolin were the only other available titles, as I recall). Some of these are better than others, and a couple of them I don’t much like at all, but the overall impression I came away with was that these films were art. Proper, glorious works of art! Once I got to see them with clear, brightly-colored images in their original aspect ratios, with subtitles that allowed the nuance of the stories to come through, I found that they were at least the equal of any Western action films, and superior to the vast majority. Soon after I found that Amazon was streaming them as well, and it seemed that every week they added a few more to their catalog. Pretty soon, I was watching almost nothing but Shaw Brothers, and when I did move my attention from them, it was mostly towards Golden Harvest or more recent Hong Kong and Chinese cinema. These days, it feels a little bit weird when I sit down to watch a movie where the characters speak English.
This has been such a great pleasure for me, but once I was about thirty films in I realized something: most of these movies have fairly generic titles, most of them are shot on the same sets using a very small group of main actors, and many have very similar overall stories, though they can vary greatly in the details. I found that, when thinking about Two Champions of Shaolin, I wasn’t completely sure that I wasn’t inserting a scene from Invincible Shaolin into my memories. I joked at the time with my friend RTF that the answer obviously was to write an in-depth plot synopsis of each film that I could refer to later.
Right now, as I write this in early 2018, Amazon is streaming over 150 classic Shaw Brothers films, all (or most) of them free with Amazon Prime. This is, in my opinion, the best thing Amazon has ever done, but it has led to a sobering realization. Most of these movies are unavailable on region 1 DVD, not that I could afford to buy dozens of DVDs anyway, and either aren’t streaming at all or only in poor quality anywhere else on the internet. Should Amazon simply decide to stop carrying them, many of them (including some of my favorites) will be lost to me. This depressing thought ultimately led me back to my old joke. Sitting and going through each film, scene by scene, and discussing it would not only fix each one more firmly in my memory, but would leave a minute record. Should the film disappear, reading this account would be as close as I could get to watching it. Plus, it would let me cross-reference between films, and analyze the careers of the studio’s great stars and also their workmanlike, second-tier faces that are now so familiar to me. That analysis would be valuable to me even if the movies never stop streaming. Aside from the massive amount of work involved, this seems like a win-win.
So here goes. I don't know whether I’ll stick to the format I’ve used in Remembrance of Films Past or not, with best things and worst things and links to Letterboxd lists and Flickchart scores on each movie yet. I might want to keep running tabs of certain tropes the Shaws are prone to, making note of them each time they occur so that I can get some idea of their frequency (like, the way their movies tend to end abruptly; how often do they skip the denouement?). We’ll see how the thing shakes out as it goes.
I do think I should stress that I am in no way an expert on Chinese culture, have no experience as a film reviewer, have never been either a film student or worked on a set, and have no inside knowledge of the inner workings of the studio. My experience as a viewer of Hong Kong cinema in general is probably greater than most of my countrymen, I have similarly read more Chinese literature than most of my countrymen, and I’m making some rather clumsy attempts to learn Mandarin, but those few meager advantages are all I have. My only qualification for writing about the Shaw Brothers’ filmography is a great passion for the movies themselves. If you’re looking for a scholarly, meticulously-researched approach to these films, well, so am I. Let me know if you find one.
I plan to start with my favorite Shaw Brothers film, the densely-plotted all-star extravaganza Life Gamble, and make my initial decisions based on that experience. If anyone is reading these (I have no expectations, but all are welcome!), please do submit suggestions in the comments if you have any ideas as to how the format might be improved, or just want to share your own opinion of the film in question. Thank you for your time. I’ll see you in a week or so.
I didn’t grow up watching Shaw Brothers movies. I caught a few at weekend matinees or on late-night TV, but didn’t really think of them as anything more than “kung fu movies that Bruce Lee didn’t make.” When I got older I’d occasionally watch a crappy VHS from the video store. That low quality, it turns out, was actually the Shaws’ own fault; they had a policy against re-releasing old films, even in theaters, so most of those videos were pirated. They were indifferently edited and extremely poorly dubbed, and I (like most of my generation) thought they were just something mildly interesting, possibly impressive in the sense of what the actors were physically capable of doing, but mostly just a good laugh. The funny thing was that I was always interested in Chinese culture, was already a huge fan of Wong Kar-Wai and Jackie Chan and Chow Yun-Fat, but the Shaws never really found a place in my consciousness.
A few years ago, though, Netflix decided to stream high-quality versions of a few of the studio’s classics. I watched The 36th Chamber of Shaolin for the first time since adolescence less because I was interested in the film itself than because I'd already watched all the Jackie Chan and Jet Li movies they were showing, and wanted something new but still Chinese. I only picked that specific movie because of fond memories of the Wu-Tang Clan album.
But it blew me away, and sent me on a rampage through the very few other Shaws Netflix was streaming (Return to the 36th Chamber, Disciples of the 36th Chamber, The Five Deadly Venoms, Crippled Avengers, Heroes of the East, Five Elements Ninjas, Avenging Eagle, Masked Avengers, The Kid with the Golden Arm, Come Drink With Me, Clan of the White Lotus, Two Champions of Shaolin, and Invincible Shaolin were the only other available titles, as I recall). Some of these are better than others, and a couple of them I don’t much like at all, but the overall impression I came away with was that these films were art. Proper, glorious works of art! Once I got to see them with clear, brightly-colored images in their original aspect ratios, with subtitles that allowed the nuance of the stories to come through, I found that they were at least the equal of any Western action films, and superior to the vast majority. Soon after I found that Amazon was streaming them as well, and it seemed that every week they added a few more to their catalog. Pretty soon, I was watching almost nothing but Shaw Brothers, and when I did move my attention from them, it was mostly towards Golden Harvest or more recent Hong Kong and Chinese cinema. These days, it feels a little bit weird when I sit down to watch a movie where the characters speak English.
This has been such a great pleasure for me, but once I was about thirty films in I realized something: most of these movies have fairly generic titles, most of them are shot on the same sets using a very small group of main actors, and many have very similar overall stories, though they can vary greatly in the details. I found that, when thinking about Two Champions of Shaolin, I wasn’t completely sure that I wasn’t inserting a scene from Invincible Shaolin into my memories. I joked at the time with my friend RTF that the answer obviously was to write an in-depth plot synopsis of each film that I could refer to later.
Right now, as I write this in early 2018, Amazon is streaming over 150 classic Shaw Brothers films, all (or most) of them free with Amazon Prime. This is, in my opinion, the best thing Amazon has ever done, but it has led to a sobering realization. Most of these movies are unavailable on region 1 DVD, not that I could afford to buy dozens of DVDs anyway, and either aren’t streaming at all or only in poor quality anywhere else on the internet. Should Amazon simply decide to stop carrying them, many of them (including some of my favorites) will be lost to me. This depressing thought ultimately led me back to my old joke. Sitting and going through each film, scene by scene, and discussing it would not only fix each one more firmly in my memory, but would leave a minute record. Should the film disappear, reading this account would be as close as I could get to watching it. Plus, it would let me cross-reference between films, and analyze the careers of the studio’s great stars and also their workmanlike, second-tier faces that are now so familiar to me. That analysis would be valuable to me even if the movies never stop streaming. Aside from the massive amount of work involved, this seems like a win-win.
So here goes. I don't know whether I’ll stick to the format I’ve used in Remembrance of Films Past or not, with best things and worst things and links to Letterboxd lists and Flickchart scores on each movie yet. I might want to keep running tabs of certain tropes the Shaws are prone to, making note of them each time they occur so that I can get some idea of their frequency (like, the way their movies tend to end abruptly; how often do they skip the denouement?). We’ll see how the thing shakes out as it goes.
I do think I should stress that I am in no way an expert on Chinese culture, have no experience as a film reviewer, have never been either a film student or worked on a set, and have no inside knowledge of the inner workings of the studio. My experience as a viewer of Hong Kong cinema in general is probably greater than most of my countrymen, I have similarly read more Chinese literature than most of my countrymen, and I’m making some rather clumsy attempts to learn Mandarin, but those few meager advantages are all I have. My only qualification for writing about the Shaw Brothers’ filmography is a great passion for the movies themselves. If you’re looking for a scholarly, meticulously-researched approach to these films, well, so am I. Let me know if you find one.
I plan to start with my favorite Shaw Brothers film, the densely-plotted all-star extravaganza Life Gamble, and make my initial decisions based on that experience. If anyone is reading these (I have no expectations, but all are welcome!), please do submit suggestions in the comments if you have any ideas as to how the format might be improved, or just want to share your own opinion of the film in question. Thank you for your time. I’ll see you in a week or so.
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