Archive for April, 2005
The Silent Swordsman
I’ll skip to the chase—The Silent Swordsman is awful. Really, really awful. Nonsensical, tedious and brain-curlingly stupid, it’s 90 minutes of film that makes me question my goal of watching all of the Shaw DVDs.
Oh well. It’s too late now.
In the early 60s, Shaw Brothers was a female-focused studio in a life-or-death battle with MP & GI. By the end of the decade, with the death of MP & GI’s chief and the success of Chang Cheh’s male-dominated film, Shaw was the dominant studio of Hong Kong and southeast Asia. The years of that transformation, roughly 1966-1968, produced a lot of confused films that weren’t sure which era to call home.
Silent Swordsman‘s director, Kao Li, was firmly planted in the older era. The writer of Shaw’s first haungmei hit, Diau Charn, he later directed a trilogy of yellow plum operas. This film would be his first foray into wuxia pian.
Chang Yi, the film’s star, was a young actor whose training with Beijing Opera training, a perfect fit for the studio’s new need for male talent with physical prowess. He worked steadily (although mostly outside of the Shaw studio) throughout the kung fu-mad 70s. If he’d arrived at Shaw 5 years earlier, when the studio only cast milquetoast men, he would have had a hard time finding a home.
The film’s two female stars, Yu Hui and Shu Pei Pei, both landed Shaw contracts after winning beauty contests. Their lack of acting experience would have been a liability in the early 60s, when actresses carried the film. But in the new Shaw studio, beauty was more important.
The story, which could easily be split into 5 different movies, reflects the film’s schizophrenic nature. Beginning as a swordplay revenge drama, the plot meanders and diverges until it becomes, in no particular order, a musical, a romance and a melodramatic tragedy. A plot summary would run several pages.
By the time all of these stories finally came to their absurd close, I was happy to see that appropriate motto, “Another Shaw Production.” If only it knew which Shaw Brothers it was a production of.
The Silent Swordsman
Dir: Kao Li
Released: September 14, 1967