More Than Kung Fu

In reading about the history of Hong Kong and Shanghai’s film industries, I’ve been surprised to find very little mention of Chinese serials. I’m not sure if the form, so popular in the United States, simply never appeared in China or if I’ve just been reading the wrong books.

I’m surprised, because Chinese films would appear to be perfect for serialization—especially wuxia pian; frequently based on multi-part adventure novels, wuxia movies frequently suffer from trying to stuff 10-books worth of plot into one movie.

Sweet Is Revenge is not a wuxia film; set in the 1920s, no one uses swords or magical powers in the entire film. But it, like its swordplay cousins, feels like a serial trapped in a feature-film’s body.

The film, like a serial, has a loose, overarching plot—the masked bandit’s (Yueh Hua) struggles against a local warlord—but is basically a series of 15-minute adventures strung together with cliffhangers and mystifying plot detours that could be rearranged into almost any order and still make about as much sense.

Director Wu Chia-Hsiang would essentially remake this film a year later with Gun Brothers, which took many of the elements of Sweet Is Revenge—a mysterious bandit with a circus past, a local villain, a dour inspector named Ma—and placed them in a more coherent plot.

Gun Brothers, while far from great, is a better film than Sweet Is Revenge. But if Sweet had been cut into chunks and shown before other Shaw films, it would have been right at home. Especially if it was preceded by a cartoon and a newsreel.

Sweet Is Revenge
Dir: Wu Chia-Hsiang
Released: May 31, 1967