More Than Kung Fu

1970 was a tough year to be Ivy Ling Po. After years of serving as the face of haungmei opera, she found herself an actress without a genre. After The Three Smiles, the curtain fell on haungmei films at Shaw Brothers, taking with it one of the studio’s few remaining showcases for actresses.

In the 7 years since Ling Po had joined Shaw Brothers, the gender roles on the studio lot had flipped; instead of making female focused films for female audiences, Shaw now made male focused films for male audiences. Where Cheng Pei Pei once slashed across the screen in Come Drink With Me, she now asked for Lo Lieh’s help in The Flying Dagger.

With haungmei dead, and fewer female roles in Shaw movies, 1970 must have been a time of concern for Ling Po. But, as one of Shaw’s two most popular actresses the studio was bound to find a new role for her to play. Eventually she’d move into martial arts films, but for a while she starred in modern day dramas.

In A Cause to Kill, Ling Po builds on her portrayal of a suspicious wife that she began in Raw Passions. Only now, instead of being a victim, she gets to play the villain — a jealous wife who decides to kill her husband and restart the movie career that marriage took away.

The noir-ish result, a hard-bitten, chain smoking Ling Po, is certainly a shock for those used to seeing her playing gentle male scholars. But the rest of the movie doesn’t live up to Ivy’s transformation. As the cheating husband Chang Li De, Kwan Shan plays the same mild mannered man he’d been playing for 10+ years. And Chiao Chiao, as mystery novelist Su Su, is more Nancy Drew than Sam Spade.

Cause to Kill was the second Shaw film for director by Mu Shih Chieh (an alias for Japanese director Murayama Mitsuo). He shoots the film with a pop sensibility that made Inoue Umetsugu’s (Shaw’s most prominent Japanese director) movies so much fun. But the over-the-top spotlights and general lack of subtlety cut the legs out from under any suspense the film tries to muster.

There’s plenty of proof in Cause to Kill that Ling Po was no one trick pony. But she needed a better film in which to showcase her flexibility.

A Cause To Kill
Dir: Mu Shih Chieh (Chinese pseudonym for Murayama Mitsuo)
Released: January 15, 1970