Diary of a Lady-Killer
Diary Of A Lady Killer, Japanese director Kō Nakahira’s fourth, and last, Shaw Brothers film began, as did nearly all of his Shaw films, as a remake of a Japanese film directed by none other than Kō Nakahira, The Hunter’s Diary [Ryojin Nikki] (1964).
But Hunter’s Diary came from a novel by Masako Togawa, which featured more than a little influence from Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho (1960), itself based on a novel. Goodness! That’s at least 4 generations of the same idea. While Shaw Brothers was certainly comfortable with remaking the familiar, Lady Killer is a little bit too familiar, featuring not particularly surprising plot twists, cross dressing and climbing body count.
In the end, this almost instantly forgettable film (no, really. I had to look up a plot description just to remind myself what happened) is notable only for a couple of stylish flourishes from Kō Nakahira and the last film appearance of Fanny Fan (who, true to her stereotyped form, bares her butt).
The most interesting aspect of Lady Killer is that it points the way to Shaw Brothers’ increasing bawdiness in the 1970s. Their films of the 60s occasionally bared a buttock or the side of a breast, but always cut away before things got too dirty. With the arrival of the new decade and the sexual revolution, Shaw Brothers embraced nudity with both hands (so to speak) in films like Intimate Confessions Of A Chinese Courtesan.
1969 was the turning point for this shift from prim smuttiness to full-on smuttiness; with its nudity-laden opening credits (which featured several nude women posing, inexplicably, with puppies and kittens) and frank sexuality, Diary Of A Lady Killer helped lead the way.
Why Shaw Brothers began featuring nudity in 1969 is a bit of a mystery. It happened about the same time that Hollywood began to release it share of sexual films, but Hollywood was protected by the newly-enacted ratings board. Shaw Brothers had no such system to shield its films from censorship (Hong Kong didn’t adopt their current ratings system until 1988). Perhaps the studio’s increased reliance on male audiences – thanks to the popularity of macho swordplay films – helped encourage the growth of the erotic film genre. Or, perhaps Shaws was only capitalizing to the increasingly explicit films coming out of Europe and America.
Saying that the film’s surprising amount of skin is its most interesting feature is obviously damning it with faint praise. Still, for those like me who approach the output of Shaw studios as an evolutionary process, Diary Of A Lady Killer stands out as a curious milestone. The bashful Shaw era, when showing anything more than a bare bottom was unthinkably shocking, was at an end.
Ian Whitney
Published: 2005-03-07