The Lady Assassin (1983)

Original title: 清宮啟示錄

The Qing emperor (Ching Miao) has come to his final years and is beginning to think about his successor. His favourite for the role is the 14th Prince (Max Mok Siu-Keung). Fourteen is young, he’s inexperienced and, as events will show, more than just a bit of a shallow idiot, whose more interested in looking righteous than the difficult business of actually being it. But least, he appears to not be actively malevolent. This can’t be said about the 4th Prince (Lau Wing) – he’s a man deeply in love with himself, palace intrigue and more often than not being evil for evil’s sake. Four has gotten wind of who his father plans to make his successor, and is not at all against murdering his own brother (well, half-brother, one hopes for the women involved).

The 4th Prince’s problem when it comes to assassinating his rival is that his brother has a very capable bodyguard and advisor in form of virtuous and highly efficient martial arts expert Tsang Jing (Norman Tsui Siu-Keung) – coming pre-packaged with his two female servants/martial arts students/probably lovers Jade (Yeung Ching-Ching) and Pearl (Daisy Cheung King-Yu) – and Tsang Jing isn’t just making the 14th Prince look like a better man than he actually is, he’s also easily thwarting most assassination attempts.

Eventually, the 4th Prince will acquire his very own martial arts expert in form of the ambitious Min Gen Yiu (Jason Pai Piao), but even then, a successful assassination seems doubtful and risky. So much so, the 4th Prince seeks out the help of Han revolutionary leader Lui Liu Liang (Ku Feng), promising him to get rid of the laws that suborn the Han Chinese under their Manchu conquerors. If, that is, Lui Liu Liang, or rather, his redoubtable martial artist niece Lui Si Niang (the incredible Leanne Lau Suet-Wah) help him access the decree in which is father has set down his designated successor.

Of course, helping out a man like the 4th Prince might not turn out as happily as one would want.

And that’s only about half of the plot of Tony Lou Chun-Ku’s breathless Shaw Brothers palace intrigue/wuxia mix The Lady Assassin, a film that somehow manages to run breathlessly through an amount of narrative that would provide for three or four seasons of a modern streaming TV show, features about a thousand different fights, yet still has room for rather a lot of complicated characterisation.

In most wuxia films, Lau Wing’s villain would be a one-note moustache twirler, but here, the guy’s abhorrent but also much more nuanced than you’d expect. As an example, the scene in which he convinces Lui Liu Lang and his family to throw their lot in with him by perfectly emulating a man of honour and conscience is a perfect portrayal of the kind of narcissist who always appears to believe in his own lies and empty promises a little (if you’ve never seen such a thing in real life, I can’t recommend the experience), and always finds a bad excuse for not acting on them he also appears to believe, however untrue it may be. Still, enjoying his own ability to pretend to be an honourable man, he will even try to implement his promises, until he gets the tiniest pushback. Then, he folds like the utterly weak man he is at his power-grubbing core.

As a whole, this is one of those wuxia where the most honourable characters – Tsang Jing and Lui Si Niang are genuinely good people – find themselves tied to the will and plans of characters whose nature is abhorrent to them once revealed, and can only break free from obligations, rules, and lies through acts of insane violence. Being in any contact with power can apparently only be cleansed through blood and vengeance.

Speaking of acts of violence, the martial arts choreography by Poon Kin-Kwan is absolutely insane – fast, vicious and only occasionally totally fantastical, this is all about speed and movement. Director Lou stages the fights – like everything else in the film – exclusively in angles and shot compositions of maximalist dramatic impact. There’s not subtlety to the direction, but as Lou uses his hammer here, everything doesn’t just look like a nail but indeed is one. It’s pretty incredible, as is how powerful much of the acting is – Lau Wing is a particular standout, but the burning fierceness of Leanne Lau’s gaze, or the dignity only slightly marred by the cynicism of permanent defeat of Ku Feng’s performance, are just as impressive.

To my eyes, The Lady Assassin is an absolute classic of the late period Shaw output, a film as perfect as its final freeze frame.

Men From The Gutter (1983)

In jarring contrast to movie cops everywhere else, Hong Kong policemen have to work more than one case at once, so HK cops Qiu Zhenming (Michael Miu) and Sergeant Zhao (Lo Meng) have to be able to cope with two problems at once. Their life is certainly not made easier by the fact that the two men can't stand each other. Zhao thinks Qiu is too soft, while Qiu takes Zhao to be so ruthless and violent that he does more harm than good. In a bizarre turn towards believability, both men won't learn to respect and love each other.

Not that the cases they are working on are leaving them much time for any of that sort of business. Firstly, there's a luckless group of ex-convicts lead by Wang Guangtai (Parkman Wong) planning an armed assault on a jewellery transport for the policemen to cope with. How luckless are they? Wang shoots a police officer even before they have done anything more illegal than buying weapons.

The second case regards the quite single-minded Zi Jian (Jason Pai Piao), a gangster who has come to Hong Kong to take bloody (and he means bloody) vengeance on gangster boss Xu Wen (Wong Yung) for trying to kill him.

Where Wang and his friends are just your typical losers trying to escape poverty and desperation, Zi Jian is a one-man army, and sure enough, the latter will turn out to be a much larger problem for the police than the former.

In 1983, the Shaw Brothers studios were in the beginning of their death throes. Many of their films of this and the following two years were somewhat desperate seeming attempts at becoming relevant to their audience again, at times leading to confoundingly weird films or, like in the case of Men From The Gutter, to films that neither look nor feel like earlier Shaw Brothers movies at all, even if they are part of genres the studio had a lot of experience in, like the "based on a true story" exploitationer.

The film's director Ngai Kai Lam/Lam Nai-Choi is today better known for his weird-o-fu fantasy film The Seventh Curse and the absurd violent thing that is Story of Ricky, but he also had quite a hand for grim and brutal crime films with a helping of HK New Wave hyper-realism like this one.

Men From The Gutter is related to the ripped-from-the-headlines brutalism that would a few years later become a staple of CATIII cinema and stands in marked aesthetic contrast to the pop sensibility the Shaw Brothers news exploitation movies of the 70s exhibited. Where the old films were all artificial colours and stylish ugliness, Lam's movie goes for a less stylish version of the grimy (that is of course just as artificial as the older model, but puts a lot of its artifice into not showing it), all dirt and grime and beautifully photographed poverty.

The film looks at the people running and shouting and killing before that background with cool, distanced sympathy, taking no sides and making not much of a moral judgement on anyone (except Xu Wen, who is obviously too rich to deserve anything more in characterization than "proper bastard"), be he or she cop or robber, but still shows the carnage everybody's life here descends into with a slight undertone of sadness for humanity. Neither this sympathy nor this sadness let Lam forgot that he is supposed to make an action film here, and so much of the film's running time consists of the sort of sharp, short, fast edited, and quite brutal looking violence the director does so well in those of his films that don't include fights against aliens or Fan Siu-Wong punching through someone's body.

The sense of real physicality surrounding the action here is of course typical for the new wave of Hong Kong action of the time, but Lam's film does not share the slightly chaotic feel which is also part of that tradition. Instead, even the most heated sequence of events here (and especially Zi Jian's final fight is as heated as they come) is shown in a way that seems coolly controlled by the director. Again, the film shows a marked friction between the intensity of the things happening on screen and the distance with which director and film seem to regard them; it's as if Lam would like his audience to feel uncomfortable with what he's showing as much as he wants them to enjoy it in his own version of the classical exploitation dilemma of needing to wallow in what one criticizes.

Men From The Gutter is not at all a film I would have expected as part of the late period Shaw Brothers' output, but it's as nice a surprise as I could have wished for.

 

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