Black Gate

Ashes of Time (Hong Kong, 1994/2008)

Chinese director Wong Kar-wai, whose films are visually intense, almost hallucinogenic, had a long-time love of the wuxia genre, and in the early ‘90s, when he was having trouble raising money for his production company, he agreed to make a historical martial arts film based on the classic Condor Heroes stories. Excited by the story but wanting it to be perfect, he spent almost three years on the project, but the result was Ashes of Time (1994), one of the most beautiful films ever to come out of Chinese cinema.

However, Wong nearly broke himself (and his cast) in making it, so he took a break to produce a spirited parody of the Condor Heroes story with essentially the same cast, The Eagle Shooting Heroes (1993), also covered below. It’s a hoot. Finally, I’ve added the undeservedly obscure Journey to the Western Xia Empire (1996), which though shot in the same western Chinese wastes as Ashes of Time is a different visual experience entirely.

And with that, we’re at the end of the ‘90s wuxia film boom, so next time, it’s back to classic swashbucklers!

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Dragon Inn (Hong Kong, 1992)

Wuxia, which roughly translates as “chivalrous martial heroes,” is the term for armed historical martial arts adventures, fantasy tales with a history in China dating back to early medieval times. Wuxia stories were adapted to film in China as early as the 1920s, but they were never a major genre until revived in the ‘60s and ‘70s in Hong Kong cinema by directors King Hu and Chang Cheh. Wuxia movies were eclipsed by the kung fu explosion in the early ‘70s but they never really went away, and when producer-director Tsui Hark had breakout hits with his Chinese Ghost Story and Once Upon a Time in China trilogies, the Hong Kong movie machine responded in emulation.

From 1991 through 1995 an avalanche of crowd-pleasing wuxia movies burst from the Hong Kong studios. A lot of these films were low-budget quickies made to formula, but that formula could be stretched to include a great variety of approaches. The three movies covered here illustrate how eclectic the Wuxia Boom was at its height. In the late ‘90s, wuxia movies returned to occasional and irregular productions, but the eclecticism of the boom years remained a hallmark of the genre, one that continues until today.

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Xena and Hercules

If you were watching TV in the late ‘90s, it was pretty hard to avoid Kevin Sorbo’s Hercules series and its spinoffs, even if you wanted to. Despite its modest budget, unambitious stories, and mostly indifferent acting, this likable family-friendly series nonetheless found an audience devoted enough to sustain it through six TV seasons.

There was clearly a hunger for solid fantasy adventures, and Hercules fed that demand. In fact, the Herc series revealed so much demand for fantasy that to meet it, it generated the vastly superior Xena: Warrior Princess show, which is so good that we can forgive the much weaker Hercules show almost anything. Ki-yi-yi-yi-yi!

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The Swordsman II (Hong Kong, 1992)

In our last Cinema of Swords article, we talked about sequels gone wrong, follow-up films to surprise hits that just went off the rails. But sometimes, at the other end of the spectrum, you get sequels done right, movies that take the strengths of the first film in a series and then build and improve on them. As an example of this, I don’t think we can do better than three wuxia films from the early ‘90s, each of which managed to incorporate the good qualities of its predecessor and then exceed them. And it’s no coincidence that all three of these films were produced by that eclectic polymath of Hong Kong cinema, Tsui Hark.

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Highlander (20th Century Fox, 1986)

Most heroic fantasy films are one-shots, made to tell a single story and hopefully do well enough at the box office to recoup their substantial production expenses. But occasionally, one of these epics strikes a chord and finds enough of an audience to warrant a sequel. It’s often the case that the folks who made the first film didn’t really have a sequel in mind when they did it, and faced with making a follow-up they flounder about somewhat.

And sometimes, dazzled by unexpected success, they simply go mad. Everyone somehow forgets what made the first movie work so well, and the sequel just goes to crazytown. This can be terrible, or this can be wonderful — and sometimes, it can be both at once.

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Pirates of Tortuga (USA, 1961)

Once upon a time, back in the mid-20th century, pirate movies were a genre unto themselves, like Westerns, gangster films, or jungle adventures, familiar fare at Saturday matinees with rollicking stories and reliable action, with cutlass duels and fiery ship battles. Though the genre dwindled and then died by the late ‘60s, it evoked fond memories and was regularly revived thereafter in big-budget epics that were mostly too overblown and bloated for their own good.

Fortunately, the original modest but tight buccaneering adventures the blockbusters attempted to evoke are still available to watch and enjoy. Some of them hold up pretty well even in the 21st century, and you can see why they struck a chord with movie audiences back in cinematic piracy’s heyday.

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Zatoichi and the Chess Expert (Japan, 1965)

Looking over my notes for the forthcoming Cinema of Swords collection (to be published by Applause Books on June 15th), I realized that there were several five-star entries in the Zatoichi series, absolute gems, that I’d never covered here at Black Gate. Worse, I hadn’t devoted an article to the blind swordsman in almost two years, and there might be newer readers who hadn’t been introduced to Shintaro Katsu and his samurai-era yakuza outlaw hero.

Well, we can’t have that. Herewith are three top-notch features from the Zatoichi series — try any one of them, and then just see if you can stop yourself from watching the rest.

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The Bandits of Corsica (USA, 1953)

After the turkeys we covered in the previous Cinema of Swords article, it’s good to get back to something fun, in this case three films about bandits and brigands. We watch these, of course, because bandits are basically land pirates, and everybody loves a good pirate movie! Sword-swinging, wise-cracking outlaw heroes are always welcome, especially when played by Richard Greene, the 1950s Robin Hood, learning the outlaw ropes here in two films that preceded his role in that classic TV series.

When I was rounding out this article by adding Ali Baba and the Seven Saracens, I realized to my shock that its review had somehow gotten overlooked and left out of the Cinema of Swords compilation coming your way from Applause Books next month. So, if you’re some kind of completist collector (like Black Gate’s esteemed editor, John O’Neill), bookmark this post and save it, as otherwise, your Cinema of Swords collection will be… incomplete!

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The Adventures of Hajji Baba (USA, 1964)

Though the vogue for Middle Eastern Orientalism in 20th-century movies wasn’t entirely a scourge — where would the history of fantasy films be without Harryhausen’s 7th Voyage of Sinbad? — by and large it was mainly responsible for a lot of crap and claptrap. This goes way back to the Silent Era, peaking with The Sheik in 1921, the movie that made Rudolf Valentino a household word. Orientalist films set in the Near East almost always relied on visual clichés of colorful and exotic luxury, with female characters who exhibit a sensuality forbidden in the Christian west, and male antagonists who are cruel, dishonest, greedy, and lecherous. The protagonists, almost exclusively male, are either European or Americans of European descent, heroes who exemplify the “Western” traits of courage, daring, integrity, and respect for decency. Even when the heroes are themselves Middle Eastern, as in the movies we cover this week, they still embody those qualities deemed “Western” and are usually played by Europeans or Americans.

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