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| Images courtesy of Eureka Entertainment |
With the ongoing proliferation of Shaw Brothers and Golden Harvest
titles making their stateside debuts on Blu-Ray disc or 4K UHD through boutique
labels like Arrow Video, Shout Factory and 88 Films, British based label Eureka
Entertainment have taken a special particular liking to the works of Chang
Cheh. With their recent releases of the Horrible
History quartet of films and the double-feature The Daredevils and Ode
to Gallantry, Eureka saw fit to do up another devotion to the prolific Hong
Kong based martial arts genre director with The Magnificent Chang Cheh. Comprised of 1966’s The Magnificent Trio,
a straight-laced serious wuxia, and then a tonal shift with 1977’s Magnificent
Wanderers, this pairing by Eureka Entertainment represents the range of its
writer-director and the ability to do two completely opposite period genre
pieces across the spectrum.
Despite being nearly ten years apart, the first film The
Magnificent Trio features an early turn by Chang’s own leading man Jimmy Wang
Yu from the eventual The One-Armed Swordsman and speaks to a
serious-minded martial arts saga steeped in historical context. When swordsman Lu Fang (Wang Yu) returns from
battle, he discovers a group of oppressed farmers who have kidnapped the local
magistrate’s daughter held for ransom. At
first it seems cut and dried until Fang’s sympathies start to lie with the
farmers and soon two other warriors including Huang Liang (Cheng Lui) join Lu
Fang in battle. Amidst battle, the local
magistrate holds in his possession a petition for the townspeople he intends to
destroy, prompting both the magistrate’s daughter and a farmer on the other
side to rescue the petition. To try and
quell bloodshed and spare the farmers, Lu Fang offers himself up for arrest, a
move that soon sparks fierce battles between the double-crossing magistrate and
the titular Magnificent Trio.
While The Magnificent Trio was a dramatic and intense
wuxia with many deaths involved, some more brutal and ferocious than others,
Chang Cheh wasn’t purely interested in doing serious fare and in 1977 amid his prolific
output he fashioned the goofy and screwball kung-fu comedy ensemble Magnificent
Wanderers. Carefree in contrast to
the tight plotting of The Magnificent Trio, this ensemble romp stars
Sheng Fu, Chi Luan-chun, Li Yi-min, David Chiang and even Phillip Kwok. The broadly appealing story of a group of
nomads wanting to join the Chinese patriots fending off Mongol armies, Magnificent
Wanderers makes even more liberal use of the martial arts choreography and
astonishing physical feats. While
playful and silly, the action fighting sequences are as striking and visually
arresting as anything in director Chang Cheh’s filmography.
Both movies being ten years apart found themselves with
differing cinematographers with Wong Wing-lung handling the scope 2.35:1
camerawork of The Magnificent Trio while Kung Mu-to took on the scope
vistas of Magnificent Wanderers.
In most if not all of Chang Cheh’s works, he loves the use of the fast
zoom in and out for tightly packed action sequences and that aesthete is
maintained across cameramen. As always,
there is some use of library music or cribbing but for the most part Wang
Fu-ling provides a serviceably rousing score for The Magnificent Trio while
Frankie Chan Fan-kei’s playful score for Magnificent Wanderers lets the
viewer know they can let their guard down and not worry too much about the
fates of the characters here.
Jimmy Wang Yu in the role of Fang Lu in The Magnificent
Trio serves as something of a precursor to the later more popular
collaborations Wang Yu would make with Chang Cheh. The ensemble cast including but not limited
to Lei Cheng and Lo Lieh give strong supporting roles and intense physical performances
of hand-to-hand combat. In the case of Magnificent
Wanderers, also a wartime film that has it’s tongue firmly planted in
cheek, no single character takes center stage, forming a broad ensemble of
characters all fighting for a kindred cause.
Save for one or two scenes, Magnificent Wanderers is considerably
less violent or dark as its predecessor from a decade prior.
Released with both films housed on one blu-ray disc from
Eureka Entertainment and featuring a limited O-card slipcover with newly rendered
artwork by Gregory Sacre, a collectible booklet and newly recorded audio
commentaries by film experts Frank Djeng and Michael Worth, the boutique label
has done it again in terms of curating and publishing two disparate yet comparable
Shaw Brothers titles from the one and only Chang Cheh. Both transfers from Celestial Pictures look
beautiful and fans keen on the subgenres and one of its most prolific purveyors
will find much to enjoy here with The Magnificent Chang Cheh. Able to do serious and silly in one breath
without missing a beat or blinking an eye, Chang Cheh’s output of films for the
Shaw Scope empire remain as fresh, entertaining and thrilling now as they did
when they first appeared.
--Andrew Kotwicki
