Hapkido Though the situation has improved a bit in recent years, there was a time when Hollywood couldn’t create a strong female action hero to save its life. For every movie featuring an Ellen Ripley, Sarah Connor, Alice or Katniss Everdeen, Asian film industries managed to produce several dozen more entertaining, hard-hitting action flicks featuring strong female characters portrayed by butt-kicking heroines, many of them real-life martial arts champions or physically gifted dancers or performers. In a tradition going back almost to the birth of cinema, the Hong Kong film industry in particular has always had a major subgenre devoted to female action heroes, and now, thanks to various streaming services, there’s a good cross-section of films featuring sword-wielding or gun-toting, kick-ass women available for American fans’ viewing pleasure.
A Touch of Zen Sammo Hung directed the action in Hapkido and The Angry River and went on to collaborate with Mao on several more of her best films, including Lady Whirlwind (1972) and When Taekwondo Strikes (1973), but earlier he had lent his talents to a film which established another iconic action heroine, and one of the top two screen swordswomen in Chinese-language cinema. King Hu’s A Touch of Zen (1971) is available to stream in its original Mandarin language (with English subtitles) on the FilmStruck Criterion Channel, and was recently given a long-overdue restoration via the efforts of the Taiwan Film Institute. Hu’s masterpiece and a martial arts classic, Touch of Zen stars Hsu Feng as a steely-eyed and mysterious swordswoman who enters the film as a supporting character but soon grabs the viewer’s attention and never lets it go. Hsu had originally appeared in a small part in Hu’s earlier Dragon Inn (1967) but it was Zen which solidified her place in martial arts movie history, and she went on to star in several more of the director’s films throughout the ’70s. Unflappable, stoic, and every bit as tough as her male counterpart, a general in disguise played by Pai Ying, Hsu’s character eventually has an affair with the cowardly scholar (Shih Chun) who is the center of the story, but it takes place entirely off screen, even though she later becomes pregnant with his child. Like Mao and many other female action heroes to come, Hsu’s characters were always presented as strong warriors first, feminine perhaps but not presented in a prurient or sexual manner, and never as eye candy. Although she retired from appearing onscreen in the ’80s, Hsu has remained active in the Chinese-language movie industry, serving as co-producer on films like Farewell, My Concubine (1993) and Temptress Moon (1996). A Touch of Zen features one of the best villains of any 1970s swordplay film, a cunning enemy commander whose troops dog Hsu at ever turn, portrayed by Han Ying-chieh, who also served as action director. Han was one of Sammo Hung’s primary mentors: the two of them collaborated on action director duties for Mao’s The Angry River; Han had also directed the action for Bruce Lee’s debut film. But his long movie lineage stretches back to the Shaw Brothers studio in the 1960s, where he helped to forge the career of the other Queen of Swordplay Cinema, a ballet dancer turned actress named Cheng Pei-pei. Although she had appeared in several films earlier, Cheng’s first starring role in a martial arts film came, like Hsu Feng’s, courtesy of director King Hu during his short-lived stint with the studio. His final film for Shaw, Come Drink With Me (66) revolutionized the industry, and gave Hong Kong not only one of its first period swordplay films shot in a new, modern style (inspired by Japanese swordplay films of the time), but also its first female action lead.
My Young Auntie
Mission of Justice Playlist: Hapkido A Touch of Zen Come Drink with Me Golden Swallow The Shadow Whip My Young Auntie Angel Terminators Avenging Quartet Mission of Justice Angel 2 Top Fighter 2
Marc Walkow is a writer and film programmer living in New York. Formerly a director of the New York Asian Film Festival, he has also produced DVDs and Blu-rays for Criterion and Arrow Video.
