The Chase
Director: Wong Tin-lam
Year: 1971
Rating: 7.5
Aka - The Shanghai Killers
The Chase was one of the first productions
from Golden Harvest in 1971 their first year. The film still had the logo
of GH imposed on a wheat field. Golden Harvest. Golden Harvest was as most
people know set up by two executives who left Shaw - Raymond Chow and Leonard
Ho and to a large degree these early films were very much in the Shaw Brothers
style. Wuxia was still the main staple of films hitting the screens and they
followed that trend. In 1971 Golden Harvest produced eight films and seven
of them would fall in the wuxia category - heroic sword fighting films. This
is one of those. The studio was bringing on veteran actors and directors
but also hoping to establish some younger actors such as Angela Mao, Nora
Miao, Maria Yi Yi and James Tin Chuen. But it was that eighth film that was
to change the direction that Hong Kong films were to go in. Golden Harvest
outbid Shaw and hired Bruce Lee for The Big Boss, which also had Maria and
Nora in the cast. Films were quickly to shift from the elegant wuxia to the
hard hitting kung-fu. This can be seen in Golden Harvest's slate for 1972.
Of the seven films produced, two of them were Bruce Lee films, two of them
Angela Mao films, two were a mix of sword and fist and the last was Jimmy
Wang-yu's One-Armed Boxer. Kung fu was here to stay.
But The Chase is very much a wuxia film
with sword fighting filling the screen constantly from beginning to end.
It doesn't have the budget and gloss of Shaw at this point. Nor the star
power. But to make up for that they loaded it with well-choreographed
action from Jason Pai Piao and Shaw veteran Chen Kwan-tai. The choice of
director might strike one as an odd one. It is Wong Tin-lam (father of Wong
Jing) who to most of us today is famous for his Cathay comedies and dramas
of just a few years before (as well as showing up in some Milkyway films),
but if you go back to the 1950's he directed dozens of Cantonese martial
arts films. Most I assume that are lost now. Here he both writes the script
and directs but clearly left the action to his two assistants. Action had
changed a lot since the 1950s. His plot is an interesting one with betrayals
and then double betrayals and maybe even a triple betrayal that keeps us
in the dark as much as the main character.
This is turning into a very bad day for
Shih Hai-lung. He is played by James Tin and he is the good guy, not a role
that he was to get for very long in his decades long career. It turned out
that he played the villain much better both in martial arts films and especially
in triad films. Here though he is kind of an innocent who has no idea what
is going on and why everyone is trying to kill him. It begins in a tea house
where three men try to take his sword from him. Two pay with their lives.
The sword was given to him by his Master and he was told to find the other
one in the pair. Then he would know who killed his father and he could get
that old-time revenge. He leaves town and spots a group of men around a camp
fire and decides to rest. All of them want the sword and attack him. He goes
easy on them though, not even bothering to draw his sword which is reputed
to be lightning speed. A Sword Slinger. But then the Three Killers show up
to take his sword. They do no better and quickly lay dead on the ground.
On to another inn and same story as the head of the Tiger Claws - which he
wears - tries to kill him.
The day is just beginning for Shih. He goes
to visit Han I-Chu (Tang Ching) at his mansion and all of his many men try
to kill Shih. But he then realizes that his sword was stolen earlier in the
day by a conniving killing female (Fong Sam) who tries to have him killed
later that night. Watching all this is a pair - Kam Shan and Maria Yi Yi.
Maria is a pouting kitten until she gets a sword in her hands and Kam is
playing with some sort of double dealing deck. It all makes for a ton of
fighting until towards the end a long exculpatory monologue is given but
then found not to be entirely true. There is a twist to everything and everyone
has an angle and everyone wants that sword.
