La main noire de Shantung

This is the good stuff. I love Chang Yi. He started at Shaw Brothers as the lead of "King Cat" in 1967. Back then they were actors, not martial artists. Times changed and as you watch Chang Yi in subsequent movies you certainly see that this guy has been working out. By "The Crimson Charm" he is doing front flips, jumping from the floor to a table top then flipping off and that is not a stunt double as his face is plainly visible. He continued to improve and like most "good guys" he topped off his career by playing villains. His "white eyebrows" character looked as good and kicked as hard as the master Hwang Jang-Lee. Why? Did he need the money for hookers and drugs or for his ego? I'll never know but I like to think he just enjoyed martial arts and enjoyed being a martial arts actor. He could never beat Bruce Lee or Jackie Chan or – insert name here – but he was certainly the best Chang Yi ever. For the movie proper, Sammo Hung plays a great off the top scar faced villain. All the fight scenes are very good for 1972. The final fight at the bandits fortress was disappointing from a set piece perspective as the fortress seemed more like a cottage in the hills. Perhaps Golden Harvest gave all their money to Bruce Lee that year and had little left to finish this film!

The opening scenes establish the bad gang. The bandits from Shantung attack the escort then rob and burn the town. Cut to some idiot pushing a lady in a wheelbarrow though the mud. Chang Yi is amused. He is the only good guy in the movie. He lends a helping hand.

This movie is remarkable starting at about 18 minutes in. Sammo Hung appears in the door as a leader of the bandits of Shantung. He started acting at about age 9 as one of the Seven Fortunes of Chinese Opera. He was always a stunt man or an extra until he got his first credit as an action director at only 17 years old for Shaw Brothers. This scene was his biggest role at the time. I suggest you watch this scene and keep saying to yourself "That's a 20 year old kid in that scene and WTF was I doing at that age?"

The scene itself is spectacular in the writing because you can watch it dead serious and it is scary or you can watch it as humor and laugh out loud. It works perfect either way!

It leads into Chang Yi first fighting Sammo and then the chief. The fight against Sammo is a tough guy slugfest just emphasizing raw power and no finesse. The fight against the chief is the opposite. It is a swordfight with finesse and speed demonstrated. Chang Yi was another nonmartial arts actor when he stared in 1967 but five years later it is obvious this guy has been training and likely achieved black belt level in between movies.

This movie is certainly the good stuff. I watched it about four years ago and watched it again for this review.

BANDITS FROM SHANTUNG (1972) has some great atmosphere and a couple of superb fight scenes, but it doesn't have enough of a plot to keep us fully engaged. It starts off well enough with some nice build-up in a sprawling deserted farm town (a nice backlot on a Taiwan location) as various motley characters show up at the town's only open establishment, a tavern/inn, with some evil doings in mind. When advance men for the title bandits show up to lay the groundwork for a raid, they round up all available hostages but one. That one is the film's lone hero (Chang Yi), whose motivation is simply stated—he's there to check up on family—but no one believes him. At the thirty-minute mark, he launches into an eight-minute battle with the two bandit chieftains, hand-to-hand with one (Sammo Hung) and swordplay with the other (an actor I didn't recognize). It's a well-staged brawl and it spreads all over the empty town.

Afterwards, not much of interest happens until the next major fight scene, which takes up the film's last 13 minutes as our hero fights the bandit leader (Pai Ying). It's a good fight, but we haven't really seen enough of the villain up to this point to feel any stake in it. And he's done such a poor job of banditry throughout the film that he seems a bit out of his league with this formidable hero. So there's not much suspense.

The few notable supporting cast members include Hu Chin (one of the kung fu-fighting tavern maids in THE FATE OF LEE KHAN), Chien Yuet San (who played a Japanese villain in WHEN TAEKWONDO STRIKES) and future kung fu great Sammo Hung, but they have relatively small parts. All the great characters we meet in the first half-hour are pretty much gone from the movie by the 40-minute mark, after the first major fight. Sammo Hung choreographed the fight scenes. The film's writer-director is Huang Feng, who was responsible for so many of Golden Harvest's early kung fu classics (LADY WHIRLWIND, HAPKIDO, WHEN TAEKWONDO STRIKES, etc.).

Still, it's short (79 min.) and well-paced and shot amidst picturesque locations and that awesome set built in the middle of the Taiwan countryside. And it's nice to see Chang Yi still playing heroes after being a leading man at Shaw Bros. (THE SECRET OF THE DIRK) but before his great streak of kung fu villainy in the later '70s (TRAITOROUS, EAGLE'S CLAW, CHALLENGE OF DEATH, FATAL NEEDLES VS. FATAL FISTS, etc.).