Heroic Grace: The Chinese Martial Arts Film (Heroic Grace Film Festival Tour, 2003) Killer Clans (1976)
Killer Clans was directed by Chu Yuan in 1976, and is unusual both for the time it was made and for a martial arts film in general.
While it's nowhere near as gorgeously shot as later martial arts films like Bride With White Hair or Peking Opera Blues, it's more visually distinctive than others I've seen from that period, full of elegantly composed long shots, dreamy tinted love scenes, and fight sequences choreographed as much for visual as action appeal. This is, for instance, the first time I've ever seen white-clad ninjas. It also features eye-candy for the straight men and lesbians in the audience in the form of lingering full-frontal shots of a shapely and bare-breasted prostitute.
While neither of those elements would be surprising in a film made today, something else is. In the martial arts genre the plot is usually the least important element and is often a completely incoherent framework upon which to hang fight scenes. But this movie is all about the plot, and an excellent, twisty, and well-paced plot it is.
The woman whose breasts are bared at the slightest provocation is the tool of an unknown party who uses her as a proxy to engage the person who appears to be the protagonist, a swordsman-for-hire. His task is to assassinate Uncle, a clan lord with a long white beard and a "garment of invulnerability." (There are actually two Uncles who are friends and are both clan lords, Uncle I and plain Uncle, but that's one of the many sub-plots which I won't delve into here.)
This plot is the result of a power struggle which is going on between Uncle's Lung Men Society and the rival Roc Society, amusingly abbreviated in the subtitles as the Roc Soc. (The roc is the giant mythical bird which plays a memorable role in the tales of Sinbad the Sailor.)
In the first of a series of foiled audience expectations, the swordsman displays a a curious reluctance to get involved in the plot, either the one he was hired to execute or that of the film. Instead, he spends most of the film on the sidelines romancing a mysterious woman in the Butterfly Forest and avoiding the mayhem and subplots which proliferate in his wake. Considering the mortality rate of the other characters, this is probably a wise decision.
This leaves the film to Uncle's attempts to figure out who in his inner circle is trying to kill him. (In addition to the swordsman, there's another traitor whose identity is withheld from the audience.) Besides the Garment of Invulnerability, Uncle is protected by a foster son (a mysterious fighter who has a secret address known only to Uncle and hidden in an underground office full of security deposit boxes with coded emblems), and an inexhaustible army of ninjas who leap up from the floorboards or down from the ceiling unexpectedly, in the nick of time, and in vast quantities, about a dozen times in the film. (The Roc Soc also has a ninja army which functions identically).
The plot is a sped-up series of backstabbings, reversals, and revelations of secret identities, in which just about everybody turns out to be a quadruple agent with absurdly complex plans to root out the true allegiance of the other quadruple agents. Secret tunnels, quintuple-crosses, deadly poisons, gruesome antidotes, and lines like "Yes, I drank the same wine... but not from the same cup!" abound. In one spectacular scene, the foster son is suspended from a rope net in a daring visual metaphor for his position at the center of a web of intrigue.
Subplots are myriad, including one which wavers between Monty Python and high tragedy and involves a loyal (or is he...) servant whose chest is bare of hair except for a Bigfoot-worthy furry circle right in the middle. This is never remarked upon by the other characters, though the audience I was with audibly found it remarkable.
Killer Clans is as much a fun-house ride as an exploration of trust and betrayal. Its reversal-a-minute qualities reminded me of George R. R. Martin's A Song of Ice and Fire even as its ubiquitous ninjas made me think of clowns piling out of a miniature car. And if that doesn't make you frantically check local listings, I am writing for the wrong audience.
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