All Slights Deserved

Martial arts film are, it must be confessed, something of a blank area for me. Many years ago I recall being challenged by a friend when I suggested that Enter the Dragon was the best of this genre ever made. "You've never seen any others though," he pointed out. It's true, and until now I haven't made any attempt to redress this. So let's start with a double bill produced by Hong Kong's most famous studio, the redoubtable Shaw Brothers. The name is synonymous with Kung Fu and martial arts cinema, almost representing a genre within the genre, cranking out dozens of films a year during their heyday in the seventies. Modelled on the old Hollywood studio system, right down to the company logo (imitating that of Warners'), the company kept a stable of stars and directors under exclusive contract. It worked highly effectively although as the decade progressed Shaw would be eclipsed by a rough-and-ready rival, Golden Harvest, who launched the careers of...

It feels a little disprespectful to have gone nearly a fifth of the way into this odyssey without covering a single film by either of the world's two most populated countries. Hopefully I'll be able to take a look at some Indian cinema next week, but first here's the film that was voted the greatest in Chinese history in a poll by the prestigious Hong Kong Film Awards in 2005. Spring in a Small Town is a melodrama concerning Dai Liyan (Shi Yu) and Zhou Yuwen (Wei Wei), a couple who live with Liyan's effervescent teenage sister Dai Xiu on the outskirts of a small town shortly after the end of the second Sino-Japanese War. Liyan has spent some years recuperating from tuberculosis and, combined with regret for the decline in his family's fortunes, his marriage to Yuwen is stagnant and passionless. Into this setting comes Zhang Zhichen (Li Wei) a doctor and childhood friend of Liyan who, unbeknownst to Liyan, was also Yuwen's sweetheart many years earlier. The for...