50 Years Ago: When Kung Fu Came to Times Square

50 years ago, on March 20, 1973, Warner Bros. held two free screenings of a new movie at the Loew’s State Theater on Broadway and 45th Street in Times Square. It was called FIVE FINGERS OF DEATH and was set to open officially the very next day, March 21. It promised action on a scale that exploitation fans had never quite witnessed before, being the very first of a new wave of English-dubbed kung fu films from Hong Kong to hit the U.S. These films would galvanize grindhouse and neighborhood theater audiences even more than the Italian westerns and Blaxploitation action thrillers that had been keeping us busy up to this point.

I had managed to beat the line and enter the lobby area to join a friend of mine who had been recruited by Warner Bros. to help pass out posters, stickers and promo material to the crowd leaving the first showing. So I helped out, too, and there was sure a clamor for the items as wildly enthusiastic fans came filing out of the theater and passing the table. When the clamor died down and all the piles were gone, I managed to slip into the second of the two free screenings that night, forced to sit much closer than I would have liked. I can assure you that the packed audience was won over by the opening fight sequence in which an elderly kung fu teacher under attack by a group of thugs leaped upward into the air and kicked two separate opponents in the head at the same time. The crowd went completely nuts and the level of excitement was maintained for the film’s entire 106-minute running time.

Made at Hong Kong’s famed Shaw Bros. studio by a Korean director, Cheng Chang Ho (aka Chung Chang Wha), and starring an Indonesian-born actor, Lo Lieh, who would become a common fixture of kung fu films,  FIVE FINGERS OF DEATH had been released abroad the previous year as KING BOXER, but when Warner Bros. picked it out of a wide selection of Shaw Bros. kung fu films offered to them, they changed the title, presumably so it wouldn’t be confused by American fans with films about the sport of boxing.

Here are pages from a promotional newspaper handed out at the screening:

The main plot of the film concerns the rivalry between two competing schools of martial arts as they prepare their champions to participate in an upcoming tournament, the winner of which will dominate the martial arts world in this corner of China in a rather vaguely defined time and location, sometime in the late 19th or early 20th centuries. One of the schools is run by Meng Tung Shan (Tien Feng), an unscrupulous and ruthless leader, who prattles on about honor but uses all kinds of despicable methods to reduce the competition and derail the efforts of the hero, Chao Chih Hao (Lo Lieh), as he trains for the event. Meng goes so far as to even hire Japanese karate experts to ambush and sometimes kill various figures from the rival school. Chao Chih Hao’s master (Fang Mien) chooses him as the only student worthy enough to learn the secret Iron Fist technique, sure to win the competition for him, until Meng’s sadistic son, Meng Tien-Hsiung (Tung Lin), also competing, has the Japanese capture and tie up Chao in order to break his hands and keep him from participating in the tournament.

Eventually, with the help of a sympathetic street singer, Yen Chu Hung (Wang Chin-Feng) whose life he once saved, Chao is nursed back to health and soon returns to the school to train again and participate in the tournament to win, cheered on not only by the singer, but by his hometown sweetheart, Yin Yin (Wang Ping), who has traveled far to see this. The tournament is followed by a series of additional confrontations and bloody showdowns until the evil school has been soundly defeated, but not without great cost to the good guys.

The fighting employed hand-to-hand punches and kicks, high leaps upward to exchange blows in mid-air, and various knives and swords. The Iron Fist technique allowed Chao’s hands to glow red before delivering what could be lethal blows. American audiences had never seen fighting like this on screen with such intensity and frequency, accompanied by such extreme displays of brutality and cruelty. One erring comrade of Chao’s, Han Lung (James Nam), eager to curry favor with the rival school and undermine Chao’s efforts, betrays his school and is ultimately rewarded by having his eyes gouged out by Meng Tien-Hsiung. He later gets his own unique revenge in a fight scene staged in a dark room in Meng’s villa, with the street singer acting as his eyes as he takes on the father-and-son villains.

The film was the talk of the town for weeks afterward as it moved up from the Broadway theaters to the neighborhood houses and would play off and on for years in grindhouses and on 42nd Street. In the parlance of the street, the main character’s name was transformed from “Chao Chih Hao” into the more pronounceable and more relatable “Georgie Howe.” No one called him by the actor’s name, Lo Lieh. (Except me.) If I heard one explicit criticism of the film, it was aimed at the fact that the Chinese songs performed by Yen Chu Hung were left undubbed in the film as shown and were heard in their original Mandarin with traditional string accompaniment. No one I knew seemed to like Chinese music. But I did. I cherish those song sequences in movies from that era. (Many kung fu films would recycle music from James Bond and Ennio Morricone soundtracks, as well as Dominic Frontiere’s score for HANG ‘EM HIGH.)

Wang Chin-Feng, right, plays the street singer who comes to the aid of Chao Chih Hao.

Some newspaper notices for FIVE FINGERS OF DEATH:

The success of FIVE FINGERS OF DEATH led to waves of dozens of kung fu films getting released in the U.S. over the next few years, although the major studios would stop acquiring them once the fad wore off and the smaller distributors, who specialized in exploitation films and dealt directly with drive-ins and grindhouse theaters, would keep a steady supply of them coming into the U.S. market for several more years. Eventually, World Northal would distribute large packages of them to television, where, in New York at least, they would run on Saturday afternoons on WNEW-TV, Channel 5, under the headings “Black Belt Theatre” and “Drive-In Theatre.”

FIVE FINGERS OF DEATH aired on Channel 5 in New York on Sat., Sept. 6, 1986.

Among the earliest kung fu releases to hit the market after FIVE FINGERS were DUEL OF THE IRON FIST, THE HAMMER OF GOD, DEEP THRUST, and two with Bruce Lee, FISTS OF FURY and THE CHINESE CONNECTION, both released in the U.S. while Lee was still alive. He died on July 20, 1973, a month before his first big Hollywood production, co-produced with Golden Harvest in Hong Kong, would be released: ENTER THE DRAGON.

Lee was the one big name to emerge from the kung fu film craze of the time and his sudden, untimely demise left a huge vacuum. Hardcore fans quickly latched on to Jimmy Wang Yu (THE HAMMER OF GOD), David Chiang (TRIPLE IRONS), and Angela Mao (DEADLY CHINA DOLL), among others, but no more household names would emerge from this genre in the U.S. until Jackie Chan’s films started to get prominent placement a few years later and attract a niche audience, even making a handful of films for Hollywood in 1980-85. Even then, it wouldn’t be till the mid-90s that Chan would achieve true stardom in the U.S. with the release of his Hong Kong production set in New York, RUMBLE IN THE BRONX (1996) and his first big Hollywood production, RUSH HOUR (1998).

I should add here that Lo Lieh went on to appear with American star Lee Van Cleef in an Italian western called THE STRANGER AND THE GUNFIGHTER (1974), released in the U.S. in 1976, when I saw it at a neighborhood theater. Shaw Bros. stars David Chiang and Shih Szu co-starred with Peter Cushing in the Hammer Films co-production, LEGEND OF THE SEVEN GOLDEN VAMPIRES (1974), which was released in the U.S. in 1979. Shaw Bros. star Ti Lung co-starred with American actor Stuart Whitman in another Shaw Bros.-Hammer Films co-production, SHATTER (1974). Sadly, this spate of co-productions was short-lived.

Credit should be given here to THE CHINESE BOXER (1970), the ground-breaking Shaw Bros. kung fu film written, directed by and starring Jimmy Wang Yu, which paved the way for the studio’s shift away from swordplay films to kung fu films as seen pretty explicitly in KING BOXER. THE CHINESE BOXER featured two of the stars of KING BOXER, Wang Ping and Lo Lieh, and was released in the U.S. just weeks after FIVE FINGERS under the title, THE HAMMER OF GOD.

Credit should also be given to the Warner Bros. TV series, “Kung Fu,” which began airing in 1972, the success of which surely influenced Warner in its decision to import KING BOXER the following year. (Bruce Lee had unsuccessfully sought the role of Caine in that show, which was played by David Carradine.)

I’ve seen FIVE FINGERS OF DEATH many times over the years in both its English-dubbed version and its original Mandarin version under the title KING BOXER. I have two English dubbed VHS copies, two DVDs in Mandarin with English subs., one R3 from Celestial Pictures and one R1 from Dragon Dynasty, plus the Blu-ray from Arrow Video’s Shawscope Vol. 1, which has both Mandarin and English dub tracks. I recently watched the Blu-ray for the first time, easily the best-looking print of it I’d ever seen, but for this piece, I decided to re-screen the old English dub on a bootleg VHS I got from the legendary 43rd Chamber, a video dealer who used to operate out of a storefront on W. 43rd Street, off Eighth Avenue. I purchased it 25 years ago.

I found the VHS English dub to be the more satisfying experience, and it triggered most of the memories for this remembrance. Maybe it’s because it’s closest to the way I first experienced the film. Maybe it’s because I experienced so many later kung fu films for the first time on broadcast television and lesser-quality VHS. Maybe it’s because I find some of the dazzling new restorations we’re getting so completely at odds with the nature of the grindhouse experience, when battered prints were the norm. Maybe it’s because I don’t think everything in films like these needs to be seen so clearly. For instance, the great fight scene in the dark late in the film depends for its dramatic power entirely on the fact that we can’t see the participants clearly and they’re literally groping around trying to make contact with their opponents. The sound is the most important element here. (Screen grabs below were taken from the R3 DVD, which is brighter than the VHS but not as bright as the Blu-ray.)

Also, while I normally prefer the original language tracks, I found the English dub here strangely endearing. It was the usual crew of voices used to dub kung fu films, but since this was one of the first, it may have represented something new and different for the voice actors and got them invested in this particular film more than they might be after they’d been doing hundreds of these at a steady clip a few years later. For one thing, they make an effort to pronounce the Chinese names correctly. Also, the actress who dubs the dialogue of Yen Chu Hung has a particularly beautiful voice and makes her character sound incredibly warm and understanding, very much concerned with Chao’s safety and well-being. Even more than Chao’s relationship with Yin Yin, her presence provides the emotional core for this film. In fact, Chao’s touching, chaste romances with both female leads offer a romantic tone to offset so much of the tragedy. I also like the music mix better in the dub, although I couldn’t always tell you where the cues came from.

I should add that the Blu-ray disc of this film in the Shawscope set from Arrow Video includes a series of related interviews about the film, including one with director Chung Chang Wha (as his name is spelled on the disc) and one with film scholar Tony Rayns. Neither one mentions THE CHINESE BOXER. There’s also an interview with Korean film curator Cho Young-Jung, who once programmed a retrospective of Chung Chang Wha’s films at the Pusan International Film Festival in 2005, when the interview was done. It’s quite informative as she discusses Chung’s career in Korea, revealing how few of his films from the 1950s and ’60s have survived; his film career at Shaw Bros., and his subsequent career at Golden Harvest. She compares the differences between the Hong Kong cut of KING BOXER and the Korean-dubbed version, IRON MAN, which eliminated moments of bloodshed and gore, making it ten minutes shorter. (In his interview, director Chung started to address this, but then veered off, claiming he went to Korea to see their version but didn’t have enough time to see it, which doesn’t make a whole lot of sense to me, although it could simply be a subtitle translation problem.) Miss Cho says she considers his earliest Shaw Bros. film, TEMPTRESS OF A THOUSAND FACES (1969), below, to be his best film.

For the record, Chung Chang Hwa’s other Shaw Bros. films are HEADS FOR SALE, VALLEY OF THE FANGS,  THE SWORD HAND, SIX ASSASSINS, and THE SWIFT KNIGHT.

The Shawscope disc of KING BOXER also includes an interview with the film’s co-star Wang Ping, who discusses her work on several films in her career at Shaw Bros., including THE CHINESE BOXER and KING BOXER, but also devoting much time to her role as Pan Jinlian in Li Han-Hsiang’s TIGER KILLER (1982).