As I’ve noted before, one of the most interesting aspect of watching the tons of Shaw Brothers kung fu movies recently released on DVD here is seeing one company play around with the parameters of a fixed genre. Most evidently, the films range from ones in which no one is killed to ones where pretty much everybody dies in a horrifying Shakespearian-style bloodbath. Sometimes they are more or less flat out comedies, while others are incessantly serious, even grim. The one thing you can always count on from the Shaws, though, is opulent production values and slick fight choreography.
The 36th Chamber of Shaolin, apparently one of the genre’s classics, has much individuality. Running more or less a fairly lengthy two hours, it features a lengthy prologue, a long training segment (the majority of the picture) and a wrap up that is efficient to the point of being almost perfunctory.
Gordon Lu Lui stars as the young San Te (a real historical figure), who is a budding patriot against the Ching dynasty. Sadly, the villains Ching forces, empowered by their knowledge of kung fu, eventually kill all his comrades. San Te flees and eventually ends up at a Shaolin temple, planning to learn the monks’ legendary kung fu. However, his plans are controversial, because while the monks see kung fu as purely a spiritual discipline, San Te wants to go out and use it to combat evil in the larger world. He also speaks of teaching it to civilians, which seems like it might cause more problems than it solves, but there you go.
San Te proves a prodigy, and my natural disinclination to buy a man already in adulthood mastering kung fu is ably mitigated by the length of the training segment of the film, which easily represents half it’s running time. San Te must master each of the fabled 35 Chambers of kung fu, all of which painfully focus on strengthening one particular skill or body part. To the delight of (most of) his masters, the single-focused San Te whips through the various levels of training in comparative short order, i.e., a small number of years.
This is the meat of the film, and it’s pretty great. The training regimens are realistically harsh, and the students are left bloodied and battered by their trials. Handled less expertly, the length of this portion of things would begin to drag, but here’s it remains fascinating throughout, largely because of Lui’s charisma and amazing athleticism.
By the time San Te returns to his village to take care of business, the end of the movie is almost an afterthought. It’s still satisfying, but it’s the training section of the movie that makes it a classic. Great stuff.
The DVD presentation, like most of these, is extremely good. The film is also available on Blu Ray for a very decent price.
