Heroes of the East (1978)

aka Shaolin Challenges Ninja

aka Shaolin vs. Ninja

aka Drunk Shaolin Challenges Ninja

Original title: 中華丈夫

Hongkong businessman’s son Ho To (Gordon Liu Chia-Hui) has come of age. This means he is bound to marry the daughter of a long-time Japanese business partner of his father, in a marriage arranged when the victims were still kids. Ho To’s not best pleased. However, things turn less gloomy for the groom when said daughter, Yumiko (Yuka Mizuno), turns out to be rather on the attractive side. Even better, the young couple do hit it off rather nicely, and things seem set for a great marriage with attractive, bilingual kids.

Alas, both of the newlyweds turn out to be rather fanatical martial artists. Instead of bonding over this shared interest, they focus on cultural differences and short tempers. Ho To thinks Japanese martial arts rather unladylike, while Yumiko clearly finds her husband’s kung fu a bit girlie. Quite a bit of physical fighting between the irascible couple ensues, until Ho To manages to insult Yumiko and the whole of Japanese martial arts, and she flees back to Japan in anger.

Following the advice of his dumbest servant, Ho To then decides to lure his wife back to Hongkong by writing her a challenge letter in which he further insults Japanese martial arts. Thanks to a former admirer of Yumiko, who is also her ninjutsu teacher, that letter lands in the hands of the grandmaster of a school for all kinds of Japanese martial arts, who, keeping with the short tempers of everyone in the movie, does not like what he reads there. Thus instead of a penitent or even more angry wife, a whole horde of masters of various martial arts arrive from Japan on his doorstep, and Ho To will have to beat every single one of them without causing the martial arts version of an international incident. On the plus side, Yumiko returns without wanting to fight.

There is really very little about Lau Kar-Leung’s Heroes of the East that isn’t awesome in one way or the other. Really, the only thing I don’t like about this tale of marriage troubles caused by some of the hardest heads in romance/martial arts is that the set-up leaves no room for the Japanese martial artists to win a bout or two against Ho To. But then, unlike most Hongkong movies, Heroes of the East does not portray the Japanese as bucktoothed villains, instead giving them and their particular martial arts cultures respect, and the fighters personalities – of course mostly expressed via fighting styles. Even better, the Japanese characters are actually portrayed by Japanese martial artist actors, so the Chinese vs Japanese martial arts are a bit more than Hongkong actors imitating Japanese fighting.

Instead, Lau’s fight choreography finds particular joy in the match-ups of the most artistic versions of culturally differently coded fighting styles, putting such an impressive amount of thought and intelligence into making every single fight different and inspired, one will hardly even notice that what starts as a martial arts romantic comedy turns into a series of fight set pieces.

But then, as is only proper and correct for martial arts cinema, there’s actually quite a lot expressed through the fighting. One of the movie’s subtler points is how much Ho To grows by having to level up his kung fu against so many accomplished fighters, acquiring a poise, dignity and politeness that is directly expressed through the changes in his fighting style. With these traits he could of course have avoided the whole marital malaise completely if he’d only already had them when squabbling with his wife.

Even though the film unfortunately spends very little time on her in the later proceedings, it is clear that Yumiko goes through a comparable process of personal growth, less by having to fight it out, but by watching her friends and her husband putting themselves through an ordeal for little more than angry words.