Many of the most exciting and interesting movies are those made by a director who takes a stale, tired old genre and invests it with new life. To take perhaps the most obvious example: by the mid-sixties no one wanted to see westerns any more. The lantern-jawed lawman, the shifty-eyed villain, the virtuous-maiden schoolteacher…these tropes were hopelessly dull and just downright ridiculous in the age of war protests, civil-rights marches, the sexual revolution, and the jet set.

And then Sergio Leone—an Italian director filming in Spain—remade the Western into something new and exciting with A Fistful of Dollars (1964). He injected a sensibility of playfulness together with ruthless cynicism and technical realism into the story. The hero is no longer a prudish sheriff prone to unconvincing speeches about the virtue of law and order, but a grimy (if shaggily handsome), nameless soldier of fortune (Clint Eastwood) not burdened by the usual haunted past and with no particular hangups about piling up the bodies. The bad guy is no longer a semi-comical loser but a scary, sadistic psychopath (played to perfection by the Italian actor Gian Maria Volonté) who seems to get a sexual charge out of killing. And there’s a vigorous, violent sense of humor: the hero rides into town not on a stallion, but on an ass. (As I write this, I wonder if this was an intentional Biblical allusion. There is a moral core to the story, though it’s barely visible in comparison to the standard Hollywood Western. The hero-with-no-name does turn out to be the savior of an innocent young couple and their baby.) When the local thugs make fun of the donkey and its rider, witty repartee follows. And the thugs all wind up dead.

I could go on…about the technical realism, say, of the rugged scenery and worn-out looking desert village, or the brilliant galloping-guitar soundtrack written by Ennio Morricone. But this elegy for a Spaghetti Western is getting away from me…I simply wanted to appreciate Sergio Leone for his remarkable accomplishment of seeing the exciting elements of the American Western mythology, and using his auteur’s sensibility and craft to wipe away the dust and make it new.

Other directors and the stale genres they rescued? How about Francis Ford Coppola and gangster films, with The Godfather? Stephen Spielberg and the action-adventure movie, with Jaws and above all Raiders of the Lost Ark? Not to mention bringing the war picture into the modern age with Saving Private Ryan? Or Stanley Kubrick, who pulled sci-fi out of the tin-foil and death-ray era with 2001: A Space Odyssey?

These thoughts came to mind recently as I re-watched for the umpteenth time another favorite of mine, Ang Lee’s Crouching Tiger Hidden Dragon (2000). This wonderful film brought to mind vague memories I had of watching bits and pieces of old kung-fu movies on TV in the seventies. For a time there was a Sunday-afternoon-movie show on some grainy, poorly-received UHF channel emanating from somewhere in Dallas, called, with blatant pre-woke condescension, “Chop-Socky Theater.” The films it presented seemed to be mainly pretexts for endless, mechanically choreographed fight scenes comprising long sequences of karate chops accompanied by crude dubbed-in sound effects. I assumed at the time that these things were watched mainly by bodybuilding and martial-arts freaks.

And then in 2000 Crouching Tiger came along—a different animal altogether. Rewatching the movie recently, it seemed obvious to me that Lee had refashioned the kung-fu genre. But unlike Westerns, sci-fi and the like, it was a genre I knew nothing about. So I asked my wife about the movies that might have informed Lee.

I asked the right person. My wife grew up in Taiwan, and grew up watching kung fu epics—or wuxia (roughly, “martial arts heroes”), as they’re called in Mandarin. She had also read some of the popular novels from which many of them were adapted. So began a year-plus long voyage on the good ship Living Room Sofa, as we looked up and watched many of these movies, available on Amazon Prime.

The movies we watched were produced in Hong Kong in the late sixties through the early 1980’s by the Shaw brothers. The director whose work we enjoyed most is Chor Yuen, whom we nicknamed “The smoke director” for his habitual use of fog machines to add an air of mystery to the set. 

These films are characterized by long, carefully choreographed, highly acrobatic fight scenes, involving all sorts of weapons—swords, knives, darts, spears, halberds, rings, fans, just to name a few. Often one or more combatants will fight only with their hands. Every significant fight scene has some gimmick or innovation that makes it unique, such as a hero who doesn’t bother to get out of his chair to fight off his attackers, or a flexible sword that wraps itself around opponents and stabs them in the back, or a warrior who has learned how to create a gust of wind by waving his hands, strong enough to strip leaves off nearby trees that cut the faces of his opponents. Fights are one-on-one, one against many, group against group, man to man, woman to woman, or mixed doubles.

The basic conflict that typically drives the story is strikingly amoral—having to do with determining who is the most highly skilled fighter and thus the officially recognized master of the kung-fu world (though what that means in practical terms is never shown). Although themes of betrayal and dishonesty versus honesty and courage are involved, in the end the moral code simply seems to be: the best fighter deserves to be on top.

The cinematography is wide-screen and brightly colored (in Shaw Vision, so the credits claim). Chor Yuen in particular likes scenes set at night, with a suspiciously stationary crescent moon hanging in the background, in a fairy-tale-like forest glade or picturesque villa. And fog.

The plots are convoluted and confusing—at least for the Western viewer (and it doesn’t help that the subtitles are typically horrendous). Acting is nearly absent; the movie essentially consists of fight scenes alternating with stretches of expository dialogue in which the actors stand around and bring us up to date on why clan X has a problem with clan Y.

There’s a lot to like in these movies, especially if, like me, you’ve felt burned out by the last thirty odd years of action pictures that get by largely on thundering soundtracks, explosions and digital effects. I enjoy the artistry of the production, which feels both craftsman-like yet homemade, with fancifully constructed scenery and, for establishing shots, papier-mâché mountain-top fortresses. I like the tacit agreement between the filmmaker and his audience to accept absurd conventions and plot twists and just enjoy the ride. The stories have a whimsical, dreamlike progression. In Chor’s Heaven Sword and Dragon Sabre (1978) the young hero has been struck by a special kung-fu blow that will kill him over the course of several years. No problem! He wanders into a shack before he can be warned that it’s teetering on the edge of a cliff, his weight causing it to fall halfway down the mountain side, where it comes to rest on a ledge beside a cave that leads to a glade containing a pond with glowing-red frogs which, if eaten…oh, just watch it.

But for all their appeal, I have to admit that these movies are also fundamentally childish in their sensibility, repetitive, and ultimately uninspiring. They are fun to watch, but one doesn’t leave the theater (or couch) feeling really moved by any character’s fate, any more than one would by watching, say, Steve Reeves as Hercules.

In watching Crouching Tiger Hidden Dragon, it’s clear that Ang Lee used these films as his starting point and kept many of their essential elements. Magical weapons that confer dangerous, deadly powers on their users, which must therefore be kept carefully guarded; carefully constructed fight scenes; kung-fu warriors fighting to prove who is the best. But it’s interesting to see what Lee retained, what he discarded, and what he changed.

Lee brought a technical realism to the film but kept some of the wuxia conventions that are implausible, to say the least: any fighter worth their salt can easily leap onto or over building roofs and jump down without getting hurt, or run up walls and run across the surfaces of ponds and rivers. Anyone can be frozen in place by touching them in the right spot, until they are unfrozen the same way. A young girl can pass for a man simply by putting on some article of men’s clothing.

But Lee makes many changes, all for the better. The plot (still complicated enough) is streamlined, while at the same time the human melodrama is given far more importance with respect to fighting sequences. It’s wuxia for grownups. Those fighting scenes are improved—every bit as imaginative and acrobatic as in Chor’s films, but more naturalistic. And Lee employs four highly skilled actors in the lead roles. One romantic story involves the aging, world-weary kung fu warriors Li Mu Bai and Yu Shu Lien, played by Chow Yun-fat and Michelle Yeoh, respectively. The dialogue is spare, the acting expressive. Their relationship is contrasted with the one between the dashing young bandit Dark Cloud (Chang Chen) and the daughter of privilege Jen Yu (Zhang Ziyi), an aspiring fighter who is being forced by her parents into an arranged marriage. Danger is introduced in the form of the elderly witch Jade Fox (Cheng Pei-pei). The abusive treatment of Jade Fox as a young would-be kung fu warrior, at the hands of powerful males in the kung fu hierarchy (sound familiar?), has warped her over the years into a dangerous assassin bent on revenge. When we get to the end of the story, we (or at any rate, I) actually care about what has happened to its characters—something that never happened with the old Shaw brothers’ productions.

An aside: the casting of Cheng Pei-pei in this role is a human tie between Crouching Tiger and the wuxia classics; Cheng herself once played the lead in arguably feminist action pictures such as The Lady Hermit (1971).

Thankfully, the film’s spoken language is still Mandarin, but in contrast to the old Hong Kong movies, the subtitles are excellent.

Lee is one of those directors who seems able to make films of almost any genre and to do them well: American family melodrama (The Ice Storm), rom-com (Eat Drink Man Woman), costume drama (Sense and Sensibility, no less), as well as pictures that defy that kind of categorization (Brokeback Mountain, Life of Pi). (I say almost. We shall not discuss here The Hulk or Ride with the Devil. Nor have I seen Gemini Man…maybe the critics are wrong!) Few artists can tell an old story in a new way. A very few can create a new one. Lee is someone who is able to do both.