A semi-sequel to Come Drink with Me (1966), one of the defining ‘60s successes of the Shaw Brothers studio, Golden Swallow sees Pei-Pei Cheng return to the titular role, the nom-de-guerre of Hsieh Wo Yen, a female warrior of folklore and one of the first true martial arts heroines of wu xia cinema. Like Come Drink with Me, however, it’s weak-kneed about the notion, barely focusing on its official heroine, a gender-bending force of nature, and instead rendering her a supporting character in a drama that plays more like a kung-fu edition of Taxi Driver.
Golden Swallow was directed by Cheh Chang, early in his long career as one of Shaw’s premiere helmsmen. He had made another breakthrough hit, The One-Armed Swordsman, the year before, explaining perhaps his preoccupation with Wang Yu, that film’s dourly charismatic star. He appears here as Hsiao Peng, known as Silver Roc, a roaming vigilante who has dedicated himself to exterminating baddies of all stripes, without much differentiation between significant wrongdoers and hapless assistants and even bystanders. Silver Roc went to the same martial arts school as Golden Swallow, and he’s carrying a torch for her, leaving her signature darts, decorated with a swallow motif, at the scenes of his vigilante rampages to let her know he’s still at large and dispensing justice. Golden Swallow herself is nearly killed in the film’s opening, when she’s hit with poisoned darts by her enemies, but she’s saved by “Iron-Whip” Han Tao (Lo Lieh), a pacifistic but highly skilled warrior-monk who never kills opponents, and she soon finds her problems mounting when a gangster confederacy, the Golden Dragon, that Silver Roc has in his sights, assumes from his calling cards that she is the vigilante terrorising them.
Chang’s direction is fast-paced and bursting with style, and the film is realised in effervescent colours and crystal-clear lighting, showing off the rock-solid, utterly simple techniques of the classic Shaw template at their height, whilst also expanding their palate. The opening, in which Golden Swallow is ambushed, is designed to throw the viewer into a plot in media res, as Chang blocks the screen with darkness except for narrow slits to allow glimpses of the action, reducing it to a series of cryptic shreds. Later, Chang offers a completely mystical moment when the haunted, driven Silver Roc paints a poem he’s composed upon the wall of a brothel, the solid setting giving away to a stylised setting of great white walls and gnarled tree limbs, his poetic mood briefly transforming his world into a formless space of pure emotion.
Golden Swallow suggests the speed with which wu xia was working to catch up with the zeitgeist. Unlike the very innocent Come Drink with Me, with its time-outs for sing-alongs and kiddie comedy, a mix of generic styles that seems almost surreal but is actually an effort to be generally appealing, or even The One-Armed Swordsman, Golden Swallow maintains a weighty mood and offers a sharp-edged gore rare in this period of the genre, as Chang’s approach pushes the Shaw template away from general audience fare. In a cruel sequence, a pair of unscrupulous landowners attempt to blackmail a family into selling up their house by planting evidence to suggest their son has stolen and eaten a chicken. The boy ends up cutting his own stomach open to prove he hasn’t consumed the fowl, and his father soon joins him in death for berating in outrage the sleazy potentates, a tragedy that Silver Roc is quick to thoroughly and brutally avenge. Silver Roc himself, a powerful, superlatively talented warrior, is a darkly psychologised version of the traditional wu xia Robin Hood type of hero, both heroic in skill and intention, sympathetic in motive, but also possessing a nihilistic sense of life and death and disinterest in probity that comes close to villainy.
Chang therefore flirts with an altogether airier, more aggressive, more realistic force of cinema than can be seen in its immediate, largely set-bound precursors. Superb location photography incorporates the kinds of locales that would soon enough become readily familiar cliches of Hong Kong flicks. And yet Chang still maintains a total stylisation, and one could get the impression this brand of film-making had roots in Chinese opera. Golden Swallow doesn’t entirely spurn a mix of flavours, weaving together romance and ripe melodrama with nearly relentless high-kicking action. Whilst this does contribute to a certain diffuseness in the narrative, it’s also one of this film’s true pleasures, as the filmmakers weave variations on an set tune with inventive dexterity. The gorgeous, sing-song-voiced Pei-Pei doesn’t have enough to do as her male counterparts still manage to dominate a film that’s named after her character (and her fencing doesn’t seem that crash-hot either, as opposed to the startlingly athletic Wang), as Silver Roc and Iron-Whip duel each-other in a confrontation fuelled both by their differing ethical and fighting creeds and, more covertly, by their competition for her affections. Those affections run deeper for Silver Roc than she can admit, which pays off in a gentle yet somehow fervently erotic interlude in which she changes out of her habitual male garb into a dress to please him, in a scene that keeps the anxiety over shifting gender roles at a simmer and finds an islet of romance between rebels.
Golden Swallow has a counterpart in Mei Niang (Hsin Yen Chao), Silver Roc’s courtesan lover, who plays the more traditional wifely role that cannot, it seems, be countenanced for a figure like Golden Swallow herself: both she and Silver Roc are defined by their transgressive status. Mei Niang stands by her man, to watch as he defeats an army of gangster enemies but dies in the process, after he’s already been badly wounded by Iron-Whip in their contest. Both women are finally left bereft and vowing never to leave the beautiful valley where they have buried Silver Roc, and Iron-Whip goes on his now melancholy way, cheated of Golden Swallow and self-recriminating for having left Silver Roc mortally injured, to meet his death in a fashion that beats out even James Cagney’s most florid demises. The finale is then rather tragic, with all the major figures disillusioned, crucified by loss or dead, but the traditional values each of them represent or threaten have been conserved. But never mind the mixed messages. Golden Swallow manages to be multifaceted and intelligent whilst never succumbing to pretension.
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