Beach of the War Gods (1973)

Beach of the War Gods (1973)
Chinese Title: 戰神灘
Translation: War God Beach (or Ares’ Beach)

 

Starring: Jimmy Wang Yu, Lung Fei, Tien Yeh, Hsueh Han, Shan Mao, Tsai Hung, Kwan Hung, Min Min, Chang Yi-Kuai
Director: Jimmy Wang Yu
Action Director: Kwan Hung, Siu Bo

 

After leaving Shaw Brothers at the tail-end of 1970, Jimmy Wang Yu worked mostly in Taiwan, although he occasionally found work for Golden Harvest on some of their more prestigious productions. One of these was Beach of the War Gods, a pseudo-epic retelling of Akira Kurosawa’s The Seven Samurai set against the backdrop of Japanese pirate attacks on Chinese coastal towns during the Ming Dynasty[1]. The movie has gained a following among genre fans today on account of the final battle, one of the longest fight sequences ever filmed.

The movie opens with martial artist Hsiao Feng (Jimmy Wang Yu) his way down the Chinese coast, stopping at a city situated next to the titular “Beach of the War Gods.” The city is a dour place: it is clear that a lot of people are high-tailing it out of there. A waiter at the local restaurant informs Hsiao that the Japanese have taken the next city over, which happened to be Hsiao’s destination. Moreover, the military officer stationed there, who also happens to be Hsiao’s uncle, has been taken prisoner by the pirates, led by famed swordsman Shinobu Hashimoto (Lung Fei). As one would expect, Hsiao’s uncle is not long for this world.

Hsiao Ho’s chit-chat is broken up by some commotion outside. One of Hashimoto’s retainers (Shan Mao) shows up and demands that the townspeople pay 10,000 taels of silver in tribute to the pirates. Otherwise, they will massacre everybody left in town. That is indeed quite the pickle, considering that the people whom Hsiao saw leaving the place earlier were the town’s most affluent residents. In other words, the town is royally screwed. That is, until Hsiao Feng steps in and kills the retainer’s men all by himself. Knowing that there is no point in going to the next town, Hsiao Feng agrees to stick around and help the remaining townspeople protect themselves. But to that end, he is going to need some more professional help first…

At this point, the film becomes a remake of the Akira Kurosawa classic, as Hsiao Feng visits the neighboring towns and starts recruiting the local talent. First on the list is Iron Bull Chao (A Touch of Zen’s Hsueh Han), a sword salesman who knows his way around the merchandise, if you catch my drift. He then interrupts a duel between rival kung fu masters: one a master of the iron shields (Chang Yi-Kuai, who had choreographed Wang Yu’s Blood of the Dragon), and the other, a spear fighter (Kwan Hung, this film’s action director). Finally, he convinces a professional assassin (The Avenger’s Tien Yeh) who is a master of the throwing knife to give himself to a patriotic cause.

While there are some fights here and there, the action is saved for the last forty minutes, when the Japanese pirates storm the town and fight the townspeople. The Japanese pirates are led by Shinobu and his lieutenants, who include genre regulars Tsai Hung and Shan Mao, among others. The Japanese fighters are almost all armed with katanas, although one of them does use a kusari-kama, or sickle-and-chain, in his fight sequences. The fighting is staged by Kwan Hung and Siu Bo. The latter had a less impressive career, his other project being the mediocre The Secret of Chinese Kung Fu (1977). Kwan Hung had a better career, as he contributed to the choreography of Two Great Cavaliers, whose final fight—her and superkicker John Liu against Chen Sing--is one of the best moments of Angela Mao’s career.

The swordplay itself is a little crude, but effective. Unlike a lot of Shaw Brothers wuxia films from that era, the choreographers don’t content themselves with having the actors swing their swords in wide arcs, only for several stuntmen to fall over in bloody heaps of bright red paint. Instead, they give it their all so that everybody is exchanging blows, parrying their opponent’s attacks, and running their enemy through. Even in the background, the stuntmen are actively engaged in fighting, even if we the viewer don’t necessarily follow their movements. Too many martial arts movies have these big group melees in which the the background stunt people are lazily jabbing their sabers and spears at each other. I get the feeling that Jimmy Wang Yu really poured his heart and soul into this movie and wanted to get the best bang for his buck.

Like many Jimmy Wang Yu films, the villians belong to some ethnic group other than the Chinese. The Japanese figured into many of his movies, including both Chinese Boxer films, A Man Called Tiger, and Wang Yu, King of Boxers. While the evil Japanese angle was already getting hoary in 1973—and Bruce Lee’s masterpiece Fist of Fury had only come out the year before—Jimmy Wang Yu gets points in finding a new context in which to villainize them. Instead of setting the film during the Second Sino-Japanese War (1937-1945) or shorty before, he goes all the way back to the Ming Dynasty. Moreover, the Japanese villains are pirates, so it is less of an attack on Japanese institutional imperialism than it is on those who plundered the Chinese for their own gain. Obviously, Hong Kong and Taiwanese viewers at the time were probably happy to see the Chinese triumph over the Japanese in any context, so those subtle little differences probably meant nothing to mainstream viewers.

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[1] - This subject matter has been the subject of several martial arts movies, including Ninja in the Deadly Trap (1983) and the more recent God of War (2017). Both of those revolve around the famous Ming Dynasty warlord Qi Jiguang, best known for his opposition to the pirates.