Lady Whirlwind (1972)

Lady Whirlwind (1972)
Aka Deep Thrust
Chinese Title: 鐵掌旋風腿
Translation: Iron Palm, Whirlwind Leg

 

Starring: Angela Mao, Chang Yi, Pai Ying, Annie Liu, Sammo Hung, Chin Yuet-Sang, Oh Kyung-Ah
Director: Huang Feng
Action Director: Sammo Hung[1]

By the time Golden Harvest released Lady Whirlwind in June of 1972, Bruce Lee had already released two films for that studio and was breaking box office records left and right. I think it was inevitable that they would take the hint and try to complement Bruce Lee’s work with a female martial artist of equal talent and intensity. That privilege went to Taiwanese actress Angela Mao, a Peking Opera school graduate who was studying Korean martial arts at the time. Mao had already had a role in the ensemble film The Invincible Eight, notable for being Golden Harvest’s debut movie. She also had a leading role in the wuxia fantasy The Angry River. Lady Whirlwind was her first kung fu movie. While rough around the edges, the film is a lot of fun.

So there’s a gang who runs the local casino, headed by a hard-talking, whip-wielding bitch (Annie Liu) and her Japanese expatriate lover, Tung Gu (Dragon Gate Inn’s Pai Ying). When one of their number, Ling Shihao, refuses to do some shady work for the gang, Ling is beaten by Tung and left for dead. Ling Shihao is played by Chang Yi, who was still in the hero phase of his career. He played the good guy in a lot of these early Golden Harvest films, like Super Man Chu and Bandits from Shangtung. Later on, he would become one of Taiwan’s biggest villains, having memorable roles in Challenge of Death; Eagle’s Claw; and Shaolin Invinicible Sticks. A young lady named Xuang Xuang (Korean actress Oh Kyung-Ah—I think this movie was filmed in Korea, considering that when anybody speaks, you see the mist from their mouths and I don’t think Hong Kong usually gets that cold) finds Ling and nurses him back to health.

Three years later, a kung fu badass named Miss Tian (Angela Mao Ying) shows up in town looking for Ling to settle an old score with him. When Tian goes to the casino and asks after Ling, the gang (led by a young Sammo Hung) thinks that whatever beef she has with him is related to the gang’s activities and makes the dumb decision to attack her. She gives them a walloping that their *grandchildren* will not soon forget. Said walloping includes Angela Mao repeatedly smacking Sammo across the face with a sack full of silver dollars!  The next day, the gang has an encounter with Xuang Xuang, who reveals that she knows of Ling’s “death”.  Miss Tian follows her and finds Ling, who has been training in kung fu for the last three years. Ling eventually convinces Tian to let him get revenge before their inevitable duel to settle Tian’s past grievances.

Lady Whirlwind is a rather fun little basher movie. Like many early 70s bashers, the film is set in the post-Qing Dynasty Republic era and the villains are your typical local gang (brothel owners, casino owners, extortionists, the basics), plus a Japanese karate expert thrown in for good measure. The movie does not reinvent the wheel or add any new twists to the formula, but ends up becoming a fun romp thanks to the innate charisma and intensity of its leading lady.

 

“You really are quite a girl.”
“Of course I am! Otherwise I wouldn’t be here.”
“You know who you’re talking to?”
“Of course. I don’t give a damn, you lousy goddamn Japanese! So what if you’re a karate expert! You don’t scare me that easily!

 

If people like Jimmy Wang Yu, Michael Chan, Chan Sing and Chang Yi were the Tough Guys of the early 70s, then Angela Mao was the Tough Girl of the same era. Her character, Miss Tian, is the definition of bad to the bone. She exudes confidence and mercilessness just like her male opponents, and at no point does she ever show the least bit of fear, even when facing down the karate master (Chin Yuet-Sang, who would become a respected action director later on) near the end of the movie. Where Chang Yi’s character has to train in two different intervals to get good enough to defeat his adversaries, Angela Mao walks into the film ready to kick butt and chew bubble gum, the latter of which she must have left in Canton several weeks before. Her glare alone is more lethal than Alice’s (from the Dilbert comics) “fist of death.”

Sammo Hung, credited as Chu Yuan Long, was the principle action director for Golden Harvest at this time outside of Bruce Lee’s movies. He had contributed to the fight choreography of the aforementioned Angela Mao swordplay films, plus Bandits from Shangtung and two other wuxia films: The Fast Sword and The Blade Spares None. Sammo would go on to choreograph most of Angela’s Golden Harvest films, the big exception being her last job for them: Broken Oath (that gig went to some guy named Yuen Woo-Ping).

As both Sammo and Angela had Peking Opera backgrounds and both studied the Korean martial art hapkido under Ji Han-Jae (best known for fighting Bruce Lee in Game of Death), Sammo understood her abilities and had the God-given ability to give them the best exhibition possible. That doesn’t quite happen here, owing to both Sammo and Angela’s inexperience with the kung fu film, which was still in its nascent phase.  If you notice, Angela’s kicks are frequently low and her hand strikes come across as Mao wildly flailing her arms. The fights thus lack real power, and martial arts enthusiasts might comment on how Angela’s fighting frequently leaves her body vulnerable to counterattacks. Sammo makes a valiant attempt to inject a sense of brutality into the fights and keep the action moving at a blazing pace. He also compliments the action with some stuntwork and even some crude and primitive wirework (people get knocked dozens of feet back or even get kicked upstairs and through the bannister). Angela throws in some basic acrobatics and does a few hapkido-influenced take downs as well.

Chang Yi’s character has more of an arc, as a former lout turned petty criminal turned righteous avenger and affectionate lover. His early fights portray him in the flailing arms style of fighting, after which he evolves through training to something a little crisper (higher kicks, better hand techniques, although it’s all still a little crude), and then comes the real treat: near the end of the movie, Chang Yi trains in tai chi chuan[2] for the final fight. This is probably the earliest movie to portray tai chi as a combat style, predating the Shaw Brothers The Shadow Boxer (choreographed by Yuen Woo-Ping) by two years. However, outside of the philosophy that Chang Yi’s teacher (a Korean herbalist!) explains, the actual tai chi displayed has *nothing* to do with the actual style. I don’t think tai chi training includes jamming your open hands into pans full of rocks or performing jump kicks. Methinks that Sammo Hung wanted to do something more realistic, but that Raymond Chow pressured him to keep the status quo with his fight direction. So instead of actual tai chi chuan, we get Chang Yi perforating his opponents with knife hand strikes.

Other important fighters here are Sammo Hung himself, Chin Yuet-Sang and of course, Pai Ying. Sammo, who was almost 20 at the time, shows up as the head henchman of Pai Ying and Annie Liu. You feel bad for Sammo Hung in this: the first 50 minutes is almost dedicated exclusively to different characters beating the hell out of him, including his own sister!. Pai Ying is just Pai Ying. He really does not have much in the way of action chops and Sammo was too inexperienced to extract a convincing performance from him. While Pai Ying does not embarrass himself in his fights like he did in the later Super Manchu, but he also doesn’t have the gimmicks he had in that movie to fall back on. Look fast for a young Leung Siu-Lung (aka Bruce Liang) as a high-kicking thug who fights Chang Yi near the end of the movie.

Lady Whirlwind was one of the earliest kung fu movies to be exported over to the United States for local consumption. It was renamed Deep Thrust, an obvious cash-in on the success of the porno film Deep Throat, which was the 4^th highest grossing movie of 1972[3]. Lady Whirlwind was a relative success in the States, although it was quickly surpassed by the arrival of The Big Boss, which was renamed Fists of Fury. While Angela Mao’s performance in this movie did little to distinguish herself from the likes of fellow Taiwanese actresses Chia Ling and Doris Lung Chun-Her, her next movie would cement her as the female Bruce Lee for the next five decades.

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[1] - In both this film and Hap Ki Do, he is credited as Chu Yuan Long as an action director, although his Mandarin name Hung Chin Pao is used for his acting credit.

[2] - While the characters say tai chi chuan in both the dub and Mandarin versions, there were some promotional materials that touted Chang Yi as using hapkido. Tai Chi Chuan was actually one of the styles that influenced hapkido’s creation, so there is some relevance there.

[3] - Compare with today, where multiplex theaters threaten to boycott films if they get an NC-17 rating.