Seven to One (1973)

Seven to One (1973)
Chinese Title: 女英雄飛車奪寶
Translation: Heroine Speed Race

 

Starring: Polly Shang Kuan Ling Feng, Yasuaki Kurata, Yee Hung, Ma Chee, Shah Liu-Hui, Chow Chung-Lim
Director: Hou Cheng
Action Directors: Leung Siu-Chung, Bruce Leung Siu-Lung, Tommy Lee (Gam Ming)

 

For those of you like me who were profoundly disappointed with A Gathering of Heroes, which brought together one of the greatest fighting divas of all time with Kurata, arguably the greatest Japanese screen fighter of all time, then Seven to One will inevitably come across as a step up, even if it’s far from perfect as a movie, even by early 1970s standards. The story doesn’t always make sense and the McGuffin plot ends up amounting to very little, but it does give us a generous helping of fight scenes from both Polly Kuan and Yasuaki Kurata, including the climax, so it does have something going for it.

This is one of the (relatively) few films that Polly made set in modern times, which means that we get Polly dressed in bell-bottoms and pink, red, and orange blouses, looking as hawt as ever. Seriously, I don’t think I’ve seen the woman look as beautiful as she does here. Granted, I’ve only watched a handful of her movies, but I stand by my declaration with no shame whatsoever. What I find particularly interesting about her being so gorgeous here is that she never exposes any skin in this movie. I recently watched some of Charlie’s Angels and it was all about the tight clothes, cleavage, unzippered jumpsuits with no bras on, etc. Most of the kung fu divas, especially those from the 1970s and 1980s, were just as charming, charismatic, beautiful, and sexy while still maintaining a modest dress code. It’s an approach to filmmaking that the Chinese have always understood that Hollywood can never seem to get: you can make a sexy female action hero without rubbing her body in our faces at every opportunity.

On the other hand, the fact that this is the 1970s means that we also get to see Yasuaki Kurata as a evil karate-chopping rock singer(!) who, at one point, wears a lilac suit jacket over one of those frilly white dress shirts. I’m ashamed to admit, however, that I didn’t pay much attention to the size of his lapels. I’ll save that for another watching.

The movie opens the way any movie should: a bunch of guys attacking Polly Shang Kuan, playing a woman named Ting, for no reason, other than for her to beat them up and establish early on that she’s more than a force to be reckoned with. After the scuffle, we switch scenes to an evil crime boss (Ma Chee, The Killer Meteors and Tiger and Crane Fists) spending time with his mistress (Yee Hung, The Zodiac Fighters and Queen Bee). I’m still not totally sure what their purpose in this movie is, and I’ve seen it twice. Maybe writing this synopsis will help me figure it out.

So we meet Miss Ting again at a bar, where some guy talks to her from behind his menu. We don’t see who he is, but we do know that Miss Ting is looking for her father’s murderer and is looking for clues at that moment. She’s attacked at the bar, but quickly mops the floor with her attackers. We then cut to her snooping around the docks, because the docks are a wonderful place to set a fight scene. And what do you know, Ting is soon surrounded by dozens of goons armed with crowbars and chains. A prolonged fight breaks out, starting at the docks and ending in a tunnel. Ting is about to be overwhelmed when a convertible shows up out of nowhere and out pops Yasuaki Kurata. He beats up the rest of the thugs and takes Ting to safety.

Ting wakes up at Kurata’s place, after eating some cake offered by Kurata’s deaf-mute maid, head over to the club he works at as a rock singer. He doesn’t stop to talk to her, but leaves her a note written on a matchbook. Ting leaves the club and is attacked by more of the crime boss’s goons. Kurata helps her fight them off and she heads back to his swingin’ pad.

Kurata returns some time later with the crime boss’s mistress, who turns out to be the owner of the club Kurata sings at, accompanying him. They’re about to have some quality time together when the mistress figures out that they’re not alone and starts searching the house for Miss Ting. Not having found her, she decides to go home. Kurata offers his place to Ting, telling her that it’s too dangerous for her to go back to the hotel.

The next day, Kurata takes Ting on a fact-finding mission. Apparently she’s looking for her Uncle (Chow Chung-Lim, Superriders Against the Devils and Princess and the Toxicant), who might be able to tell her about her father’s murder. While not finding any leads initially, she does receive word from her uncle when she returns to her hotel. She also finds that she’s being followed by even more of the crime boss’s goons. Shaking them off her trail, she arrives at her uncle’s mansion, where he tells her the story.

Apparently a week before, Ting’s father (Shah Liu-Hui, Moonlight Sword and Jade Lion and The Mighty One) had requested for the uncle to meet him at a hotel. We then cut to footage of the father being chased by thugs all over the city before he can reach the hotel and talk to Uncle. Apparently he has an extremely valuable diamond ring in his possession. When the bad guys come a-knockin’, Ting’s father gives Uncle the ring and hides him on the balcony. The bad guys come barging in and the father shoots them to death with a pistol. You know, despite their being scores of bad guys associated with organized crime in this movie, nobody actually uses guns. Heck, they don’t even use choppers. Practically everybody just fights with their fists and the occasional found object. It’s fascinating just how much Chinese cinema warps reality in order to make a kung fu movie. But the thing about it is that it’s far more believable when it happens in a Chinese movie than in a Hollywood film. There’s just something about Chinese cinema that makes it easy to swallow that the characters live in a world where people use fisticuffs on each other at the slightest provocation. You just roll with it.

Getting back on track, the father is killed in his hotel room by the sudden appearance of Kurata, although the Uncle didn’t see what had happened, so he isn’t able to tell Polly to beware of him. By this point, the film is entering the last act, which means we’ll get a heavy dose of fight scenes from here on out. Kurata ends up picking up Polly and taking him to the mistress’ house. She tells Polly how much she hates the crime boss for being a lecherous creep (we’re treated to a phone call in which the crime boss asks the woman if she’s naked and whatnot). When Polly and Kurata leave the place, they are attacked by the crime boss’s men, while boss and his personal bodyguards enter the mistress’ house. Polly and Kurata go back into the house to find the mistress dead (and naked—this is an early 1970s kung fu film after all) in the bathtub.

Kurata and Polly rush over to the crime boss’s house, only to discover that he’s not there. There’s an interesting moment of gratuitous violence in this scene when the two question the maid as to where the boss is. She says she doesn’t know, but they figure that he’s gone to her uncle’s house. Kurata tells Polly to go to his car. After she leaves, Kurata turns around and delivers a karate chop to the top of the maid’s head, who falls back into a chair. My wife saw that scene the first time I watched this and asked me if he had killed her. I told her that he had only left her unconscious, even though it was pretty clear from the flashback sequence that Kurata’s karate chop was indeed lethal. If I were Badmovies.org, I’d refer to this scene as a RANDOM ACT OF VIOLENCE AGAINST A MAID!

So the boss and his men are busy attacking Polly’s uncle. Polly and Kurata show up and a huge fight breaks out. This is where Yasuaki Kurata finally shows his true colors to Polly, giving some nonsensical speech about how she’s good enough to take on six men at once, but not seven, or something like that. We also learn that the crime boss never even knew about the diamond ring McGuffin in the first place, making me wonder why exactly his men had spent the previous 70 minutes attacking Polly. Kurata also explains to us why the ring was so important in the first place: it had the password to a secret account in Switzerland inscribed on it.

Although I’d hardly call Hou Cheng a great director, he does keep the film paced reasonably well, which is more than I can say for his colleague Griffin Yueh. The first 25 minutes or so are brimming with action, after which the film slows down a little until the 50-minute mark, after which it becomes one fight after another, broken up by one of the lowest-octane car chases ever filmed. He also knows that we, the viewer, want to see Polly and Kurata fight, which he delivers to us in spades. Heck, even the second act is consistently interesting, because we at least have Polly to look at and an extended chase involving her character’s father.

I guess Hou and Polly must’ve gotten along quite well, since he also directed The Rangers (which I’ll be reviewing later on this year) and The Zodiac Fighters. He also seemed to have had a gift for kung fu weirdness, as The Zodiac Fighters has gone down in history as the film that featured Polly Kuan fighting against men in lobster costumes, while his Shaolin Invincibles is the movie with the infamous kung fu gorillas. Seven to One is A LOT more down to Earth than those films, to be sure.

Once again, the Leung father/son team and Tommy Lee are on board for the action, which both more plentiful and entertaining than in A Gathering of Heroes. As I’ve already stated, both Kurata and Kuan get to participate in numerous fights, which is a very good thing. Kuan, who was trained in three different martial arts (karate, judo, and tae kwon do) gets ample opportunity to show off all of her skills. Her kicks, while not especially flashy, are quite hard-hitting here and she gets a lot more height on them than a lot of screen fighters during the early 1970s. She mainly uses reverse punches and elbows when it comes to handwork, but it’s done with more flair than your average Basher film from the same time. This is some of her best work here, no doubt about it.

Kuan is matched move for move by Kurata, who gets to show off his own considerable kempo and aikido skills (mainly the former, though). He’s actually a lot quicker and more powerful than Kuan is, although he loses to her ultimately because he’s the bad guy. However, losing in hand-to-hand combat to Polly Shang Kuan Ling Feng is like Hwang Jang-Lee losing to John Liu: we know that the villain in real life is a lot better than the hero, but the hero is awesome enough onscreen that we buy it anyways. Despite the general claims about Lau Kar-Leung’s masterpiece Heroes of the East (1978) being the first Chinese movie to show respect for Japanese martial arts, I’ll say that Kurata and Polly were doing Japanese styles justice as early as 1973.

The only false move that the movie makes is at the finale, which begins with a motorcycle/car chase that is not very exciting. It doesn’t help that both vehicles look to be going at the speed limit, instead of above it. It also ends on a particularly silly note, with Polly leaping out of the motorcycle and into a rowboat as the former falls into the harbor. It’s edited in such a way that it comes across like she’s magically teleporting from one vehicle to the other.

The chase is followed by a brief fight between Kuan and Kurata, which is all well and good. However, it doesn’t take long for Kuan to literally punch Kurata’s lights out (so to speak), and so the last five minutes of the movie is Kuan sneaking around to avoid a blinded and crazed Kurata, which isn’t quite my idea of a fitting final fight.

When all is said and done, Seven to One is a fun slice of early 1970s kung fu. The quality of the fighting is up to the standards set by Sammo Hung in the Angela Mao films he choreographed during the same era and Polly puts most of her contemporaries, like Jimmy Wang Yu, David Chiang, Lo Lieh, Shih Tzu, and others to shame. The story is very much more than “Polly Kuan beats people up because of some McGuffin that most of the bad guys aren’t even aware of,” but then, this past weekend was the same one in which I watched Shaitani Dracula, the film in which no scene logically followed the one before it, so Seven to One looks perfectly fine by comparison. Truth to be told so I could accept a movie about Polly beating people up for no good reason, if the fights are well done. I’m pretty sure I’ll come across that film at some point.