Cited as King Hu’s last pure wuxia film, 1975’s The Valiant Ones is set during the Ming Dynasty of the 16th century in a time when China’s coastlines were under constant harassment from Japanese wokou. As an opening narration explains, these pirates operate nearly unchallenged thanks to their fighting prowess and the corruption of Japanese consuls, Chinese officials, and even the Ming emperor (Chao Lei) himself. Despite the collusion, the monarch must keep up appearances of solving the problem, and so he commissions General Zhu (Tu Kuang-chi) to assemble a group of warriors to combat the pirates. Zhou in turn hires a brilliant captain, Yu Da-you (Roy Chiao), to lead the unit, along with a handful of fighters that includes a husband-wife duo (Wing Bai and Hsu Feng) who could each take on an entire platoon of bandits.
Whether or not Hu felt he was leaving behind the wuxia genre, he mounts The Valiant Ones as an epic send-off, structuring the film as a series of action scenes that pit Yu’s group against seemingly inexhaustible waves of pirates and their corrupt Chinese collaborators. These fights are staged with the help of a young Sammo Hung (who also plays pirate leader Hakatatsu), and each set piece avoids repeating the others while finding new ways to demonstrate the characters’ preternatural skills. Sometimes, the quiet moments before a battle can be as adroitly arranged, as in a showstopping scene where Yu uses a board of Chinese checkers to perform a headcount of nearby pirates and arrange his own troops to face them, only for shots of the board to keep filling with more and more stones representing enemies emerging from everywhere.
But even as the choreography grows ever more elaborate, Hu crafts the action scenes according the principles he had developed over his preceding few features, whittling down images to a rapid-fire montage of shots that reduce each skirmish to a kind of poetic essence. Melees play out in fragmentary close-ups of arrows flying through the air and the clash of swords colliding, or the blink-and-miss-it glimpses of a warrior parrying a blow or landing a fist or blade on an opponent. Naturally, this method can be disorienting, but it conveys the battle instincts of martial artists who’ve honed themselves into as much of a weapon as the swords, spears, and bows that they carry around with them. Hu conveys the sense of being one of these fighters and responding in a split-second to equally skilled enemies’ own feints and attacks.
Like other Hong Kong wuxia films of the time, The Valiant Ones unfolds as a series of double-crosses, whether by government officials against Yu’s soldiers or by those soldiers themselves as a means of infiltrating the pirates. There’s a wry camaraderie on display throughout, even a degree of professional respect between Yu and Hakatatsu’s respective camps. But the film also captures the director’s growing interest in spiritual and natural matters over the grisly exploits of mankind. Gorgeous mountain vistas and thick copses of trees recur throughout The Valiant Ones, and as the finale barrels toward a bleak conflagration of pointless death, it slowly adopts the silent, indifferent perspective of these backdrops to the blood being spilled all over them.
Image/Sound
Eureka’s release, part of their Masters of Cinema Series, is sourced from a 4K restoration by L’Immagine Ritrovata and represents the strongest video presentation of one of King Hu’s films to date. The image perfectly balances the deep black shadows of the cinematography with the color palette of verdant greens from forest canopies and undergrowth and rich tans of both soil and the bronzed faces of the actors. Close-ups are rich in detail, and master shots of landscapes and buildings show tremendous depth of field. The mono track cleanly centers dialogue against the sound effects we expect from a classic wuxia, from clanging metal to whooshing arrows.
Extras
The disc comes laden with extras, starting with a commentary by Asian film expert Frank Djeng, who gives a thorough explication of The Valiant Ones’s production and place with both Hu’s filmography and the broader contemporary trends of wuxia cinema. An interview with critic Tony Rayns further elaborates on the arc of the director’s career, while a video essay by critic David Cairns salutes Hu’s outsized influence on martial arts cinema and his role in elevating it from cheap, mass-produced entertainment to the auteur realm.
Lengthy, informative interviews with stuntman Billy Chan and actor Ng Ming-choi are also included, as is a 2003 interview with Hong Kong International Film Festival producer Roger Garcia and an old interview with actress Hsu Feng and an additional interview with Ng. An accompanying booklet contains an essay by film scholar Jonathan Clements, who links Hu’s characters to their real historical counterparts while delineating how The Valiant Ones communicates its commentary about the Ming era through its action and philosophy.
Overall
Boasting a gorgeous transfer and stacked with extras, Eureka’s release of King Hu’s mid-career masterpiece is one of the best discs of a wuxia film released to date.
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