The Deaf and Mute Heroine

聋哑剑

Hong Kong, 1971, colour/b&w, 2.35:1, 103 mins.

Director: Wu Ma 午马.

Rating: 8/10.

Inventive twists and action triumph over a mediocre script in this 1970s martial arts classic.

STORY

Ancient China. A deaf-mute swordswoman (Ma Hailun) steals some pearls from gangster Tong Jiuying (Li Ying), loses them to another gangster, Liu Hong (Tang Di), and then steals them back again. She’s attacked by Tung Jiuying and Liu Qingqing (Huang Shali), the sister of Liu Hong (who died in the conflict), who runs a gambling house. The swordswoman is wounded by one of Liu Qingqing’s poisoned darts and is rescued by a dyer, Yang Shun (Tang Jing). Later, Yang Shun is persuaded by a work colleague (Wei Ping’ao) to gamble some money he’s borrowed in order to marry the swordwoman; after running up a huge debt at Liu Qingqing’s gambling house, he’s held captive by her henchman, Hu Qi (Wu Ma), until he pays up. Yang Shun is then persuaded by his colleague to steal the swordswoman’s reflective wristshields, which she uses in combat to give her rear vision. Unwittingly he leads Liu Qingqing to her. Then, after the swordswoman survives the attack, a figure from her past, Ma Lie (Yang Wei), suddenly turns up wanting vengeance.

REVIEW

It is not too soon to begin noting classics among the martial arts productions, and certainly, by any token, The Deaf and Mute Heroine deserves a place alongside King Boxer 天下第一拳 (1972), the Li Xiaolong 李小龙 [Bruce Lee] films (1971-73), Hap Ki Do 合气道 (1972) and the like. Directed by a renegade from the Shaw studios, it is a fascinating example of a mediocre script rescued from collapse by an endless succession of stunning and inventive twists. Having only lately tracked it down (as an alternative support to Back Alley Princes 马路小英雄 [1973] for the general release [in the UK] of The Way of the Dragon 猛龙过江 [1972]) I found it more than worthy of enthusiastic advance reports. Despite particularly heavy cutting [to 85 minutes] – the original ran to 103 minutes – it is still a remarkable work, an independent production which carries stylistic traces from both the Shaws and Golden Harvest.

The film’s basic ideas are ingeniously simple: a deaf and dumb swordswoman in Ancient China, nameless, silent, possessing great skills. She has, we later learn (via a monochrome flashback), a past; all she lacks is a future. The point is underlined on several occasions: she moves through a hostile land, continually battling to stay alive; she has no object in life except to survive the rigours of her solitary existence; a brief moment of peace and happiness (a permanent home and a prospective husband) has to be paid for by a huge dose of combat later on; and despite her efforts on his behalf, Yang Shun finally dies. At the very end she strides off alone, with nothing accomplished save her moral debts squared and a few more hours of grace won. The Deaf and Mute Heroine is the archetypal drama of fate, with a nameless character spurred on to self-preservation amid a landscape of death, greed and corruption. Here and there super-heroes meet and clash in battle, the survivor going on to other fortunes; it is an intensely pessimistic world, peopled by humans with no future; a familiar world, however, in costume martial arts dramas, and one exploited magnificently by director Wu Ma 午马.

Wu Ma, who also plays the bald sidekick of the gambling house proprietress, has obeyed all the rules of the genre. So much so, in fact, that he is forced to bend the plot at crucial points into ever-more unlikely shapes. A sub-credits combat sequence (similar to Zhang Che’s 张彻 Heroes Two 方世玉与洪熙官, 1974) introduces us to the Swordswoman as she wins the pearls that later catalyse events. With the entrance of the peaceable Yang Shun, the pearls become less and less important, and the dramatic focus shifts to the Swordswoman’s silver wristshields, without which she is at a serious disadvantage since their reflective surface provides her with rear vision. Her original pursuers (common bandits) quietly give way to more superior villains, led by a hard-faced casino proprietress with a large butterfly tattoed on her back. Despite her skill in combat she is clearly not the Swordswoman’s equal, and dramatic convention demands that the heroine should meet only an opponent of equal stature for the final trial of strength. Since there is no provision for this amongst the cast, the script resorts to a lurching deus ex machina to fulfil dramatic requirements. A super-hero enters who is both completely au fait with events and perfectly equipped to resolve the script’s dilemma: a master of weightlessness (achieved through perfect balance), he has a former defeat to avenge at the hands of the Swordswoman.

Director Wu Ma smoothes over such plot deficiencies by sheer imagination at every step. The Swordswoman’s battle with the bandits takes place amid tall reeds and mud, and Wu Ma has clearly learned much here from his Shaw apprenticeship. The visuals are crowded and often screened from direct vision, while comical use is made of bodies hurtling from off-camera. Similarly, later fights with both the proprietress (a really savage combat between the two women) and her henchmen are set amid hanging lengths of cloth, while the leaping, flying and bouncing techniques of the main characters are standard Shaw Brothers skills. On the other hand there is often a clarity and sparseness in both the photography and camera set-ups, which forecast Golden Harvest trademarks (the film was made in 1970 [and released in early 1971]): a confrontation in a rocky place and the finale on the seashore are particularly memorable for this. Wu Ma capitalises on the convention of using characters’ skills to highlights their personalities – the sadistic, vaguely lesbian proprietress Liu Qingqing specialises in throwing small poisoned sickles, while Ma Lie, the superhero, dazzles his victims with his polished sword-blade. As the swordswoman, Ma Hailun 马海伦 [Helen Ma], though not particularly attractive, has exactly the right quality of hardened femininity to make her character make psychological sense. Wu Ma and his team have provided her with fine settings and an endless succession of marathon combats, and she partakes of all with engaging spirit. If The Dead and Mute Heroine sticks in the memory for its succession of great moments rather than its overall cohesion, that is not to belittle its appeal. The fights are some of the most inventive and entertaining seen here so far [in the UK, mid-1974], and by dint of Wu Ma’s respect for the genre’s conventions his film triumphs even over the story’s structural immaturities.

CREDITS

Presented by Mingxing Film (HK). Produced by Mingxing Film (HK).

Script: Ma Lie. Script supervision: Tang Wan, Xu Kechang. Photography: Hua Shan. Editing: Guo Hong. Music: Zhou Liang. Action: Xu Erniu, Xu Songhe.

Cast: Tang Jing (Yang Shun), Ma Hailun [Helen Ma] (deaf-and-mute swordswoman), Huang Shali [Shirley Wong] (Liu Qingqing), Li Ying (Tong Jiuying), Wei Ping’ao (Sun Lu), Yang Wei (Ma Lie), Tang Di (Liu Hong), Wu Ma (Hu Qi), Xu Songhe, Zeng Chulin (Liu family retainers), Hao Lvren (doctor).

Release: Hong Kong, 18 Feb 1971.

(Review section originally published in UK monthly films and filming, Nov 1974. Modern annotations in square brackets.)