THE GRAND PASSION (1970)
Directed by: Yang Shih-ching
Starring: Polly Shang-kuan, Pai Ying, Tsao Chien, Shih Chun
Stop us if you’ve heard this one before. King Hu’s A Touch of Zen was such a massive production that seemed to drag on forever, during the downtime his cast and crew went off to make another movie. This time, it was his production manager, Yang Shih-ching, who picked up a camera, and he tapped Hu’s other major female discovery to headline the cast, Polly Shang-kuan. Dragon Inn may have put Hsu Feng on the road to stardom, but the intense Polly Shang-kuan was the actual lead swordslinger in that movie, and this hardcore flick is a showcase for what she can do.
Like A City Called Dragon, it’s also about rebels trying to deliver a MacGuffin (a list of names) but this time Polly Shang-kuan and Pai Ying are siblings as well as part of a secret spy network, and they need to take the list to a middleman at the local teahouse. Standing in their way, of course, is the government’s torture-loving General, and numerous creeps who start coming out of the woodwork who may be friends or who may be foes. Eschewing the occasional silliness and flights of fantasy you can find in the genre, this one is a locked-down, intense drama with gorgeous production design and a sense of realism that grounds the action and makes the twists feel real. Polly Shang-kuan would go on to be one of Taiwan’s biggest action stars, and Director Yang Shih-chung would make two more movies with her after this one.