Wong Fei-Hung is a historical figure in China. He is a healer, a martial artist, and something of a spiritual Zen master – and, in 1991, the ninety-ninth film retelling or reworking Wong Fei-Hung’s increasingly legendary and folkloric tale was released under the title Once Upon a Time in China. Jackie Chan fans will instantly recognize the character as the one portrayed by the artist in his drunken master films.

The first of six films (and the first of three starring Jet Li), Once Upon a Time in China is a tune that is so familiar to the Chinese people that viewers went to it not so much as an entirely new film experience, but as a western audience might go to an opera or, more likely, to different touring shows of The Phantom of the Opera.

In other words, the words and the characters are largely the same – the distinction comes in the execution. Yet what is already a comfortable mythology for a Chinese viewer will, to a non-Chinese viewer often seem odd at best and, at worst, ridiculous and farcical. Consider that Once Upon a Time in China for all of the portions of it that are extremely accessible to a western audience, is often (and most during its first hour), difficult for a western audience to appreciate. Think it as a person who’s never seen a television suddenly asked to puzzle out the ins and outs of twenty year soap opera.

Jet Li is arguably China’s greatest competitive martial artist, his status as an actor is, for me, something that is a little more in doubt. There are times, indisputably, where Li displays an amazingly virile charisma, and others where, I fear, he comes off as more than a little uncomfortable and wooden. By 1991, the 28 year-old Li had already begun to resurrect a career that had of late been rife with more films of the wooden variety than the charismatic with the fun fantasy Swordsman II - he continued his winning streak when the “Spielberg of the East,” Tsui Hark (pronounced “Choy Hok”), chose him to play the legendary Fei-Hung in Once Upon a Time… in the same year.

In my mind, Tsui Hark’s version of the Wong Fei-Hung tale is notable most for its dual concerns with the Boxer Rebellion and with, it seems, the massacre at Nanking during the Japanese occupation of China in W.W. II.. The obsession with the first plays into the idea that martial arts are helpless against a gun (the Boxers believed that a special kind of martial arts skill would protect them from bullets – it didn’t), the obsession with the second plays into the role that the camera and a Christian missionary plays in the documentation of atrocities of war.

Both ideas, that bullets will spell the end of China’s place as the middle kingdom, and that not all westerners are bad, come into sharp focus in those moments of the film in which Wong is variously distracted by or loses friends to the bullet, and moments in which the Christian missionary sees the evils perpetrated on the Chinese by his own race, and Aunt Yee (Rosamund Kwan: Swordsman 1 & 2) takes pictures with her new western toy. Most remarkably, perhaps, is the casting of Chinese in the role of the chief bad guy Leung Fu (Yuen Biao: Black Dragon) and white slaver Iron Robe Yim (Kwan Yan Yee: The Iron Monkey) rather than the Americans or the British.

Once Upon a Time in China, despite its obviously racist and stock Caucasian characters, is a notable departure for the Wong Fei-Hung sub-genre of pictures in its relative sensitivity in acknowledging the good of many “foreign devils.” The success of this film and the propelling of Jet Li into the first tier of stars in Hong Kong suggests that Chinese audiences, just a few years before Hong Kong’s re-assimilation into the communist mainland, were ready to shift their grudges from their traditional targets (the British, the Japanese) to a new target (themselves).

Consequently, the message of “united we stand, divided we fall” is one that is prevalent in the picture.

Still, a discussion of the sources and main themes of Once Upon a Time in China serve only to illustrate half of why it is that this film, more than others similar to it, is so widely acknowledged as a classic of the historical martial arts genre. The other half of its stature among martial arts films is the absolute virtuosity of its fight sequences. With the possible exception of his work in Fist of Legend, I don’t know that Jet Li has ever had a better showcase for the breadth of his talent, power, control, and strength – a scene in which Jet uses an umbrella to teach a triad member some manners stands as one of the wittiest and most elegantly choreographed action sequences I’ve seen – it, along with the under-train fight in Jackie Chan’s Drunken Master II are among my favorite moments from this genre.

Boasting of at least seven major fight scenes (five with Jet Li), almost all of them occurring in the second half of the film, Once Upon a Time in China doesn’t scrimp on the action – that is, if you have the patience to wade through the odd in-references and the awkward slapstick of its first hour. The finale staged in, around, and on top of, a teetering canopy of ladders and shot over the course of several weeks, is a triumph even with stuntman Hong Yan Yan standing in for a seriously injured Jet Li. Also of note is a battle in the rain that features, in one moment, Jet doing something indescribably in between a column and a wall, and in the next moment, a giant log spinning in the air between the combatants.

Better just to watch it for yourself.

The new DVD release of this film is a handsome thing featuring a fascinating “educated fanboy” commentary track by Hong Kong movie expert Ric Meyers, an additional thirty minutes in never-before-seen footage (most of which does not involve the fighting), with a crisp widescreen anamorphic transfer of an utterly rewarding 2:35:1 aspect. If you’ve been laboring under the misconception that your pan-and-scan version of this flick is adequate, let me be the first to disabuse you of that notion. Short of catching it at a late night revival, DVD is the best way to watch Once Upon a Time in China.

Very obviously the product of an alien culture, the film is a landmark production in many thematic respects – a fact made all the more amazing by the pure visceral magnificence of its action sequences. Give it a look if you’re already a fan of the genre – give it a look if you’re curious as to the Chinese mind set in certain areas – and give it a look if you like martial arts as practiced by what is very possibly the most technically proficient practitioner in China’s history.

If not for a few too many subplots and characters, and a plot that is very simply sprawling and untidy, Once Upon a Time in China would earn my highest recommendation, as it is, it’s well worth a look.




Recommended:
Yes

Viewing Format: DVD