Chen Kuan-tai - The Chinese Cinema

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Chen Kuan-tai

A collection of 5 posts

2022 Spring/Summer Festival Compilation

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2022 Spring/Summer Festival Compilation

Five Shaolin Masters and Shaolin Temple (Chang Cheh, 1974 and 1976)

Five Shaolin Masters and Shaolin Temple (Chang Cheh, 1974 and 1976)

Five Shaolin Masters circles back and starts at the beginning of another 1974 Chang Cheh film, Heroes Two, with the destruction of the Shaolin Temple, but then goes off in the other direction. A narrator helpfully informs us that the Chen Kuan-tai character in that film went south and met

Heroes Two (Chang Cheh, 1974)

Heroes Two (Chang Cheh, 1974)

Chang Cheh’s take on the Fong Sai-yuk character has Alexander Fu Sheng playing him as a good-hearted but dim-witted boob who is quite easily gulled into capturing one of the few survivors of the destruction of the Shaolin Temple, Chen Kuan-tai’s Hung Hsi-kuan, and handing him over to

Executioners from Shaolin (Lau Kar-leung, 1977)

Executioners from Shaolin (Lau Kar-leung, 1977)

The anti-Qing struggle and the destruction of the Shaolin Temple is a common narrative backdrop in kung fu movies. Respectively, they’re kind of akin to the role the Civil War and Little Big Horn play in American Westerns. The Temple story is a subset of the larger Qing-Ming war,

The Flying Guillotine (Ho Meng-hua, 1975)

The Flying Guillotine (Ho Meng-hua, 1975)

A crazed Qing Emperor suspects everyone around him of disloyalty, and when two well-respected advisors dare to suggest that maybe he shouldn’t have killed a bunch of innocent teachers and intellectuals, he decides to kill them, along with anyone else who might be disloyal. He tasks another advisor with