FIVE SHAOLIN MASTERS (1974) - All-Time Classic
To understand the full impact this film had worldwide, you had to have seen it when it came out; it opened on Christmas Day 1974 in HK. IMDB is TOTALLY INCORRECT in stating that this movie was released in the USA in 1979...
I saw it in 1975 at Kim Sing theater on Figueroa in Chinatown, L.A.; it was a double feature with Man Of Iron[starring Chen Kuan Tai]. Kim Sing theater, like the other two Chinese movie theaters Sing Lee & Royal Pagoda, ran double features...But Kim Sing theater showed ALL the Shaw Bros. classics...
This film had them all...The who's who of classic martial arts stars :
David Chiang, Ti Lung, Meng Fei, Chi Kuan Chun, Alexander Fu Sheng, Tang Yan Tsan, Gordon Liu and the classic bad guys : Wang Lung Wei, Chiang Tao, Tsai Hung, Fung Hak On, and Leung Kar Yan[aka Liang Cha-Jen].
Unlike most all of the martial arts movies from HK or Taiwan, this one had an epic scale (without any elaborate sets and costumes) and a very personalized, emotional feel to their fight scenes...Not just mindless violence & mayhem. When people died fighting in this movie, YOU FELT IT...For example, I still remember 35 years later how the audience gasped the most when baby-faced MENG FEI bit the dust with super-villain Leung Kar Yan in the climactic fight sequence...This was Mr. Fei's only outing with Shaw Bros., which might explain why he has the least screen time in FSM compared to the other Shaw Bros. contract stars. He was already a boxoffice sensation all over East Asia with his two previous title roles : The King Boxer(1971) and The Prodigal Boxer(1972)--Fei played Chinese folk hero Fang Shi Yu[Fong Sai Yuk] before Alexander Fu Sheng & Jet Li.
These movies had screen personas of protagonists who were MORAL & HONOURABLE...Which an entire family could go see. They also had universal CROSSOVER appeal to all ethnicities worldwide. Hollywood had nothing that could compare in terms of sheer screen presence and genuine noble, heroic appeal at that time [i.e. 1970's]...
Yeah...You had the groundbreaking badasses like John Shaft[Richard Roundtree], Superfly Priest[Ron O'Neal], Calvin Lockhart, etc...But they weren't heroically NOBLE. Neither were the Steve McQueens, Clint Eastwoods, Charlie Bronsons, Roy Scheiders, Gene Hackmans, etc...All of whom I also liked in retrospect, although back then I preferred Alain Delon, Jean Paul Belmondo, Terence Hill, and Bud Spencer.
I grew up in the '70's and fondly remember the martial arts craze created by the great Bruce Lee and company...
The film's director Mr. Chang Cheh was a legend in his own right : a fusion of Kurosawa and Peckinpah. In fact, he has been dubbed the Sam Peckinpah of martial arts cinema; the similarity between the two being their propensity for onscreen ultra-violent action; the obvious disimilarity being that morally, Peckinpah's protagonists weren't much better than their antagonists. You knew if it was a Chang Cheh film, some of the protagonists or heroes--if not all of them--were going to get killed off at the end in some spectacular, ultra-violent fashion.
No other martial arts film director had Mr. Cheh's reputation.
FSM still has the same impact upon me today as it did when I first viewed it as a pre-junior high-schooler back in the mid-70's at Kim Sing theater on Figueroa...
I felt compelled to post this because I finally saw FSM after 30 years just last week and was bowled over at how much it STILL impacted me as a middle-aged man...