Director Yuen Woo-ping’s Iron Monkey (1993) was released at the tail end of the early 1990s resurgence of martial arts films spurred by the success of Tsui Hark’s Once Upon a Time in China series. That franchise starred Jet Li as Wong Fei-hung, the Chinese folk hero from Guangdong. Wong has been portrayed at different times by Kwan Tak-hing, Gordon Liu Chia-hui, Jackie Chan, Sammo Hung Kam-bo, and Vincent Zhao Wenzhuo, among others.
Iron Monkey is arguably the best martial arts film Hong Kong has ever produced. Like the industry that made it and the genre it represented, the film was the culmination of a series of circumstances, situations, and serendipitous events that will never recur.
By the 1960s, Beijing Opera’s popularity was in precipitous decline in Hong Kong, at least in part because of the rising popularity of film. The training regimen for Beijing Opera was rigid, thorough, and frankly brutal. Chen Kaige’s Farewell My Concubine gives a glimpse into the training young men endured. And that “tradition” lasted into the 1970s.
Jackie Chan has said that when he joined an opera school, his parents had to sign a waiver acknowledging the discipline that would be used and indemnifying the school if Chan died. It was in this school that Chan would meet, live, and train with Yuen Biao, Yuen Wah, and Sammo Hung. Corey Yuen Kwai, Yuen Qiu and Yuen Wo0-ping also studied at the school.
By the early 1970s, as audience numbers plummeted, an entire generation of Beijing Opera students and performers found themselves out of work. Students had spent nearly a decade enduring a draconian training regimen in preparation for a career in opera, only to have it vanish just as they graduated. With little or no schooling outside of opera and very few job opportunities, these young people turned to the industry that had rendered them obsolete.
They brought with them their training in martial arts and acrobatics. One reason Bruce Lee’s fight scenes are so breathtaking is because the people surrounding him are his equals. Lam Ching-ying, who also studied opera, was just as fast as Lee. Yuen Wah not only fought with Lee, but performed acrobatic stunts as Lee’s double. Sharp-eyed viewers will find many of Hong Kong’s martial arts stars on the receiving end of Lee’s kicks and punches.
Bruce Lee died in 1973, shortly after he had ignited a global craze and hunger for martial arts films. The Hong Kong film industry, desperate to fill that need, was blessed with a group of highly skilled people capable of creating breathtaking fight scenes.
Meanwhile, it was common knowledge that these performers had very few other employment options, and were thus ruthlessly exploited. Hong Kong stuntmen of the 1970s and 80s had little choice but to do what was asked of them, because if they declined, the stuntman behind them would do it. It led to breathtaking cinema, but also to broken bones. Over the next two decades, as these performers got older and were injured, they created some of the greatest action scenes ever filmed.
Some stuntmen became fight choreographers, action directors or directors. In this process, as martial arts choreography developed, so too did the ability to capture the action in ways that heightened or amplified what was onscreen, because the people behind the camera had spent time in front of it. Even in non-martial arts films, like John Woo Yu-sen’s iconic Hard Boiled (1992), part of what makes the action so kinetic is the movement of the camera in concert with its subjects.
Iron Monkey is an iconic film because it was the culmination of this process; Yuen Woo -ping and his crew had perfected not just the fights but the filming thereof. It certainly helped that the ostensible stars of the film, Donnie Yen Chi-tan and Yu Rongguang, were very capable martial artists. Yen studied martial arts most of his life, and Yu learned them during opera training in China.
But the film, inadvertently or otherwise, ended up highlighting one performer more than the rest. The story revolves around a Robin Hood-like hero who fights corruption in a small Chinese town and the various efforts made to bring him to heel. The film’s Chinese title, 少年黃飛鴻之鐵馬駿, can be expressed as Young Wong Fei-hung meets the Iron Monkey. In the film, Donnie Yen plays Wong Kei-ying, father of the young Wong Fei-hung.
Yuen Woo-ping wanted to find a young person who could bring Wong Fei-hung to life, but also keep up with the other martial artists. Yuen met with the coach of Hong Kong’s Wushu team and inquired about a young man he had seen practicing. The coach agreed with Yuen’s appraisal of skill, but pointed out that it was in fact a young woman who had impressed the director.
Angie Tsang Sze-man was barely a teenager and had taken up Wushu as a positive outlet for what she would admit was a rambunctious personality. She accepted the role, and in so doing made cinema history. She is the only woman to have portrayed Wong Fei-hung, and Iron Monkey was the only film she ever made. But she will always be remembered for her performance.
In a fortuitous instance of art reflecting life, Tsang perfectly captures the mischievous Wong Fei-hung, lighting up the screen with a smile that is equal parts innocence and insolence, and her martial arts skills are self-evident. Even when surrounded by martial arts heavyweights, Tsang holds her own. She makes the impossible seem effortless, and at times seems to be having as much or even more fun than the audience.
Iron Monkey’s narrative exists mostly as a means of filling in the gaps between action scenes, and the emphasis is more on broad humour than serious drama. Yet even with such expositional austerity, the actors are convincing with their emotions, motivations and personalities. The brief moments given to parenting, romance or righteousness are convincing thanks to the dramatic skills of the cast.
In a series of action set pieces, characters face off against one another either singly or in groups, and each scene is bigger and more impressive than the last. The final duel, taking place among burning timbers, was dangerous for the actors as well as the filmmakers. It is a dizzying sequence, and while the actors carried it off impressively, it is obvious that the concern on their faces was not artificial.
The golden age of martial arts films, like the success of Hong Kong cinema itself, was a confluence of a number of factors that cannot recur. Whenever people ask why Hong Kong no longer makes many martial arts films, I point out that the training methods that the first generation of stars underwent are now considered excessive and even abusive.
Younger generations understandably don’t want to undergo that sort of ordeal, although some commentators find that attitude problematic. I interviewed Ti Lung once, who bemoaned the lack of commitment of younger stars. “When I worked at Shaw Bros, you went to work every day not knowing if you would break a bone or get set on fire. But it was the job and we did it. We didn’t complain.”
Angie Tsang once told me that the Chinese wushu team would always dominate the sport because they trained on concrete floors with no heat or air conditioning, under the watchful eye of very strict coaches. When they travelled to a competition, they slept in hotels and competed on padded mats. In many ways, it was a victory before the competition even began.
Although offered a number of opportunities to reprise her role after Iron Monkey’s success, Angie Tsang refused. She didn’t want to spend any more time than necessary with the front half of her head shaved, or continue being a woman portraying a man. In her own words, she wanted to be “a normal teenage girl”.
After finishing school, she remained a member of the wushu team and eventually joined the Hong Kong Police. She started a family and left Hong Kong several years ago. But she will always be Wong Fei-hung to fans of Hong Kong cinema, and will always have her well-earned place in cinema history with a single film credit.
From the Vault offers critiques, reviews and highlights of Hong Kong celluloid favourites, from the fascinating to the flawed to the flamboyant.
