The Beauty of a Shaw Brothers Film
The 36th Chamber of Shaolin. Image courtesy of Celestial Pictures.
If you happen to be in Singapore and find yourself in the mood for an independent film, you should make your way down to Beach Road and check out what’s playing at The Projector. While I enjoy ducking out of the heat to catch a film at a Golden Village cineplex, they won’t be screening the same kind of offbeat fare you can find at The Projector. I once watched a 3-hour documentary about Britain’s National Gallery at the Projector, which I would only recommend if you are suffering from a terminal brain disease.
The Projector is housed in Golden Mile Tower, an integrated mixed use development dreamed up by Singapore’s Housing and Development Board in the 1960s and 70s to jump-start growth along an envisioned Golden Mile on Beach Road. Heavily influenced by the Brutalist style, many of the developments on Golden Mile had shops, apartments, restaurants - and movie theaters. It is now often considered an eyesore and a den of debauchery filled with Thai karaoke bars, but the area is rich in Singapore’s urban and architectural history. And just a bit further down Beach Road is Shaw Towers, which was also part of the initial Golden Mile concept. Completed in 1975 it housed one of if not the largest cinema in Singapore at the time.
Still owned by the Shaw Organization, the fact that international film companies were leading the charge on big urban development projects in Singapore, Malaysia and Hong Kong reveals the extent to which a studio like Shaw Brothers transcended its boundaries as a film production house in the 1960s and 70s. It was a major cultural, financial and economic player, bigger than just studio back lots and film reels.
In the 1960s and 70s, Shaw Bros (run by the legendary Run Run Shaw) was the biggest studio in Hong Kong. The studio was very much run in the style of the old Hollywood studios - indeed, the Shaw Bros logo bears more than a passing resemblance to the famous Warner Bros seal.
Shaw Bros vs Warner Bros.
Run Run Shaw ran a tight ship - he would sign talent to contracts, and shoot tight and controlled productions, keeping costs down and turning out a huge number of assembly-line films, exactly like Old Hollywood. He didn’t like to overpay stars (one reason why he let Bruce Lee get away) and especially in the 1970s there was a house style that makes every Shaw Bros film of that era instantly recognizable.
This was a wildly profitable business model, but it stifled the creative freedom of directors and actors who wanted to try out stylistic innovations. That is why John Woo, who initially worked for Shaw Bros shooting cookie cutter films in Taiwan, didn’t really find success until he jumped ship to Cinema City and could give free reign to his singular action vision. It’s how Golden Harvest eventually sprang up as a competitor, because that studio would gives its stars like Sammo Hung and Jackie Chan more control over the creative process.
Eventually Shaw Bros pivoted toward television in the late 1980s, but during its heyday in the 1970s that Shaw Bros house style is so clean and in a way comforting. Hundreds if not thousands of these films were released so obviously I have not seen them all. Run Run Shaw sold the distribution rights to Celestial Pictures in 2002 and they started to reach a wider audience. Nowadays there is an entire channel on MNC Vision here in Indonesia that airs nothing but Shaw Brothers films. And when I walk in on a classic, I cannot help but sit down and watch the damn thing.
They have the look and feel of Old Hollywood, shot in an extremely classical and controlled style often on sound stages and back lots and loaded up with ridiculous sword fight sound effects that are so artificial they become a thing of exquisite beauty. They frequently tell these elaborate, fantastical versions of Chinese myth and history and hybridize the classic Hollywood production design and filmmaking style with acrobatic and elaborate fight sequences.
And they have a certain fidelity to the structure of classic storytelling and plotting, something that newcomers like John Woo and Jackie Chan were happy to shove aside in order to deliver ever-greater spectacle and innovation. The classic example is the 36th Chamber of Shaolin starring Gordon Liu. It’s a very traditional story about an underdog fighting the forces of oppression who goes through mystical Shaolin training. It’s got martial arts choreography and training montages straight out of Kurosawa, and it’s also a very satisfying narrative arc. Simple and traditional, sure. But it works, and that adherence to traditional style and structure is one of the things that allows Shaw Bros films to exist forever in this cocoon of timelessness.
The 36th Chamber of Shaolin exemplifies the cross-pollination between Hollywood and Hong Kong in terms of style, story-telling, look and production. It is a classic film and it gives some idea of what a major player Shaw Brothers was in the late 1970s. And once you start connecting the dots you too can enjoy a stroll down Beach Road in Singapore, maybe on your way to catch a screening of a classic Shaw Bros feature, with a deeper understanding of how this movie production house in Hong Kong could have had the reach to shape the built environment in urbanizing Singapore in the 1960s and 70s.
