The Fighting Fists of Shanghai Joe Review (Scherpschutter)

This was not the first east-meets-west hybrid, nor was it the first foray into this territory for the Italian genre film industry. The lavishly produced British-French-Italian Red Sun had shown the way two years earlier and a couple of low budget hybrids had been released earlier the same year. None of these hybrids would become a classic, but this one is often mentioned as one of the better examples of the subgenre. If so, that would explain why none of these movies reached a classic status.

The story is predictable but seems otherwise perfectly serviceable: A Chinese immigrant (who has no trouble at all to make himself understood in the new country) travels to Texas, looking for honest work, but all he encounters is racism, racism and more racism. He soon runs afoul with a slave trader called Spencer, ending up with a price on his head. Luckily our immigrant is an expert martial artist with a rich repertoire of punches and kicks, but then Spencer and his friends decide to hire the four most terrifying bounty hunters of the West, among them a cannibal and a scalphunter.

This could all have resulted in an enjoyable crossover, with jokes about the cultural clash of a polite China men being confronted with white racist trash, but what we get is hardly ever funny, often gross, and most of the time clumsy. With the spaghetti western in decline and the martial arts movies from Hong Kong flourishing, it was no surprise that some film makers would combine elements of both genres. What these movies from Hong Kong usually lacked, was a decent budget and - even more so - good-looking locations; the same sets and outdoor locations were used over and over again, leading to a visual monotony, only remedied by the virtuoso fighting skills of some of the lead actors. Shanghai Joe was made with a decent budget and therefore has a more sophisticated look than most martial arts movies from Hong Kong, but what it lacks is - of all things - a virtuoso fighting star. Most fans of martial arts movies disliked this movie for its poor action scenes. On Coolass Cinema, Angel Face calls the movie 'execrable'.

Lead actor Chen Lee looks more Japanese than Chinese and it was therefore suggested that he was a karate-instructor from Rome. However, according to director Caiano he worked in a launderette instead of a dojo, and was chosen because he looked a little like the young Dustin Hoffman. Giusti thinks his real name was Mioshini Hayakawa, which is indeed Japanese, not Chinese (*). Unlike Lo Lieh in the similar hybrid movie Là dove non batte il sole|The Stranger and a Gunfighter he isn't escorted by a major spaghetti western star. Lo had Lee (van Cleef), Lee has to do it all by himself. The movie also lacks all possible coherence; while the martial arts sequences flirt with parody and slapstick, the western action is blood-spattered, unpleasant and gory. But in the middle of some parodist martial arts nonsense, all of a sudden, one of the bounty hunters has an eye gauged out. Absolute madness.

Admittedly, the movie has a few things speaking for it. Caiano is smart enough to keep up the pace, so it never becomes dull, and while the first forty minutes or so are no more than a series of often unfunny vignettes, the film picks a little in the second half, with a couple of guest appearances by the likes of Kinski, Mitchell and Undari. However, I agree with Bawtyshouse, who said in his review that "Their scenes are so brief (...) that [those actors] don't have a real chance to flex their wild, woolly acting chops." I also agree with him on these ultra-violent and gory killings: "Gruesome stuff and oddly disconcerting, these shots don't give a visceral thrill or gasp, rather, they make you do a double-take in disbelief, like, "what was *that*?"

Well, what the hell is *it*? It seems that those who like it are attracted by its weirdness. Alex Cox calls it a surrealist horror-western in the tradition of Questi and Corbucci. Others have compared it to Questi's Se sei vivo, spara|Django Kill! French critic Jean-François Giré likes the movie too, calling it the only successful fusion of martial arts and western action Italian style. The film also has fans among the members of this forum. Apparently they enjoy the mix of western parody, silly jokes and exploitation. What doesn't work for Bawtyshouse and me, seems to work for them. Stanton says it gives him the feeling of a superior Fidani trash movie. I guess that's one way to look at it. And I think it's only fair to quote John Welles, whose opinion seems to cover a middle ground : "This Western tries to say some interesting things about the West, and how Chinese immigrants helped do a lot of the "dirty" jobs that Whites wouldn't do. Sadly, most of this is drowned under its comic book style and some pretty bad kung-fu."

Jean-François Giré, p. 309 Forum discussion, page 3 The Film's page Forum discussion, page 3