Beach of the War Gods
A prolific actor, stuntman, writer and director whose life offscreen was often as colourful as the films he was involved with, sued by the Shaw Brothers for breach of contract and subsequently prohibited from making films in Hong Kong and surviving an attempt on his life in 1981 related to his links to organised crime in Taiwan, it was in 1973 that Jimmy Wang Yu unleashed his epic recreation of the coastal conflicts between Chinese villagers and Japanese marauders of 1556 in an area known as the Beach of the War Gods.
Celebrating its fiftieth anniversary and making its worldwide Blu-ray debut as part of the Eureka Classics range, Beach of the War Gods (Zhan shen tan, 战神滩) stars Wang as lone swordsman Xiao Feng, nephew of the governor of besieged Hangzhou where the enemy forces are encamped under the command Shinobu Hashimoto (Fei Lung, another prolific Taiwanese stuntman and actor and frequent collaborator with Wang).
Finding himself in the right place at the wrong time and forced to repel the advance guard of the Japanese forces who have offered to spare the village of Li in return for a substantial ransom of silver, Xiao finds himself obliged to recruit sufficient warriors to lead the defence of the village, among them “Iron Bull” Zhao, Leng Ping and “Lightning Fist” Hong, aware that with only sixty miles separating them from Hangzhou the attack could come at any time.
Very much a film of two halves, the first section of the film concerned with the gathering of fighters of suitable skill who are willing to lend themselves to the cause, Beach of the War Gods doesn’t find its pace until the assault begins as Hashimoto’s forces arrive before dawn under a parade of fiery torches accompanied by masked drummers, an almost ceremonial nocturnal handover to an extended battle scene which moves from the booby-trapped beach to the streets of Li itself.
The sheer number of costumed performers engaged in the sometimes overly choreographed action making the scope of the undertaking impressive, that is the main selling point of the film which never gives any of the leads any discernible character, the initially grounded close quarters combat becoming more fantastical as it progresses with swordsmen jumping over buildings though from the start a suspension of disbelief is required with the attacking forces seemingly failing to notice the massed forces gathered on the rooftops waiting to ambush them.
Shot not long after One Armed Boxer with which is shares sets and presented in a brand new 2K restoration with the original Mandarin dialogue alongside newly translated subtitles and the dubbed English version, Eureka’s new edition of Beach of the War Gods is supported by a new commentary by Asian film expert Frank Djeng, an interview with action cinema aficionados Mike Leeder and Arne Venema and an archive interview with Jimmy Wang Yu himself.
Beach of the War Gods will be available on Blu-ray from Eureka from Monday 23rd October
