’The 14 Amazons’ or — The Shaw Brothers do ‘The Lord of the Rings’?
There are many reasons I could lavish gushing praise on Cheng Kang’s ‘The 14 Amazons’ (1972) but there’s one thing about his film that’s truly exceptional and that’s the pacing because the flow of action and excitement here is sheer perfection.
This invigorating momentum is greatly aided by a clear, direct and focused story, one that also allows for a satisfying range of variation and invention to the peril and danger. It briefly goes like this — after General Yang Tsung-pao is ambushed and killed defending a remote border of the country his family’s matriarch gathers the surviving Yang clan together, a clan primarily consisting of 14 widows of Yang’s fellow fallen comrades, to lead a force of volunteer troops across the country to avenge the General’s death and, ultimately, storm of the stronghold of the barbarians responsible. Along the way they encounter various traps, obstacles and ambushes set by their opponents in an attempt to whittle down their numbers before they reach their final goal.
So what we’re dealing with here is a sort of mash-up of a group-of-heroes-on-a-quest adventure with a WW II commandos-on-a-mission yarn, and ‘The 14 Amazons’ makes that particular mix work extremely well. So as soon as one barrier or impediment it dealt with or overcome a new, different one immediately presents itself which helps keep everything fresh and exciting, and the murderous grief fuelling the Yangs’ thirst for revenge adds legitimate weight to their aim.
Although the thought that kept popping into my head was — “This is a lot like Peter Jackson’s ‘Lord of the Rings!” — and not just once or twice but pretty frequently throughout, and looking up several reviews of the film this morning I noticed I wasn’t the only one drawing such comparisons. For one, the Yang matriarch is a wise, kindly figure with a staff who leads a plucky and determined group on a dangerous journey, occasionally leaning on her walking stick to give them soothing words of encouragement. Then there’s battle scenes which involve everything from violently clashing cavalry and infantry, skirmishes and raids plus large scale assaults on heavily fortified bases. There’s even a perilous flight to a treacherous bridge spanning a seemingly bottomless chasm that wouldn’t have looked too out of place in Khazad-dum!
Director Cheng Kang, much like Jackson, also does an excellent job of extracting the absolute maximum from his available resources to give the movie as grand a look and feel as possible, especially in his clever use of extras. He’s certainly got plenty of them but some sly editing and careful planning allows him to give the impression that fifty men and women could easily be several hundred. Obviously, another benefit of this is that it allows for an extremely high body count and some ferocious set-pieces.
I had a delirious blast with ‘The 14 Amazons’ but when you’re dealing with a movie that plays like a Wuxia version of Peter Jackson’s epic then how on earth could you not?
