The bells of death

" It will be interesting to see what becomes of the “new Shaw studios” in Hong Kong, with over a million square feet of space built for a reported $180 million it is supposed to open sometime this year. Given how the old Shaw Studio phased out film production in favor of TV in the mid-eighties, it will presumably still cater largely to television content. One thing is for sure: digital formats will replace the 35mm Eastmancolor film stock that the old Shaw Studio exported throughout the world back in the sixties, when it was making 40 or more Shaw Scope films a year. That was a time when their air-conditioned costume warehouses were well stocked with 80,000 Chinese costumes for the dozen or so films they had in simultaneous production. The Bells of Death (Duo hun ling, 1968), directed by Feng Yueh (1901-1999), takes viewers back to that time.

The story and editing for The Bells of Death pay tribute to both Akira Kurosawa and Sergio Leone. What is intriguing is how similar it is to Once Upon a Time in the West (C’era una volta il West, 1968), by Leone since both that film and The Bells of Death were released in their respective countries the same year (1968). Leone was clearly paying attention to Asian cinema, since he remade Akira Kurosawa’s Yojimbo (1961) as A Fistful of Dollars (1964), and Kurosawa had a thing for John Ford and Shakespeare, so the globalization of ideas was already in effect. But when concurrent productions mimic each other you can’t help but wonder how that kind of synchronicity occurs.

In Once Upon a Time in the West the villains are introduced when they ruthlessly kill a family. The protagonist, played by Charles Bronson, has a score to settle with these men and he has a habit of announcing his presence by playing a harmonica. In The Bells of Death, Wei Fu (played by Chang Yi), a woodcutter, sees his family brutally murdered and his sister kidnapped by three murderous horsemen. With the aid of martial arts training at the hands of an elder swordsman, Wei Fu seeks his vengeance, but instead of a harmonica he announces his presence with bells from a bracelet he wears from his murdered mother. One of the pleasant surprises about The Bells of Death is how “training by the master” moment does not subject viewers to a tedious montage of the training itself – a refreshing break from convention.

Wei Fu manages to trace down the murderous trio and the fights scenes that follow take him into bamboo forests, tricky candle-holding environments, and into dark alleys. Most of the action adheres to the physical realm except for one notable exception whereby Wei Fu somehow wields the power to blow leaves off a tree and onto his attackers, with the leaves sticking to their faces with such power that their removal peels off the skin too. Fans of the wuxia genre (defined as those films that mix honor code philosophies with martial arts) probably aren’t phased by the use of a little neijin (defined in Wikipedia as “the ability to control mystical inner energy”), but it definitely stands out.

As should be clear from the aforementioned action, this is an altogether different beast than your typical spaghetti western, but it does dip into the lexicon of tight facial close-ups that alternate with widescreen vistas, and has a dynamic soundtrack. The Bells of Death does not hit the consistent high notes of Leone’s epic masterpiece, but it retains its own modest charm."