Super Spies and Secret Lies: Three Undercover Classics from Shaw Brothers (1966-9) (Review)

Have you ever seen a spy movie from Hong Kong? My guess is, if you have any interest in Far Eastern cinema at all, you probably have. Enter the Dragon, no less, sees Bruce Lee going undercover at the behest of British intelligence; Jackie Chan and Stephen Chow have also made entries into the spy genre with self-explanatory titles like The Accidental Spy and From Beijing With Love. Those movies, though, are more commonly viewed as martial arts films. The impression that lingers after Enter the Dragon has to do with the awesome fighting abilities of Bruce Lee, rather than the set-up which allows him to fight. The question of genre also arises in connection to the three Shaw Brothers films in Eureka’s delectable new Blu-Ray set Super Spies and Secret Lies, albeit from the other end of the telescope.

Put simply, all three of these movies have impeccable period spy-movie vibes. If you have any impression at all of what a 1960s spy movie is supposed to be like, whether that’s based on James Bond, The Avengers during its Diana Rigg days, Austin Powers or anything else, then every item on your mental checklist will be ticked off by these films. There is one notable exception, and that’s politics. The James Bond series is political in a plausible-deniability way: the 20th-century entries usually contrived some way to establish that its megalomaniacal supervillains weren’t formally aligned with the Kremlin while frequently Soviet-coding them as much as possible. Even this cautious approach, though, is too hot for Hong Kong, which in the 1960s was a British colony bordering Mao’s China. None of the heroes in these films are intelligence agents, nor are any of the people they’re fighting. So how do they work as spy movies?

Usually when you ask a question like this in the context of a box set, you can chart the different strategies each film comes up with to get around the issue. In this case, they all hit upon the same answer, but before I reveal what that is, it’s worth talking about the earliest film in the set, The Golden Buddha. This is, very slightly, the odd man out in the set, because it draws from spy fiction that predates the Bond franchise. In this case, there’s a clear inspiration from Alfred Hitchcock’s North by Northwest, as Paul Chang Chung’s hapless businessman ends up drawn into an international conspiracy because of mistaken identity. North by Northwest was one of the films Albert ‘Cubby’ Broccoli used as a model for his fledgeling spy franchise, but there’s still a huge distance between Cary Grant’s put-upon Roger O. Thornhill and Sean Connery’s Bond. It proves to be too much distance for The Golden Buddha to bridge, and Chung’s unlikely hero is most compelling before the movie enters its more Bondian third act. For all its flaws, though, it sets down a template which the other two films in this set follow.

The template is this: if politics and intelligence agencies are too dicey as subject matter, these films should be about the one occupation that a 1960s audience found even more glamorous and exotic than espionage – jewel theft. And not just a smash-and-grab raid on your local jewellers, either. We’re talking international jewel thieves, jewel thieves who clearly spend a lot of their proceeds on secret bases and matching uniforms. For all I’ve said these films have few pre-Bond influences, there is at least an unconscious line back to the master-criminal tales that thrilled European audiences in the early decades of the 20th century, whether that’s gentleman-thieves like Arsène Lupin and Raffles, near-omniscient gangs like Les Vampires, or the more occult likes of Dr. Mabuse and Fantômas. This archetype was currently undergoing a revival in Italian comics and pulp novels, one which found its way into cinemas with films like Umberto Lenzi’s Kriminal and Mario Bava’s Danger: Diabolik.

Clearly, the mid-’60s zeitgeist was headed a certain way. Just one year after The Golden Buddha, Lo Wei returned to the sort-of-spy genre with Angel with the Iron Fists, a film which represents a remarkable flowering of the earlier film’s promise. As in the earlier film, Wei takes a supporting role, but here pretty much everyone is overshadowed by Lily Ho as the titular international jewel smuggler (told you). As she infiltrates the self-explanatory Devil Girl’s Gang, the film delivers the expected plethora of catsuits and cat-fights along with some rather smarter takes on how a gender-flipped Bond might use her femininity. There is, for instance, a witty moment where a fellow spy passes information to her in a bar by pretending to drunkenly chat her up. The film keeps delivering these little moments of ingenuity along with the exotic travel and epic punch-ups the genre mandates; some bad back-projection in an early driving scene feels less like a technical fault and more like an early warning of the delirious, intoxicating movie-world you are about to enter. The film is the longest in the set, nudging two hours, and some people find it overlong. Personally, I could watch a whole miniseries of this.

After Angel with the Iron Fists, the only place for Shaw Brothers spy films to go was over the top. It’s a mission they gleefully accepted with the final film in the set, 1969’s The Singing Thief. Daniel Craig once joked that his next Bond film would be a musical, but director Chang Cheh actually delivers it in this story of a diamond smuggler – of course – who’s started a singing career in his retirement. Needless to say, events pull him back in, but the real draw of the film is its soundtrack, ranging from instrumental covers of Stevie Wonder to the melodramatic ballads star Jimmy Lin Chong delivers in luridly colourful musical numbers. Chong’s character is called Diamond Poon, a phrase I’m not even sure we’re allowed to print on this site, but it does get across something of the film’s attitude towards its MacGuffin: everyone in this film is agonisingly horny for diamonds all the time. What began as a trope ends up as an all-consuming obsession, something which could be said for any of the thrillingly retro stylistic tics in these films. This micro-genre probably couldn’t be pushed much further than this, but it’s a blast watching it burn itself out in a blaze of psychedelic cool.

Eureka’s extras include commentaries by Mike Leeder and Arne Venema, plus two shrewdly differentiated critical videos – one from Llewella Chapman situating the films as part of international Bondmania, and one from Wayne Wong about their position in the history of Hong Kong’s cinema industry. A shout-out has to be made to Darren Wheeling’s sleeve art, a regular Eureka strength, which will add a touch of swingin’ batchelor-pad glamour to even the drabbest Blu-Ray shelf.

Graham’s Archive – Super Spies and Secret Lies