Release Year: 1977
Country: Hong Kong
Starring: Don Wong Tao, Angela Mao Ying, Lo Lieh, Phillip Ko Fei, Sit Fong, Wang Hsieh, Man Kong-Lung, Sit Hon, Lin Hsiao-Hu
Writer: Ni Kuang, Go Bo-Shu
Director: Go Bo-Shu
Cinematographer: Cheung Sai-Gwan
Music: Stanley Chow Fook-Leung
Producer: Vengee Park
Original Title: Bo Ming
Alternate Titles: Wutang Thugs Hos and Scrillah, Battle of Shaolin, The Damned, Snake int he Eagle’s Shadow III

Bandits, Prostitutes, and Silver has always been one of my favorite kungfu films, if for no other reason than because it’s so relentlessly depressing. The American release from Xenon decided to retitle it Wutang Thugs, Hos, and Scrillah, which I guess is at least an accurate translation into “insulting street lingo,” though I won’t pretend to know what the hell “scrillah” is. Scrillah aside, this movie has absolutely nothing to do with Wutang, which is par for the course in 99% of the movies with “Wutang” in the title. I’m waiting for them to release Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon as Wutang Matrix Killah and The Hardboiled Wutang Bitch.

He might also be doing better if he would quit paying to spend the night with his girl. I know he loves her and all, but shelling out your hard earned cash you’re supposed to be saving to free her just seems counter-productive, especially when all they do is stand around and say, “I’m saving money to set you free.” She knows that, asshole, and you just spent half of it to tell her.

As is required for a kungfu film, Wong crosses the local rich bastard, who then makes it his personal quest to humiliate Wong by sleeping with Wong’s gal every chance he gets. He even goes so far as to threaten to buy her before Wong is able to do so, which at the rate Wong was going, would leave a cushy ten thousand year window of opportunity. Frustrated by his lack of progress, heart broken as he watches his girl service his arch-nemesis, and just generally pissed off at how the world seems constructed to keep the little guy down, Wong befriends a famous bandit named Sparrow. You may laugh at a guy named Sparrow, but then you’ll have to explain to your friends how a guy named Sparrow kicked your ass and stole all your scrillah.

Sparrow offers Wong a chance to make more money in one afternoon than he would make in a lifetime, or once again, at the rate Wong was saving money, in ten million lifetimes. All Wong has to do is drive the cart in one of Sparrow’s heists. Ahh yes, the getaway car driver. Is there any less fortunate character in all of action cinema? Set it in modern day American cities or ancient China, and the result is always the same. Getaway drivers have nothing but bad luck. Wong is hesitant. He’s always been a straight arrow. But a man’s gotta do what a man’s gotta do, and the kungfu film thrives on the character of a good man gone bad or a peaceful man pushed to the brink of violence. Personally, I make it a rule in my life to never ever piss off a guy who struggles to maintain a peaceful nonviolent lifestyle despite being a whirlwind of kungfu power. It’s just one of those things I figure I’m better off not doing, like heroin or robbing the Mafia.

Nothing is ever as simple as just stealing a huge shipment of scrillah, though. Lo Lieh runs an escort service hired to protect the silver. Unfortunately for the guy who hired him, Lo’s true agenda is to work with the famed Three Scars Gang to steal the silver for himself. He’ll dole out some to the gang, some for himself, and then triumphantly return the rest to its rightful owner, who will be thankful and give him a big reward. Personally, I’d kick the guy in the shins for letting my silver… err, scrillah… get stolen in the first place. He was being paid to prevent it from being stolen in the first place; not to recover it after he’d already let it be stolen. Actually, no. Add to my list of things not to do, “kick Lo Lieh in the shins.”

Lo Lieh, of course, is a kungfu film institution. He was a staple of the wonderful 1960s Shaw Brothers swordsman films alongside Jimmy Wang Yu and Cheng Pei-pei. He usually played a good-hearted but somewhat dim-witted guy, and there was always a good chance for a romantic triangle involving he, Jimmy, and Pei-pei. Lo Lieh’s transition to kungfu films went much better than Jimmy’s. While Jimmy faltered and never really hit a stride in kungfu films, Lo Lieh flourished, though not in the role we knew him for. After starring as a hero in the amazingly brutal kungfu classic Five Fingers of Death, Lo caught a bad case of the uglies. His mustache went from debonair to mangy, and he always seemed to be sweating a lot, or rubbing sausage grease all over himself. It was only natural, then, to cast him as a bad guy, a role he played in scores of films. Whether or not he was evil more times than Wang Lung-wei is a counting job best left to today’s fastest super-computers.

The Three Scars gang is lead by the delightful Angela Mao Ying, one of the true greats of kungfu films. I’m at a bit of a loss as to why you would cast Angela Mao in your film and then proceed to not have her fight, but whatever. She’s cute, but cute is for wimpy girls who aren’t powered by the fury of kungfu. Angela Mao should be cute and kick some serious ass. Anything else is just a waste of her talents. The Scars aren’t all that happy with the deal, but like everyone else they have to make a living. They think it’s unfair that they do all the work but Lo takes the lion share of the loot. When they find out Sparrow is also after the silver, they’re even less enthused, because he’s damn good.

Wong agrees to drive the cart, and he and Sparrow are the first to get to the shipment of silver. When Sparrow demands that Wong kill the driver of the other cart, Wong refuses. He won’t commit murder, and besides, that’s a fellow cart driver there just trying to earn a living. Sparrow gets right pissed and attacks Wong, but after a rather great fight and rather goofy “rolling shenanigans,” Wong proves the better fighter. Sparrow is accidentally stabbed by his own knives and has to give the dying, “I knew I would die one day, but I never thought… it would be… like this!” speech after which one must spit up a lot of blood then fall over. The spitting up of blood is crucial. Any seasoned kungfu film fan will tell you that if you’re gonna die, you have to spit up blood, preferably while making the “sour” face and reaching out with one arm while the other holds the knife in your belly.

Wong is terrified and takes off in the getaway cart, forgetting that the chests of silver are in the back. Meanwhile, the Three Scars gang is looking like a bunch of chumps hiding behind a tree a little ways up the road, wondering what the hell is taking so long. Wong stops to collect himself in the woods and realizes then that he has a shitload of scrillah with him. He does the “laugh and let the money fall through your fingertips into a big pile” thing, which I usually do, only with pennies. I don’t know if there is a slang word for pennies that is comparable to scrillah. Let’s call them nuchwaezchers. He starts daydreaming of proudly walking up to the whorehouse and demanding the release of his love. Then he falls asleep, which is generally a bad thing to do just a few minutes after killing a famous bandit and hightailing through the woods with a fortune in stolen silver.

When he wakes up, he’s staring at the feet of a very annoyed Three Scars gang. There’s a tussle in which Wong once again emerges victorious until Angela Mao steps up and shows us her secret weapon — spinning razor blades hidden in her shoes! That can’t be comfortable to walk on. She reveals that while she is indeed the leader of a ruthless gang of bandits, she’s not totally devoid of compassion. She offers Wong a cut of the silver and a position in the gang, recounting to him how he reminds her of her husband when he was young and driven instead of laying on the ground after just getting his ass kicked by Don Wong Dao. Wong, however, maintains that despite the day’s tragic turn of events, he’ll only take enough money to free his girlfriend. He has no desire to enter a life of crime. Angela sighs and tells him it’s too late; a life of crime has already entered him.

Back in town, word of Wong’s sudden skill in the art of committing crimes spreads quickly. His girl can hardly believe that he’d do such a thing, while Lo Lieh is convinced that Wong’s in cahoots with the Three Scars Gang to rip him off. When he confronts them using kungfu and a head-slicing steel whip, we finally get to see some ass-kicking action courtesy of Angela Mao. It’s a great fight, like just about all the fights in this film. I only wish they’d done more with someone as capable as Angela. Despite her secret weapon, neither she nor her husband are good enough to beat Lo. That task can only be completed by one man, and he’s heading right into a trap at the brothel.

Wong knows they’ll set a trap for him there, but he has no choice. What he doesn’t expect, and frankly I don’t know why he didn’t, was that they’d have his girl tied up in the head slicing thing as a hostage. The good thing about a kungfu movie is that even with a predictable, run of the mill plot there is still a lot of tension generated because anyone could die at any moment. It doesn’t matter who they are, how heroic or innocent they’ve been, or how important they’ve been to the story up until that point. Everyone is fair game. In an American film, there’d be no tension because you’d know the girl was not going to get decapitated. In an old school Hong Kong kungfu film, you don’t have that promise. It’s just as likely, perhaps even more likely, that heads will roll.

The final fight is fierce and suitably tragic. The hero doesn’t get the girl, but he does get a noose around the neck. In one of the most powerful finales to a kungfu fight, Wong is tied to one end of a rope while Lo is on the other. Using an archway, he hangs himself in order to hang Lo. The final shot of Wong’s limp feet hanging a foot above the ground while the stolen silver pours out of his torn pocket is a heavy-handed but effective visual, and it puts the entire moral point of the movie right there in front of you. It’s that moral that lifts this movie above the usual “guy out for revenge” film.

Bandits, Prostitutes, and Silver is a fabulous film. The acting is great, and the characters manage to avoid most of the cliches. Well, except for the villains. They laugh and stroke their beards and kill everyone they can. But the good guys are an interesting lot. Wong’s character is great, noble without being overbearing. He’s flawed. When he’s faced with a chest full of silver, he becomes greedy. He gets confused. Frustrated. He struggles to be good, but he’s also corruptible. In short, he’s a fairly believable human character. Likewise, Angela Mao and her husband are interesting. They’re not good guys. They’re not even bad guys with hearts of gold. For the most part, they are pretty ruthless, but the back story of how they became bandits and why they show compassion for Wong makes them interesting.

Since this is a kungfu film, let’s talk about the fights. Don Wong Dao is spectacular. His name may not be as familiar to people as Jackie Chan or any of the Shaw Brothers stars, but he’s a tremendous fighter. Fast, powerful, and graceful. He carries the action scenes remarkably, and he’s helped by a stellar supporting cast. Angela Mao and Lo Lieh are, of course, acclaimed veterans, but even the extras put up great fights. Quantity is one thing, quality another. Luckily, this movie features both, and that makes it one hell of a ride toward a thoroughly depressing ending. It’s the sort of thing only a kungfu film, or possibly a spaghetti western, would ever dare to try.

Everyone is doomed and depressed. Mao and her husband miss their simple life. Wong has the whole girlfriend forced into prostitution thing as well as having to deal with the fact that once you take a step down the path of violence, it’s very difficult to turn back. Greed and anger spawned from his frustration with seeing how goodness doesn’t seem to accomplish anything in a world this evil eventually ruin his life despite how valiantly he struggles to avoid them. The depression adds an added degree of ferocity to the kungfu, which was already pretty fast-paced and impressive to begin with. Kungfu films are always great for morality plays because, and you’ll have to excuse the pun, they pull no punches. The tragedy playing itself out in Bandits, Prostitutes, and Silver is every bit as poignant — and violent — as a Shakespearean drama. I know ol’ William’s melodramatic works are on a pedestal these days, looked at as high art. But in their own day, they were seen as worthless, violent crap. Lowest common denominator trash full of greed, lust, and perversion. Maybe someday hundreds of years from now, people will regard kungfu films with the same degree of reverence. Ha, yeah sure.