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Super Spies and Secret Lies: The Golden Buddha/Angel with Iron Fists/The Singing Thief - Limited Edition
[Blu-ray]
Blu-ray A - America - Eureka Review written by and copyright: Eric Cotenas (3rd February 2025). |
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The Film
 "Following the enormous international success of Dr No and From Russia with Love, Bondmania swept the globe and initiated a cycle of Bondsploitation movies. Studios all over the world sought to capitalise on James Bond and the concept of the super-spy – including Hong Kong’s venerable Shaw Brothers, who began producing tales of intrigue, espionage, and grand theft in the mid-1960s. Eureka Classics presents three of their best in this special-edition set: The Golden Buddha, Angel with the Iron Fists and The Singing Thief." The The Golden Buddha is the McGuffin that draws Paul Cheung (Police Story's Paul Chang Chung) into a deadly adventure when he gets his case switched with an identical one belonging to old friend Chan Chung Cheung (The Double Crossers' Chang Pei-Shan) when he gets stranded in Bangkok due to bad weather. When he goes to exchange the cases, he finds his friend murdered and efforts by both the real police and murderous fake ones to obtain the golden statue hidden in his friend's luggage. Paul tattoos the clue found in the Buddha and then sets out to find his friend's siblings who each have another Golden Buddha each with a different clue that combined together reveal the location of the family treasure. Paul saves the life of his friend's brother Chan Chung Tai (producer/director Lo Wei) and then goes in search of his sister Chan Mei Nan who might either be the a slinky siren (The Magnificent Trio's Fanny Fan Lai) or a woman (Iron & Silk's Jeanette Lin Tsui) Paul has managed to annoy by bumping into her and spilling her luggage and underwear out onto the street. only to walk straight into a trap that finds them trapped deep in the lair of the Skeleton Gang who want to steal the treasure to fund their plans for world domination. Despite some instances of graphic violence, The Golden Buddha is a breezy action flick that heavily emphasizes the Thai backdrops amid gun play and some awkwardly-staged fights. Better known to film fans for his later character actor work, Paul Chang Cheung makes for a charismatic and athletic lead as a seemingly mild-mannered businessman who conveniently practices martial arts rather than a debonair superspy. McGuffin aside, he and Jeanette Lin Tsui do give a human dimension to the lip service paid in the script to character which keeps viewer engagement during the draggy middle which consists of the pair running from pawn shop to pawn shop searching for one of the Buddhas (a sequence with some understated comedy as a pair of Skeleton Gang thugs including Shaw regular Greaser-haired Fan Mei-Sheng more concerned with finding getting their hands on the Buddha than facing off against the other pair as they constantly cross paths from shop to shop). The Skeleton Gang's lair is economically modular but and the climax takes place on a moderately impressive Johnson Tsao-designed set but some of the production's other cost-cutting choices like the obvious roller scenery outside the train windows and several painted background that do not hold up in bright, flat lighting keep the film from competing with even the stripped down production values of the very first Bond films.  Shaw favorite Lily Ho (Intimate Confessions of a Chinese Courtesan) is the Angel with the Iron Fists, a secret agent who arrives in Hong Kong under the noses of the Dark Angel gang who expect a man to replace the agent they gunned down in a phone booth. Agent 009 Ai Si assumes the identity of Luo Na to court the interest of diamond dealer Cheng Tie-hu (Rendezvous with Death's Tang Ching) who is suspected along with his nightclub singer lover Dolly (Fanny Fan again) of belonging to the Dark Angel gang. He saves her from harassment by two men and further attacks, revealing herself to be the mistress of recently-imprisoned crook Baldy (Monkey Goes West's Tien Shun) who managed to double cross his gang and stash away a fortune before his arrest. Luo Na lets Cheng believe that she must know the location of the missing money which the gang wants for their world domination plans. Dolly becomes jealous, believing that Cheng's courting of Luo Na is more than just subterfuge, and a hidden camera picks up evidence that Luo Na is more than up to physically defending herself from attack the Dark Angel gang Jin (The 14 Amazons' Tina Chin Fei) to forcibly recruit Luo Na into the gang by staging the theft of all of her diamonds. What Jin does not realize is that they are playing right into the hands of the authorities since Ai Si has been tasked with finding the Dark Angel gang's lair and blowing it up. Before she can do this, she must pass Jin's tests – including an assassination without actually killing one of her colleagues – and evade the continuing suspicion of Dolly who now resents Luo Na supplanting her both as a lover and in the gang hierarchy. Also helmed by Lo Wei – who also plays the police inspector – Angel with Iron Fists feels even more like a Connery-era Bond film – drawing equally from Thunderball and Goldfinger (along with a From Russia with Love shoe knife) while anticipating You Only Live Twice with Jin being as much Blofeld as Sax Rohmer's Sumuru and her recent cinematic incarnation – than Golden Buddha with Ho a fully-fledged and seasoned agent who feels no guilt in deceiving an enemy agent who cares about her and literally has to be gassed (on two occasions) to be made vulnerable. There is actually a surprising bit of graphic gore midway through the film more grisly than anything seen in the early Bonds at their most sadistic, although presumably there was a little bit of self-imposed censorship with one surviving former villain gunned down nearly out of frame and warranting only momentary notice by the heroine before going back to celebrating at the end. While it is a Lo Wei film without Bruce Lee, Angels with Iron Fists appears to sport significantly better production values than Golden Buddha, possibly due to the presence of Ho who was as much a Shaw star as a fashion icon at the time. We have no idea how successful the film actually was, but apart from the Shaws that broke a million at the box office, they might not have been motivated to make more 009 films simply due to the pace of production at Shaw during the period where cast and crew were quickly shuffled off to other hastily-conceived productions.  The Singing Thief is Diamond Poon (Ming Ghost's Jimmy Lin Chung), an ex-con just a year out of jail who wants to become famous for something other than crime; nevertheless, being a suspect in the crimes of "The Flying Thief" whose thefts of wealthy women mirror his own modus operandi does not prevent him from capitalizing on the notoriety with a nightclub floor show. The laughing stock of the publc – including school children who are always around to sing a song about his incompetence – Inspector Pan (Mui Yan) is eager to prove that Poon has not changed his ways. When Pan tries to arrest him, Poon escapes and reconnects with esteemed diamond dealer Wang (Sex and Zen's Lo Lieh) who was once the romantic rival of Poon for his wife Tian Xie (Return of the One Armed Swordsman's Essie Lin Chia) and secretly bought fenced the goods Poon stole and asks for a list of the ten wealthiest women in Hong Kong with the intention of catching the real thief in the act. One of those women happens to be Darling Fang (Lily Ho) who works for the police force and has Poon put in her custody in order to catch him in the act. Can Poon manage to give the cunning Darling the slip to catch the real thief or will The Flying Thief seal Poon's conviction by spiriting away the jewels right under their noses. Although marketed as a Bondian spy film, The Singing Thief is actually To Catch a Thief by way of Shaw Brothers; and Lily Ho may be Hong Kong's Grace Kelly but Jimmy Lin Chung is no Cary Grant and Shaw's esteemed wuxia pioneer Chang Cheh (Disciples of Shaolin) is no Alfred Hitchcok. Presumably a crossover vehicle for singer Chung, he is actually the least interesting actor and the film only really comes to life when he shares scenes with Lieh or Ho. Thankfully, the film moves at a good clip, although even as the shortest film in the set at exactly ninety minutes, it still drags during not only his musical numbers but also a sequence demonstrating 's interest in him through not only a series of enlarged photographs but remote-controlled projectors showing recordings of his performances that each go on long after the scene has proven its point. Johnson Tsao's production design is typically impressive with a sprawling nightclub set and much redressing of Shaw Brothers' guest villas along with a climactic chase through their sound stages and sets of various periods providing a suspenseful backdrop but it is not that diverting a mystery no matter how many red herrings are tossed in and some martial arts during the finale are a bit too little too late. We have no idea how well the film did or did not perform, but the pace of Shaw Brothers production and particularly Chang Cheh's filmography during this time likely allowed him to move on to several more productions before this one made an impression at the box office. 
Video
None of these films were dubbed into English and presumably only played stateside in Asian-American theaters – presumably with the same bilingual Chinese/English subtitles as the Hong Kong prints – and were not available on home video in English-friendly form until Celestial Pictures' standard definition PAL-converted remasters issued on region 3 DVD with optional English subtitles in Hong Kong by Intercontinental Video Limited (IVL). Arrow Video's 1080p24 MPEG-4 AVC 2.35:1 widescreen Blu-ray transfers come from newer HD masters presumably from the negatives. All three films look immaculate with no signs of damage. Whereas the case with a number of Shaw's period films was the Shawscope lenses revealing soft edges in wide angle shots and inconsistent focus in close-ups; here, the sweet spot seems to be somewhere in between with some edge-to-edge crisp medium and long-ish shots and generally softer close-ups and wide shots, but in terms of editing, each film's general coverage within a scene is varied enough so it does not irritate. The Golden Buddha's resolution easily reveals the artifice of both the interiors sets, sound stage exteriors, and the cardboard and painted backdrops; however, the one thing the fakeness assures the viewer is that these pieces will almost certainly be thoroughly-wrecked in a fight scene. Angel with Iron Fists's production values hold up well in HD apart from a couple window views of fake skyscrapers and a late model yacht explosion and a dark apartment break-in sequence that gets a little noisy from underexposure. The Singing Thief suffers from some day-for-night and night-for-night shots that are simply graded too dark to see anything (it is one thing to conceal the faces of the fighters to surprise the viewers by revealing that the one killed was not Poon and that the victim was actually a traitorous friend but most of the fight before takes place in impenetrable blackness sapping any thrills from the scene). 
Audio
Each film features a Mandarin LPCM 2.0 track sporting clean post-dubbing – most if not all of the cast were dubbed by voice actors as Hong Kong cinema did not adapt sync-sound recording until the nineties – foley effects that sound exaggerated in volume but never as off-putting as the one added to Hong Kong film 5.1 remixes during the early days of DVD – and boisterous music tracks that include what might either be an edited original or reworked version of Monty Norman's Bond theme. The optional English subtitles are sport many Anglo spellings that might give an American pause ("jewellery" vs "jewelry") but there also a few rare proofing errors as well. 
Extras
The Golden Buddha is accompanied by an audio commentary by action cinema experts Mike Leeder and Arne Venema who reveal that the film was mostly shot in and around Bangkok's Chinatown and cite inspirations in both the Bond series up to that point as well as Alfred Hitchcock's North by Northwest. In addition to discussing the film as part of Lo Wei's filmography, pointing out various regulars from his films – including Fanny Fan Lai who was initially signed to Shaw Brothers' Cantonese arm and made a few brief film appearances before being an overnight star with a new name in their Mandarin division – and the film's dodgy set design, they spend quite a bit of time gabbing about Bangkok life then and now (both of them having worked and lived there, with Venema noting that his father was responsible for introducing Fujicolor film to the Thai film industry back then).  Angel with the Iron Fists is also by an audio commentary by action cinema experts Mike Leeder and Arne Venema who discuss the film's debt to Dr. No – leading to a lengthy tangent about the Bond series and their lists of best to worst Bonds – as well as just how substantial a contribution Ho made not only to the film but the direction of Shaw Brothers' more contemporary-set films by way of how she invested and promoted fashion and boutique brands and told Run Run Shaw that they could furnish the film with expensive furniture and clothing in exchange for free publicity catering to the aspirational ambitions of the audience (they also reveal that Ho figured prominently in the studio's magazine "Southern Screen" and that each time she appeared in it she was pushing a brand). The Bond talk leads to further discussion about how the film embodied the formula established by the mid-sixties in terms of gadgetry and sex appeal, noting the extent that the film goes to show Fanny Fan Mei in next to nothing from scene to scene while Ho had roughly twenty wardrobe changes.  The Singing Thief is accompanied by an audio commentary by action cinema experts Mike Leeder and Arne Venema in which they provide background on Chung who only made a few films and how his abilities as a dancer were exploited onscreen not only with his casual movements but also in terms of the film's action choreography. They also discuss the film in terms of Chang Cheh's filmography – once again leading to an aside about the homoerotic subtexts of his male characters during the buddy-buddy fighting between Chung and Lieh – revealing that its inclusion here is not random and that it really was indeed marketed as a spy film even though it is more of a comedy caper pic. Disc two also includes "International Super Spies" (21:51), an interview with James Bond expert Llewella Chapman who discusses the success of the series in catering to the aspirational lifestyle desires of its audience which were already drawing circulation to the travel sections of newspapers, as well as a discussion of the various Eurospy ripoffs and then of the three films at hand here, pointing out the ways in which the Shaw films and the Bond series appeared to feed off one another back and forth. "From Hong Kong with Love" (16:43) is an interview with Hong Kong cinema scholar Wayne Wong, editor of "Martial Arts Studies", who also discusses the aspirational travel and lifestyle aspect of the films, the success of the Bond series in Hong Kong, and the various East Asia Bond copies along with the ambiguous definition of what makes a spy in the Shaw films. He also notes that other Asian Bondian films had producers reaching out to foreign directors to give their films wider appeal and a different style, and that Lo Wei was actually the exception when it came to the sub-genre. More interestingly, he notes that a female Bond was less of a novelty in Asia as Lily Ho's character fit the mold of the "female warrior" more common to Asian action films long before it was a thing in the West. 
Packaging
The limited edition of 2,000 copies includes an O-Card slipcase featuring new artwork by Darren Wheeling, a reversible sleeve featuring individual sleeve artwork for each film, and a collector's booklet featuring new writing on all three films by Iain Robert Smith, author of "The Hollywood Meme: Transnational Adaptations in World Cinema", looking at Hong Kong's Bangpian genre. 
Overall
Super Spies and Secret Lies offers enough of a sampling of Asia, Hong Kong, and specifically Shaw Brothers dipping its toes into Bondmania to whet appetites for more. 
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