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The Magnificent Chang Cheh: The Magnificent Trio/Magnificent Wanderers
[Blu-ray]
Blu-ray A - America - Eureka Review written by and copyright: Eric Cotenas (30th June 2025). |
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The Film
 "One of the Shaw Brothers Studio’s most prolific directors, Chang Cheh – or the “Godfather of Hong Kong Cinema” – is the filmmaker behind Five Deadly Venoms, Chinatown Kid and Boxer Rebellion. Collected here are two films by this maestro of martial arts cinema that showcase his considerable talents at both ends of his career: The Magnificent Trio, produced when wuxia films ruled the Hong Kong box office in the mid-1960s, and Magnificent Wanderers, made at the height of the kung fu craze at the end of the 1970s." The Magnificent Trio: Having left the border war against the Xings lead by his uncle, Lu Fang (Master of the Flying Guillotine's Jimmy Wang Yu) stumbles upon a trio of men abducting a young woman. Lu springs to her rescue until the elder man Gao Bao-shi (Five Fingers of Death's Tien Feng) reveals that the girl is Wen-zhen (The Bells of Death's Chin Ping) who Gao, his son Ji-xian (Vengeance!'s Cliff Lok), and fellow villager Li Chu-yen (The Mighty Peking Man's Ku Feng) abducted as a protest the cruel taxation of her magistrate father Wei (The Chinese Mechanic's Lui Ming) who has taken advantage of the border war and the remoteness of his province and hired previously-imprisoned bandits to enforce his polices, ultimately having villagers who object or cannot pay his taxes murdered. Although conflicted about their desperate act, Lu reveals that he was on his way to appeal to Minister Yuan (The Fantastic Magic Baby's Li Ying) for more help at the border and will bring their case to him as well. When Wei sends his men to the mill where Wen-zhen is being kept, Lu fights them off and decides he must wait with them for Yuan to stop in the village in a few days time. Wei's advisor Qian (Drunken Arts and Crippled Fist's Tang Ti) goes to Eagle Castle where a dangerous group of bandits led by Sheng Chen (Rape of the Sword's Chen Hung-Lieh) are imprisoned and offers them a reward to kill Lu and the villagers and rescue Wei's daughter. He also recruits Huang-liang (School on Fire's Cheng Lei), a starving swordsman who got himself jailed just for the food. Wei sends the bandits along with Yan Zhi-qing (The 36th Chamber of Shaolin's Lo Lieh) – a bandit who only proclaims to only kill for justice that Wei has made his bodyguard but spends most of his time with restaurant owner Xia-qing ('s Fanny Fan Lai) – to storm the mill. On the way, they come across Li Ju-shun ('s Wang Chang-Chi) bringing food to his the Gaos and his brother. He draws his sword but is quickly dispatched by Huang-liang who has a change of heart when he discovers that one of the men he was sent to kill is his master Lu. Yan respects Lu's abilities and only duels with him out of obligation and it ends in a draw. Behind his back, however, the bandits reveal to Wei Yan's duplicity and he sends them to the Mati village to put down the protest upon learning Gao has drawn up a petition for Minister Yuan; whereupon Qian hits upon the idea of abducting restaurant waitress Jing-yu (Golden Buddha's Violet Pan Ying-Zi) who happens to be Gao's daughter to trade her for Wen-zhen. At a stalemate, Lu intervenes and agrees to take the villagers' punishment of a hundred lashes for Wen-zhen's return and the villagers' pardon. It is only once he is in Wei's dungeons that he realizes that the magistrate has no intention of honoring his word; whereupon Wen-zhen and her handmaiden Ling Lung (Princess Iron Fan's Wu Ching-Li) - once promised to Ji-xian before being sold to the magistrate by her father to pay his tax debt – endeavor to free him. On the outside, Huang-liang has become remorseful over killing Li Ju-shun after he meets the man's widow (Madame White Snake's Margaret Tu Chuan) and finds help in attempting to infiltrate the magistrate's castle from Yan who has been supplanted in the magistrate's favor by bandit leader Sheng Chen who is about to betray the magistrate for his own profit. Pre-dating star Wang Yu's and director Chang Cheh's One Armed Swordsman which in conjunction with the success of King Hu's Come Drink with Me directly preceding The Magnificent Trio really launched the new boom of wuxia films for Shaw Brothers and their competitors in Hong Kong and other Chinese territories, a genre which had been popular in film and print during the earlier half of the century but had fallen out of favor and been censored between the wars. A remake of Hideo Gosha's Japanese Three Outlaw Samurai, the film presents Chang Cheh's recurring themes and style in embryonic form and, as such, possesses many of the weaknesses of his more successful films. The pacing is slow and almost stagnant during the talky, expository sequences no matter how much the camera keeps moving, and the fight scenes are also rather uninspired in their coverage with creative angles and movement only accompanying specific moves while the camera is largely static otherwise. There are a lot of characters to keep track of, which is not as much an issue in serialized wuxia but a lot for a feature-length film where some important characters either do not even warrant a proper name at all or until their death scene. Owing to Shaw Brothers' reputation for comedies and historical dramas before the switch to action cinema, the three female principals are credited before the titular "magnificent trio" but all three are relatively strong characters for women in a Chang Cheh wuxia, particularly Chin Ping's Wen-zhen who is initially as much lovesick as obligated by his rescue to help Lu but her actions during the climax result from her own sense of justice and imperial law, "betraying" someone who has no honor and selflessly deciding her own future path. Although largely workmanlike, the scope photography of Wong Wing-Lung (Red Spell Spells Red) is handsome enough capturing the usual standards of Shaw costumes, decoration, and familiar standing sets – including forest exteriors – while the score is credited to Wang Fu-Ling (Bamboo House of Dolls) but presumably includes some library music along with Tchaikovsky's "Swan Lake" during one of the most dramatic and tragic moments.  Magnificent Wanderers: In a Chinese village controlled by the Mongols, the High Prince (The Magnificent Trio's Li Ying) brutally torture and extorts the townspeople regardless of their social class and a folk hero has risen up, striking Mongol convoys of weapons and supplies. Generals Lu (Beach of the War Gods' Shan Mao) and Zhu (The Youthful Delinquents' Yang Zhongmin) suspect the culprit is young, wealthy, skilled swordsman Chu Tie Xa (The Legend of the 7 Golden Vampires' David Chiang) who is rumored to consort with rebels in the countryside. Even if this is untrue, the generals suggest that framing and arresting him will be a means of seizing his family fortune. They are not the only ones who want a piece of Chu's fortune as a number of the more prominent and moneyed townspeople are meeting with him to plan a revolution, ready to scavenge his treasures when he surely loses. A man of the people, Chu welcomes a trio of panhandling conmen – fortune teller Lin Shao-yu (Avenging Eagle's Alexander Fu Sheng), strongman Shi Do Yong (Shaolin Temple's Chi Kuan-Chun), and acrobat Guen Fei (The 7 Grand Masters' Li Yimin) – to the meeting to embarrass the snobby restaurant owner, and they are the only ones who remain at his side when the Mongols show up to arrest him (if only because they have not finished eating). They fight off the Mongols and provide Chu with a hiding place while he plots a definitive strike against the invaders who have discovered nothing but rocks in the sealed coffers hidden in Chu's family home. When the trio tell him that Lu and Zhu have extorted expensive gifts on behalf of the Prince's concubine's seventeenth birthday and have taken a cut of it for themselves, Chu and the trio plot a heist and then to join the rebels teeming in the hills. A humiliated Lu and Zhu decide to hold the town for ransom in order to draw Chu out of hiding, but he and the trio have more tricks up their sleeves. Coming relatively early in Shaw's "Five Venoms" cycle of over thirty films between 1975 and 1984, Magnificent Wanderers is director Chang Cheh gone off the rails, seemingly not attempting to emulate the comedic vein of some of their competitors martial arts films – which would not crystalize into a formula easy to imitate until the following year with the Jackie Chan/Yuen Woo Ping duo The Drunken Master and Snake in the Eagle's Shadow – than the filmmaker just trying anything and everything with his next generation of Shaw action stars across different subgenres. While we have seen many, many Shaw titles but perhaps still not enough to determine which is the "worst", Wandering Trio is not actually funny as much as it tries, from the mugging performances and pratfalls to the "zany" scoring and dazed expressions. The best martial arts comedies before they fully descended into parody and then comedy as an actual action genre still retained elements of danger and drama. Unlike those films or even Chang Cheh's more serious works, no character ever feels truly imperiled even Lu and Zhu who fear losing their heads if they keep failing their prince. Whereas the best of the "Five Venoms" films had the acrobats up against regular martial arts moves to bewildering and sometimes comic effects, the fight scenes here are considerably less exciting because it feels like all of the fighters are choreographed acrobats, with the Mongols using the same off screen trampolines as Li as they pursue him during the climax. The Mongol prince – a short man wearing oversized armor under his clothes to appear bigger and not being able to speak without stuttering in public (Lu and Zhu must simply guess at what they want him to do) – is one bad joke every time he is on the screen and the Mongol fighters in general are just pratfall artists. This may be the Chang Cheh martial arts film with the lowest body count, coming in at four in a row at the ninety-five minute mark with every other fighter either incapacitated by Chu's gold pellets or being shoved down like rows of dominoes by the other leads. The ending is incredibly anticlimactic as if paving the way for a sequel – not a follow-up but a direct sequel – with a cliffhanger. Either this was the plan or Chang Cheh could not conceive of a "heroic bloodshed" film with an end where at least half of the Venoms were not slaughtered or nobly sacrificed themselves. While the Magnificent Wanderers title might only refer to the trio on con men, the quasi-Sergio Leone animated title sequence depicts all four leads under the title, suggesting that the title may refer to their status at the open end of the film. 
Video
Unreleased theatrically outside of Asian territories, The Magnificent Trio was remastered in 2003 by Shaw library owners Celestial Pictures and released on English-friendly DVD by Intercontinental Video Limited as a PAL-to-NTSC conversion with a 5.1 upmix of the Mandarin audio. A better option came from the Momentum Pictures in the U.K. with a proper PAL transfer and mono audio. The film's HD remaster makes its Blu-ray debut in the U.S. and U.K., and the 1080p24 MPEG-4 AVC 2.40:1 is the more pleasing presentation, lensed mostly on Shaw sets including most of the outdoor scenes, with controlled lighting and painted sky backgrounds. The few actual exteriors also hold up well because Chang Cheh keeps the camera static her for some striking landscape shots with the characters as compositional elements compared to the more Spaghetti Western-esque zoom-happy and whip-panning of the director's later works.  Although dubbed into English for export, Magnificent Wanderers was hard to see outside the gray market in English-friendly form until the DVD era when Celestial remastered the film with the master turning up on Hong Kong and Taiwan DVD editions with Mandarin 5.1 upmixes and English subtitles as a PAL-to-NTSC conversion. The film makes is Blu-ray debut here in a 1080p24 MPEG-4 AVC 2.35:1 widescreen transfer that is most pleasing in its few studio interiors with much of the film shot on exteriors in Taiwan in bright conditions but with Chang Cheh's trademark zooms and pans ramped up even further here to impart some comic energy to the climax. The film is still of a high standard in terms of production but just not as elegant in terms of the director's usual visuals. 
Audio
The sole audio option for The Magnificent Trio is a Mandarin LPCM 2.0 mono track. All of the actors were post-dubbed by Mandarin voice actors so the vocals are all consistent in volume and clarity along with the foley effects while the more dramatic music like the aforementioned "Swan Lake" bit is in danger of sounding a bit crunchy, but this may be the source recording rather than the mix or the age of the combined track. The optional English subtitles could have used another pass as they stumble when Huang-liang fears that "Master Lu has walked into a trip." Magnificent Wanderers includes both Mandarin and English LPCM 2.0 mono tracks, both post-dubbed. In this film, the music does more of the work to try to convey the film's zany atmosphere with fewer standout foley effects in the gold pellet firing and sword clashes, but this has less to do with the mix itself than the most of the choreography which requires the Mongols to be clumsy idiots who fail to hit their mark and can easily be tripped or smacked on the head. Optional English subtitles are free of any noticeable errors (we presume the slight differences in name spelling between the film's subtitles and HKMDb are the choices of the translators rather than actual errors). 
Extras
The Magnificent Trio is accompanied by an audio commentary by East Asian film expert Frank Djeng (NY Asian Film Festival) and martial artist and filmmaker Michael Worth in which Djeng defines the setting as the last days of the Ming Dynasty in the 1640s. Of the film itself, Djeng and Worth cite Come Drink with Me as a key influence in addition to the Gosha film Chang Cheh is remaking. They also note that this is the first Chang Cheh wuxia with choreography as the lost Tiger Boy – shot in black-and-white on a much lower budget and shelved until the success of the King Hu film – had the performers improvising their fight moves on the set. While much has been made by Djeng and others in other tracks about Shaw's transition back to Cantonese in the seventies, here Djeng reveals that many of the early Cantonese films Shaw produced were shot sync-sound and that Chang Cheh as head of dubbing earlier on had a lot to do with the turn to both Mandarin language and post-dubbing making it easier on the set without having to worry about getting a clean track. They also point out small roles by Shaw wuxia regulars like Wu Ma (The Dead and the Deadly), Yuen Woo Ping, and Unicorn Chan (Trilogy of Swordsmanship).  Magnificent Wanderers is accompanied by an audio commentary by action cinema experts Mike Leeder and Arne Venema who ponder how much of the film was actually directed by Chang Cheh and how much was by "joint director" Wu Ma who helmed more outrageous films and discussing the career of Fu Sheng as not only the proto-Jackie Chan but might have had his career had it not been for his tragic accident driving to the set of The Eight Diagram Pole Fighter after which his more prominent role had to be hastily-rewritten. In comparing the film to Chan's first successful martial arts comedies, they note how the formula is "almost there" but describe Chang Cheh's approach to comedy here as "pantomime-level." They look at the film in the context of his previous, troubled production and flop Boxer Rebellion, suggesting that the haste evident in the staging and choreography of the fight scenes may be evidence of the director's creative burnout and look at other changes around the time including more and more of his creative team leaving to Golden Harvest and other independent companies. While they seem to enjoy the film, they do discuss it in contrast to his better works and note some of the things it lacks including "memorable" characters or even characters that "have their moments." "Chang Cheh Style" (29:20) is a video essay by Gary Bettinson, editor-in-chief of Asian Cinema journal, and it is indeed very much an essay broken up into sections looking at the visual style that the director refined at his peak, defining both of these films as the outliers. 
Packaging
The first 2,000 copies come with a limited edition O-Card slipcover featuring new artwork by Grégory Sacré (Gokaiju) and a collector's booklet featuring new writing on Chang Cheh by writer and critic James Oliver discussing the differences between Three Outlaw Samurai and The Magnificent Trio, noting that wuxia tended to be more conservative than chanbara, and that Chang Cheh's film mutes much of the political and class conscious aspects of the original film, focusing on individual injustices committed by its corrupt villain rather than overall structural inequality. Similarly he notes that Magnificent Wanderers has feet in both the wuxia and kung fu genres with the nobleman hero finding more loyalty among the lower class than among his own wealthy contemporaries. 
Overall
Pairing two films from the opposite ends of his career, The Magnificent Chang Cheh paints a picture of the evolution of both the director and the industry to major shifts in the market in the mid-sixties and late seventies.
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