[Column] A little bit of magic at Pucheon Film Festival

Derek Ellery, contributing writer to Cine21

A rare - but precious - joy that sometimes comes in attending film festivals is not just discovering the new or rediscovering the old. Occasionally, there is a sense of history that comes full circle in an almost magical way.

Some 35 years ago, at the time of the first explosion of Hong Kong cinema in the West, a film called "The Girl with the Thunderbolt Kick" was released in the U.K. It was like many other Hong Kong films shown at that time in the West: atrociously dubbed into American English, truncated from its original length, and with poor color duplication.

But there was a bravado and singlemindedness to the film that shone through, despite the imperfections of the foreign-release version. With a bit of research - not so easy in those days, prior to the Internet and film encyclopedias - I discovered its original English title was "Golden Swallow," and it was already some five years old. The 1968 Shaw Brothers production starred Wang Yu and Cheng Pei-pei, was directed by Chang Cheh, and was a kind of sequel to "Come Drink with Me," a big hit which King Hu had directed a few years earlier for the Shaw Brothers and which also starred Cheng as swordswoman Golden Swallow.

In fact, the real star of the film is not Swallow but a proud, unfeeling, white-garbed swordsman, Silver Roc, played by one of the hottest action stars of the time, Wang Yu. A champion-swimmer-turned-actor, Wang rose to fame on the back of another Chang Cheh movie, "One-Armed Swordsman," and became known in the West as the star of the English-language action film, "The Man from Hong Kong," one of several made during the early-to-mid 1970s on the back of the "kung-fu" craze in the West. He was known then as Jimmy Wang Yu.

Wang was never a great actor, nor a very imposing physical presence on screen. Slim and expressionless, he had none of the self-deprecating humor that humanized Bruce Lee’s obsessive screen characters. But Wang radiated a cold, steely charisma that was perfectly fitted to the masochistic, self-destructive characters he usually played; and he starred in (and directed) at least one masterpiece of the wuxia genre - "Beach of the War Gods," made for Golden Harvest in 1973.

Wang largely disappeared from the movies during the 1980s, and I never expected to meet him in person. But here’s where history comes full circle, thanks to film festivals. Pucheon, July 2006: Wang is in town for PiFan’s retrospective of six of his movies (unfortunately, not including "War Gods"), and here he is, a sprightly, jokey, relaxed 63, taking questions after a screening of "Golden Swallow."

Here he is, apologizing for how "exaggerated" (kuazhang) the action sequences seem now; but at least in those days they did their own stunts, he adds. He is still capable of performing a trick, in which he catches three coins separately in the air. Here he is, telling us how he and Cheng, though playing long-lost lovers, never talked to each other once the director had yelled, "Cut!" And, here he is, talking to me afterwards about how he’s planning a prequel to "One-Armed Swordsman", taking the role of the main character’s elderly teacher.

Rewatching a legendary film after 35 years - in a beautiful, complete, digitally restored print - and finally meeting the legend behind it. Festival happenings don’t get much better than that.