After killing the tiger, depicted in the film, and appointed a constable of Yanggu, Wu Song is sent out of town on a months-long mission and when he returns he is shocked to learn of his brother’s death, supposedly from heart disease. The emotional core of this film is the close relationship between Wu Song and the older brother who raised him from infancy, as seen in the opening sequences. With the one I’ve got I’m cursed for good! ‘Three Inches of Mulberry Bark’-three-tenths man and seven-tenths monster. When she finally meets her husband’s younger brother, who’d just gained fame by killing the tiger, she immediately falls for the handsome, muscular young hero and comes on so strong to him that he violently rejects her, outraged at the thought of cheating on his beloved older brother, who’d worked so hard to raise him.įor the record, the author of the novel describes Wu Da this way: “he was short and grotesque, and had no flair for merrymaking whatever.” A page later, Pan Jinlian’s inner thought upon meeting Wu Song reads like this: “If I could have a man like that I wouldn’t have lived in vain. To be fair to Jinlian, once a maid in a rich home, she’d been forced to marry Wu Da after the master of the house forced himself on her and his wife caught them in the act and decided to punish the poor girl by marrying her off to “the worst man.” (This is seen in flashback.) Of course the beautiful Jinlian is bitter. Pan Jinlian (Wang Ping) behaves pretty harshly in TIGER KILLER and at one point even slaps Wu Dalang (Ku Feng) in front of Wu Song (Ti Lung), much to the latter’s horror. THE AMOROUS ADVENTURES OF LOTUS PAN (1994)Īs you might judge by these titles, the focus of these films happens to be on Pan Jinlian and not her famous brother-in-law, who’s not even seen in THE GOLDEN LOTUS, only talked about. THE AMOROUS ADVENTURES OF LOTUS PAN (1964)
I then re-watched TIGER KILLER and followed it with viewings of the three other films about Lotus Pan: Chang lamenting marriage to such a man foreshadow the marital catastrophe her own character would soon be facing. As it turns out in THE STORY OF THREE LOVES, the lyrics sung by Ms. The lyrics about Pan Jinlian that Grace Chang sings are surprisingly sympathetic towards a character I remembered as being cruel and hard-hearted to her husband, named in the subtitles of TIGER KILLER as “Wu the Elder” and sometimes taunted as “Wu the Elder the Shrimp,” a kindly man who sells wheatcakes on the street for a living but happens to be short in stature, homely and walks with a waddle.
Wu Song gets his revenge and is on his way to prison at the end of the movie. That one is TIGER KILLER (1982), in which Wu Song, the heroic killer of a man-eating tiger on Jinyang Ridge and a constable in Yanggu, comes back from an assignment which took him out of town for several months only to find his older brother, Wu Dalang, dead, having been poisoned by the brother’s wife, Pan Jinlian, at the urging of her lover, Ximen Qing, and the meddling teahouse owner and part-time pimp next door, Madame Wang. Lotus Pan is the subject of four movies in my collection, all produced by Shaw Bros., only one of which I’d seen up to this point. She has also become the patron goddess of brothels and prostitutes. She is an archetypal femme fatale and one of the most notorious villainesses of classical Chinese culture. Pan Jinlian ( Chinese: 潘金蓮 Wade–Giles: P’an Chin-lien) is a fictional character in the 17th-century Chinese novel Jin Ping Mei ( The Plum in the Golden Vase), and a minor character in Water Margin, one of the Four Great Classical Novels of Chinese literature. Here’s how she’s described in the first paragraph of her Wikipedia page: I thought the name sounded familiar, so I looked it up and realized she’s also known as Lotus Pan, aka Golden Lotus, and is a character in the classic Chinese text, “The Water Margin,” upon which countless Hong Kong movies have been based, including many that I’ve seen. Early in the film, she is seen performing in a tavern and is called upon to sing a song about Pan Jinlian. While binge-watching Hong Kong movies during the coronavirus lockdown, I reached onto my shelf of Cathay releases and pulled out the two-part movie, THE STORY OF THREE LOVES (1964), starring Grace Chang as a street singer-turned-student who is forced into marriage with a brutal warlord in 1920s Beijing.
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