'Shanghai Joe' (one 'Chen Lee' – actually a Japanese named Hayakawa) decides he's to travel East – he's in San Francisco – and become a cowboy. Everywhere he goes the whites treat him with little respect, from the clerk at the Wells Fargo station who ignores him, to the stagecoach driver who won't let him sit inside, to the three cowboys at the saloon who decide to have a bit of fun, prompting Joe to display his formidable martial arts skills.
After a few more encounters word of Joe's prowess gets around and he is recruited by representatives of local land baron Spencer (Piero Lulli – something of a spaghetti western fixture). Finally, Joe thinks, a chance to be a real cowboy – except the 'livestock' Spender is transporting across the Tex-Mex border prove to be Mexican peons.
Worse, Spencer will stop at nothing to keep his illegal activities from the authorities, so when a detachment of cavalry show up his orders are to shoot the Mexicans lest they talk. The only people to escape the massacre are Joe and one of the peons. They go to the local sheriff, only to find he's also in league with Spencer.
Meanwhile the land baron has decided that Joe is too dangerous to live and places a bounty on his head, recruiting a quartet of the meanest desperadoes in the territory. But neither Pedro the Cannibal (Robert Hundar – Cut Throats Nine ), Tricky the gambler (Giacomo Rossi-Stuart – Death Smiled at Murder ), Sam (Gordon Mitchell, featured in many a peplum, western etc.) nor Scalper Jack (Klaus Kinski – no introduction needed for anyone remotely aware of Euro-trash and arthouse cinema) proves up to the job, leading Spencer and his colleagues to send for someone from back East – the 'Orient', that is…
The Eastern/Western crossover in which an Oriental martial artist or swordsman travelled to the wild west or an Occidental gunslinger found himself in Japan or China was perhaps an inevitable development in the Italian western. After all, one of the foundational texts of the form, Sergio Leone's Fistful of Dollars , was itself heavily indebted to Akira Kurosawa's Yojimbo , with Kurosawa's samurai films in turn strongly influenced by the American model of John Ford's westerns, with the interconnnections also apparent through the likes of Today It's Me, Tomorrow It's You , with frequent samurai actor Tatsuya Nakadai ( Sword of Doom , Kagemusha , Ran etc) in the unlikely role of a Mexican bandito, and – more obviously – Five Man Army , with an actual samurai (played by Tetsuro Tanba) in the wild west.
Nevertheless, the true breakthrough of the martial arts (or more specifically kung fu) film internationally in the early 1970s in the wake of Five Fingers of Death and Enter the Dragon would seem the main impetus to films like Fighting Fists of Shanghai Joe and The Stranger and the Gunfighter – even if Joe's Italian title Il mio nome e Shanghai Joe also points to the significance of the Terence Hill comedy/parody spaghettis around the same time.
As it is, the film approaches its subject matter with enthusiasm if not a little uncertainty, perhaps reflecting the confusion over Chen Lee's origins: Flashbacks reveal that Joe learnt his style at the Shaolin Temple of the Red Lotus, whose distinctive brand he bears, but his final adversary, who – shock of shocks – turns out to have been a classmate of his, is more like a samurai, with a top-knot rather than a queue, while Joe himself wears a costume seemingly more akin to a judo suit. Likewise while Joe treats his wounds with acupuncture and a medicine he's brought from back home he oddly seeks out a western doctor to treat the daughter of the Mexican he saved when she contracts a fever.
It is also perhaps telling that the relationship between these two remains decidedly chaste, although whether this is down to traditional spaghetti/western macho – remembering how the bedroom scenes featuring the Man with No Name were cut from the Dollars films, for instance, or the innumerable westerns in which the hero must ride into the sunset, unable to settle down to a life of domesticity – or a certain caginess about depicting 'inter-racial' relationships is moot.
However, more important for the target audiences than such sociological niceties is how well the film delivers on the action front. Surprisingly well is the answer. The martial arts sequences fall halfway between the Bruce Lee and Chang Cheh/Wang Yu schools, making up what they lack in speed, grace and power – though Lee/Hayakawa proves surprisingly adept in this regard – with some out and out brutality, including a Fulci-esque eyeball-ectomy and the odd limb-lopping/symbolic castration (oh the laziness that lets one automatically view any violation of the eye in Italian cinema as Fulci-eseque and any damage to appendages anywhere as symbolic of castration anxieties!). The finale, meanwhile, sees a neat reprise/hybridisation of its twin models, combining the knife vs pistol dynamics of Yojimbo with the "aim for the heart" of Fistful, then throwing in a Shaolin-style mystical twist of its own…
Only the more stunt-based sequences – leaping onto horses, into combat etc – let the average down slightly, the action being presented through dramatic angles, cutaways and slow-motion rather than in the more integrated/holistic fashion that better showcases the acrobatic skills – or, more evidently, relative lack thereof – of the performers.
In terms of comedy the film is unsurprisingly at its weakest, with an apparent confusion as to whether we're supposed to be laughing at or with Joe's naivete and/or the ignorant whites who abuse him.
Still, to expect present-day PC sensitivity to a 30-year-old Italian exploitation film, where box office takes precedence over philosophical niceties about representations of 'the Other', is surely to expect way too much from a film which, taken on its own terms, delivers the goods nicely.
This Region 2 DVD from Imagica, released as part of their ongoing 'Macaroni Western Bible' series, showcases – cultural stereotype alert – a characteristic Japanese attention to detail. The 2.35:1 widescreen transfer is about as good as you're likely to get for a low-budget exploitationer of this vintage, while the mono English and Italian dubs are clean and clear (with decent English subtitles also available), allowing Bruno Nicolai's impressive score (albeit lifted from the Sartana series entry Have a Good Funeral My Friend ) and the chop-socky sound effects to shine through.
The extras comprise biographies of the cast and crew and what look to be a trio of essays – they are in Japanese, so it's hard to tell – a 29-image stills and posters gallery; an interviews with director Mario Caiano, and an alternative credits sequence, culled from a video and in pretty poor condition.
The interview lasts 12 minutes and is in English – which he speaks well – with Japanese subtitles and intertitles for the questions, some of which are easy to tell from the answers which others – who the 'he' is – are a bit more tricky. Caiano explains how Chen Lee was in fact Japanese; the final villain a Rome-based Tae Kwon Do teacher; his experiences of working with Klaus Kinski, and how he and Leone made their first spaghetti westerns simultaneously.Unfortunately the disc also has a characteristically Japanese price…
Copyright © K H Brown 2002-2005
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