Poor Cynthia Rothrock. She’’s the first “gweilo (white devil)” woman to become a major star in the golden age of the Hong Kong kung-fu film, then gets relegated to such sad junk as the China O’’Brien and Lady Dragon series in America. But for anybody who wants to know what the fuss was about, and those, like me, who want to see Cynthia regain her rightful place in the top echelon of action stars, the two newest Dragon Dynasty DVDs are the ones for you.

Dragon Dynasty is the new home for the many martial art movies the Weinstein Company has been hoarding for years. They’’re finally releasing these amazing, literally unmatchable, adventures with enough worthy whistles and beguiling bells to make them worthwhile for even a pioneering kung-fu flick fan such as myself. Still, some of their decisions and missteps are indicative of the seeming disdain they previously displayed for these bogarted milestones.

Take, for example, Above the Law, Rothrock’s’ second HK film (following the classic Yes Madam, which also introduced Michelle Yeoh to an awed Chinese audience) and Dragon Dynasty’’s ninth DVD release. What, say you, I don’’t remember Cynthia Rothrock in that fine, first, 1988, Steven Seagal movie!?  That’s because Cynthia was in the 1986 like-named Hong Kong film, which was more generally known as Righting Wrongs, which would have made a much less confusing, more easily ordered, title for this new DVD.

Under any name, this combination of Death Wish and Enter the Dragon adds to its list of firsts, in that it’s the first major action starring vehicle for the impressive Yuen Baio away from his “big brothers,” directors, and co-stars Jackie Chan and Sammo Hung (late of CBS-TV’s Martial Law series). But rather than showcase Baio’’s sweet, lovable, easy-going nature, director Corey Yuen Kwai (who went on to choreograph the action in Jet Li’s’ Kiss of the Dragon, among others) decided to make Righting Wrong a monument to paranoia, fear, brutality and some of the most savage kung-fu ever put on celluloid.

The return of Hong Kong to China’’s rule was more than a decade away at the time, but action directors such as Corey were already reflecting their concerns with films that featured corruption as a murderous way of life. Baio plays a lawyer who moonlights as a vigilante after his beloved mentor is mown down. Rothrock is the Interpol agent sent to arrest him, while everyone around them is unleashing assassins to kill everyone they can get their hands, knives, guns, construction tools, planes, garrotes, and bombs on.

The fights Corey crams this movie with are boldly conceived, incredibly played, and well worth watching, even studying, repeatedly, which is a good thing since clips of them are shown repeatedly during the interesting “Special Feature” interviews with Rothrock, Baio, and Canadian kickboxing champ Peter “Sugarfoot” Cunningham (who co-stars as one of the many killers). The packaging copy isn’t through with you at just the confusing title, however. The good news is that the disc also features alternate scenes (although not one Rothrock mentions in her interview) and endings, which aren’’t listed on the box. The bad news is that, while the copy maintains that the film is letterboxed widescreen, it ain’’t.

Which is a shame, because Dragon Dynasty’‘s tenth release, and the next piece of Rothrock proof, is Shanghai Express, which is beautifully restored and letterboxed, capturing every millimeter of the astonishing stunts and scintillating fights director/star Sammo Hung piles on his international cast-of-hundreds. Like Righting Wrongs/Above the Law before it, this DVD features a pandering alternate title for a film that is better known (even on the opening credits) as The Millionaires’’ Express. (more…)

In a bygone age of self-defeating fair-play isolationism, comparatively few outposts of the U.S. entertainment industry saw fit to take issue with the congealing Axis powers. Timely Comics’ Captain America books tackled a larger agenda of wish-fulfillment Nazi-busting in 1941 at a time when popular sentiment and much of the mass communications media, stateside, were still holding out for an anti-inflammatory approach. Just two years earlier, the lower-berth Hollywood producers Ben Judell and Sigmund Neufeld had run afoul of their industry’s attempts to repress a film called Hitler – Beast of Berlin, starting with a Production Code Administration complaint that the very title might pose an affront. It is always an awkward choice, even in the realm of heroic fiction, between pre-emptive action and a wait-and-watch attitude.

And between this difficult patch for the Judell–Neufeld movie and the ferocious début of Captain America, the Third Reich began insinuating such self-glorifying motion pictures as Campaign in Poland and Victory in the West into American theaters with impunity if not necessarily articulate English intertitles. Said the show-biz tradepaper Variety, bucking the mollifying influence of the Production Code: “Instead of making Americans frightened of the terrible power of the Reich’s Army, [Victory in the West] inflames them.”

The Captain America stories may have been thusly inflamed, but likelier Joe Simon and Jack Kirby, the talents responsible, were springing from an intuitive sense of developments more appalling than any ostentatious display of aggression. (Superman had tackled fictional-allegory aggressors and, then, squared off against Adolf Hitler and Josef Stalin as early as 1940 – though far outside his own formal continuity, in an isolated gimmick story for Look magazine.)

As emphatic a stand belonged to the comics series known as Spy Smasher, from Fawcett Publications. The property’s retooling as a movie serial began taking shape in 1941 at Republic Pictures – which recently had adapted Fawcett’s Captain Marvel, with a tone markedly grimmer than that of the funnybooks – and a shooting script was completed shortly before the Japanese invasion of Pearl Harbor. It was with a newfound sense of propagandistic ferocity that the Spy Smasher serial went into production on Dec. 22. The attraction began arriving in weekly big-screen installments on April 4, 1942.

The movie version takes some savvy liberties with the source, providing the lead character – Alan Armstrong, alias Spy Smasher – with an entirely civilian twin named Jack, and thus obliging star player Kane Richmond to handle essentially three roles. A recurring villain called the Mask was literally un-masked for the screen, allowing Hans Schumm a richer opportunity for characterization.

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