Movie Review: Blood Brothers (1973) directed by Chang Cheh (original Chinese title “Ci Ma”, “The Blood Brothers” on the title card, aka “Dynasty of Blood.”)
Ching (Qing) Dynasty government official Ma Hsin-yi (Lung Ti) has been assassinated. The assassin, Chang Wen-hsiang (David Chiang) has been arrested, but seems unusually calm and in good spirits. Hauled into court, he offers to write out a full confession.
This Shaw Brothers kung-fu epic purports to be based on actual events, but the ending makes clear that those events are being told from a particular point of view which may not reflect official history.
Chang and his good friend Huang Chung (Kwan Tai Chen) started as petty bandits in rural China. When they tried to mug Ma, the three were impressed with each other’s fighting skills, and Ma proposed that they team up for more ambitious endeavors. They became sworn brothers, and soon took over a mountain bandit gang, which they trained into serious soldiers.
Ma, a scholar as well as a skilled fighter, went off to take the government official exams while his brothers held down the fort. He succeeded in becoming an official and rising in army rank. Once he rose high enough, Ma sent for his personal troops to fold into the army fighting the Hair Bandits of the south. This did well, and soon Ma became governor of the province and could enjoy a time of relative peace. Huang and Chang also enjoyed promotions and a better standard of living.
However, Huang’s wife Mi-Lan (Li Ching) had married him quite young when he seemed like the best local choice. Huang’s an illiterate lout who regularly visits houses of ill repute. while Ma is a handsome, articulate fellow with a bright future, and single. Mi-Lan is attracted to Ma and vice-versa. Problem! It can’t be discovered that Ma is fooling around with another man’s wife, or his career will suffer. And Ma wants to go as high as he can. This conflict of interest leads to tragedy.
Since the story primarily revolves around the relationship between Ma, Huang and Chang, the Blood Brothers title suits this movie far more than Dynasty of Blood, though there is plenty of the red stuff around. As one would expect from the Shaw Brothers and Chang Cheh, there is a bunch of martial arts action, and often very good. A couple of the more epic battle scenes seem very much in the tradition of Cecil B. DeMille.
The framing device of Chang writing down his confession and the judge reading it piece by piece neatly allows transitions between parts of the story and keeps it flowing along. We get a strong sense of the friendship between the three men and the building tension between Ma and Mi-Lan.
Mi-Lan being the only female character of any plot importance does kind of skew the narrative, though. There are some party women to establish that Huang is in fact partying when he should be home with his wife, but they barely have dialogue, and Mi-Lan has female servants in Nanjing who have even less to say. While the story teases the idea that Chang might also have been in love with Mi-Lan at some point, you could also think based on the evidence that he’s asexual and just thinks of Mi-Lan as a good friend who’s being hurt by her husband’s neglect and betraying him in turn.
Some of the deaths of mook-level characters are overdone; I am wondering if those were stuntpeople the director especially liked so they got extra “acting” as a reward.
Content note: Lots of violence, sometimes bloody. Torture, a character is executed in a particularly cruel way. Heavily implied offscreen extramarital sex. Slut-shaming.
The attention paid to the emotional bond between the oath-brothers and between the individual brothers and Mi-Lan gives this a bit more texture than a simpler revenge plot, so it will go over well on days when you’re looking for a martial arts movie that rewards watching during the slow bits.
