The Water Margin (1972)

THE WATER MARGIN is a lavish production that covers just a few chapters of the famous book. It spends the first 15 minutes introducing character after character, played by many of Shaw Brothers biggest stars, which had me worried the plot would be incomprehensible... thankfully, once introduced most of them disappear completely until the last 20 minutes!

The film focuses on a manageable subset of the 108 Outlaws of the Marsh, and a reasonably self-contained story that doesn't particularly require any knowledge of the preceding chapters. I fact it mainly focuses on the characters played by Tetsuro Tamba and David Chiang, who are not outlaws at the start of the film, so this is presumably where they were introduced.

Chang Cheh and collaborators seem to be aspiring to the grandeur of classic samurai films, but even with Shaw Brothers pulling out all the stops their resources can't quite stretch to the production values or gravitas of an Akira Kurosawa epic. They do deliver on entertainment though, and perhaps overachieve on gruesome deaths.

The film isn't particularly action-packed by Chang Cheh's standards, but there are several fights distriubuted throughout and it all builds to a suitably exciting climax with multiple duelling opponents. Four choreographers are credited, and they do good work resulting in quite varied styles being seen.

The 14th century novel The Water Margin, or Outlaws Of The Marsh, is considered to be one of the Four Great Classical Novels of China, and it was undoubtedly a big influence on depictions of the jiang hu in literature and cinema - though it is thought to be based on stories and oral traditions that had been circulating long before they were collected into a novel.

This was presumably intended to be the start of a long running series, with characters introduced here with the intention that they would appear in future entries. Indeed there is All Men Are Brothers which is another ensemble piece featuring several characters who are only seen in the introduction, and The Delightful Forest focused on Ti Lung's character.

I guess the studio didn't feel like they were getting a good return on the investment these epics required though, or Chang Cheh just got distracted by his Shaolin cycle, so it didn't blossom into the cinematic universe that it might have become.