Chinese Godfather (1973) Review

There is no better feeling than reaching a certain milestone in your life where you had been on a life quest to find something that is basically like the ultimate ancient artifact. In my case, it’s this obscure movie called Chinese Godfather (1973) or The Chivalrous Knight. It stars almost no one recognizable except Michael Chan, who’s only two roles I do distinctly remember are Shaolin Hand Lock (1978) and Five Element Ninjas (1982). While I do recognize that he was a significant action actor in the kung fu genre, the truth is that I never found him particularly charismatic nor noteworthy especially compared to people like a David Chiang, Lo Mang, Fu Sheng, etc. as other contemporaries he may have worked with or peers. But the primary reason this movie is so significant to me is that there is a particular scene that I have been hunting for literally decades that had been trapped in a state of zombie-like retention in my brain where a stubborn neuron refused to die out which has impelled me upon this ultimate quest where I have finally re-discovered the missing link.

So the movie plot reads (as per the description on Tubi):

The story of kung fu brothers Chow and Sii, who agree to carry out a thief’s dying wish of taking stolen jewels to his wife.

Truthfully, that’s about as sensible as you can get in this wretched movie. This movie has a horrible flow with lengthy fight scenes that leave you stunned with boredom in how the action doesn’t seem like action but filler in trying to get towards the end. Because it’s so old and done under what I presume is some independent umbrella, the quality, even on a platform like Tubi TV, is just god awful where most of the shots are nearly indiscernible especially as many scenes are done in the shade.

The basic plot revolves around some jewels that Michael Chan and his brother find from a dead thief. They get the address of the wife and plan to return them to her, despite not questioning how this person managed to scrounge them up. The wife lives with her young daughter, who believes her father is a good person because “he’ll buy her a house when they’re rich.” The mother isn’t as naive and dislikes her husband’s nefarious methods.

In opposition to Michael Chan and his obscure actor brother is some guy named Cheng Lei. I suppose I ought to give this guy more credit because he was considered part of the OG “Five Tigers” along with Jimmy Wang Yu, Chang I, Lo Lieh and Chieh Yuan. The thing is that I think he was more prominent during the early 70s while most of the films I cared about started around the mid 70s through the early 80s where the actors, martial arts and plots were far sharper and refined.

At any rate, Cheng Lei runs some gang of thugs and the jewels were stolen from him. Because of their value, he obviously wants them back while the wife realizes that the jewels are bad news for her. When Chan and his brother try to return them to her, she flat out refuses which disappoints the daughter but leaves Chan and his brother wondering what to do. They end up getting ambushed by the thugs and defeat them, earning the wrath of Cheng Lei and his group.

Another major player in this is Hu Chin, who is somewhat recognizable (I knew of her from The Boxer Rebellion 1976) but not by name compared to say Kara Hui. She runs a casino under her father and is a deceptive character who gets into various trouble because she’s avaricious. She often plays games with men’s hearts, including Michael Chan’s who discovers her as she’s about to get raped by one of her customers and kills him in self defense.

From there, the middle section is just Cheng Lei trying to find his jewels and beating up everyone in town. Eventually, he kills off the jobber brother, which naturally pisses Michael Chan off and he abducts both the thief’s wife and her daughter to try and determine where the jewels are. At some point, Michael Chan gets into a romantic relationship with the seductive Hu Chin and reveals the location of the hidden jewels to her. In turn, she goes to steal the jewels for herself while Michael Chan finds that the location had been ransacked by the thugs, which turns out to be the home of the wife and her daughter (why the hell would you hide the jewels there of all places????).

One comment I want to make here is the really bizarre use of subliminal inserts in this movie. Both the jobber brother and infrequently Michael Chan would have a moment or scene where for a few frames an image from a Bruce Lee movie is interjected. There is absolutely no explanation how nor why this happens. I think because this was a Chinese movie, they effectively got away with murder in terms of the copyright but this certainly ought to fall into the Bruceploitation genre.

Nonetheless, Michael Chan ends up tracking down Cheng Lei, imprisoning him and freeing the mother and daughter. The mother continues to want to have nothing to do with the jewels so Michael Chan suggest that they leave the town. As they start off for a new life, they get ambushed where the wife and her daughter stay behind. Some weirdo comes out of the bushes to try and rape the mother but she fights him off only to get stabbed to death. The daughter is left crying but there’s actually no resolution to her fate (I mean WTF)

Somehow Cheng Lei gets free because he knows something about martial arts and hunts down Hu Chin, who is examining the jewels at her lair. How he knew Hu Chin had the jewels is no ones guess because nothing really makes any sense and they’re just trying to tie up very loose ends as the story winds down. She tries to play off that those jewels are the stolen jewels but Cheng Lei knows better because they’re his. He gets pissed and kills her then takes back his stolen property (assumedly). Michael Chan finds the ruins of the gambling ring and gets mad at seeing his betrayer girlfriend killed.

So the last 8 minutes of the movie or so is an unending fight that makes no sense with numerous changes to scenery in transitions that are inexplicable. Like at one point they’re in some farm location and Michael Chan throws a bucket of blood on Cheng Lei only for them to suddenly appear on some rocks by a lake. Then they start climbing up towards a trapped zone that apparently is used for catching wild pigs, etc. So at this point, I’m actually intrigued because I’m beginning to really believe this could be The One.

The fights during this period are indiscernible because everything is horribly dark. Whatever filter is used makes everything seem like it was shot at night. It’s almost as if the camera was wearing Bruce Lee’s sunglasses to produce this mess. But the two climb uphill towards another set of traps in some forest area. Both men get entangled by the legs from a trap that pulls them up into the air and leaves them dangling. Cheng Lei manages to free himself and get a bunch of free blows on Michael Chan. From there, he laughs mockingly at Michael Chan (because he does look like an idiot here just swinging around helpless) before he blindly steps into another rope trap that causes spikes to be driven through his chest. THIS IS THE MOMENT!

I have been FUCKING SEARCHING FOR THIS GODDAMN SCENE FOREVER! It took me 45+ years to find this stupid scene.

But before I do my personal deep dive into this scene and what it meant to me, let me just say that the movie almost abruptly ends at this point. We get Michael Chan supposedly climbing to get his leg free while the writhes in pain with those horrible spikes sticking out of his chest. After that, the screen goes to “Fin” without any further resolution.

So why has this fucking stupid ass film that I just verbally eviscerated bearing this level of significance to me?

Growing up, my parents were kung fu fan aficionados. Judging from my blogs, you can see how the kung fu genre made a huge impact on my life with my love for the Shaw Brothers studios work as well as more independent films. Most of my current love comes from nostalgia where my parents would occasionally rent these films and there would be a certain scene that would stick out in my brain. Some scenes were so strong that they stayed with me for life.

Once the internet came about, I was able to begin my hunt for re-living part of my childhood. I found a few sites that sold old kung fu movies or I would hit up the old Suncoast store to pick things up. Then my family and I would sit around the dinner table watching these. Sometimes it might just be my father and I watching late at night some of these films during the late 90s.

Being a collector, I have this obsessive compulsive nature which is utterly determined once I become fixated on an idea. In the case of kung fu films, I wanted to find every single film that I had seen at some point, identify them, absorb them and get that feeling of satisfaction. An example of my life long quest is Rage of the Dragon (1980) and Dynasty (1977). In those instances, those movies were some truly rare moments that I only drew blanks because they weren’t typical Shaw Brothers movies where I was more familiar with the actors or names of the titles. I succeeded in discovering those movies because I managed to scrap up enough of a memory/description on reddit that helped me identify those two. But the last two, including this one, remained a mystery. So now, it’s down to one final movie on my list.

But for the memory itself, it’s such a funny thing to me because I was such a young child when I probably had seen this movie. I’m almost certain my family had rented it out and it might’ve been anywhere between ’79 – ’81 because of how we had this ancient Beta Max. But I couldn’t have been more than 4-6 when I saw that scene. The way my memory/mind works is very odd in how I had been trying to piece this puzzle together. For the longest time, the way I had thought about this scene was some guy with a mustache stepping into a trap (like something on the floor) which would cause a spiked ball to ram straight through him. You can see in the featured image how the spikes form a kind of broadening shape that makes one think that it had a ball shape.

But the other part was that my mind confused one of the actors to be a Bruce Lee type. For a while I had thought it was Bruce Li because my memory had entangled it with a different Bruceploitation film done by him (there’s a scene where Bruce Li is hitting some weird punching machine with sci fi green lights and another scene showing him torture working out on some machine then getting a headache). I think my parents rented both movies and I might’ve been coming in and out of the living room but somehow was made to think these two movies were the same thing (remember kiddies: we didn’t have el interneto to verify ANYTHING). So these fuzzy images were left imprinted in my brain.

As you can see though with that guy’s expression, he’s in pretty bad shape. But for whatever reason, I thought it was a mustached Bruce Li triggering a trap after beating the fuck out of some bad guy. I think what happened is that Michael Chan looked kinda like Bruce Lee here especially since this movie came out around Bruce Lee’s death and there’s a bunch of subliminal stuff here which would make one believe he could be a Bruce Lee type. I don’t recall seeing the subliminal stuff though until now so I’m sure I must’ve only seen that ending.

At any rate, I’m actually a little disappointed that the weapon that slays the villain wasn’t a spiked ball because the idea had been implanted into my brain for decades. Also, I thought it was the good guy that got impaled because it’s pretty rare to see the bad guy receiving the lasting image before credits roll. Yet in this movie, there are no credits at all. It just ends with no warning.

The thing for me about this entire experience was the various false leads getting to this point. No search ever came close to the image and I’m sure my minuscule description only caused question marks to be raised over heads of other hard core fans. I tried to even use AI to see if it could help me because the scene was simply so obscure. In recent days, I had been watching various independent movies with a fascination for Chan Sing, who was kind of like the Chinese version of Charles Bronson back in the day. He had a mustache and would play various hero roles in the 70s (as well as villains such as in Vengeance). So I thought his movies might make a good candidate for this particular scene.

Alas, as I perused through Tubi’s catalog and some of YouTube, I had not been able to find the infamous scene. Part of my technique was to load up a video, pause it and quickly scan through the movie’s frames to see if anything resembled that particular scene. Even with this movie, I was unable to notice it (because it happens right at the very end). Yet the weirdest clue occurred to me: the title. For some reason, Chinese Godfather rang a familiar bell in my head. I don’t know why this would be the movie and even though I did my fast forward run through and unsuccessfully hadn’t been able to spot the particular scene, my gut instinct said, “Look, this movie seems rotten. Just watch it and maybe you could write a review.” I did find a few interesting scenes that may have hinted at the end fight so I figured to give the movie a chance. Unfortunately, it was mostly an uphill battle trying to trudge through the muck of this sucker. Yet the title was the thing that kept me sticking around.

Perhaps, because of this low budget, forced ending my tiny developing brain at the time cludged all these elements together. The movie itself is pretty worthless for the most part as you see a bunch of nameless, fat, uninteresting thugs getting their asses beat or inexplicably being able to beat up the heroes. And though Michael Chan was supposedly a legit martial arts expert, he just has zero screen presence to me. At least, the villain ended up with a highly memorable reaction that left a permanent impression on an impressionable kid for this long. But I am happy to say that this is the one and I’ve managed to nail one more obscure life quest objective.