Next Steps: Teenage Kicks

Teen and coming of age movies seem to me to be the most universal of cinematic genres.  Few of us fight monsters, few of us rob banks, but we all grow up, we all go to school, we all fall in love for the the first time, in short we can all relate to the experiences that characters go through in coming of age movies.

The teen movie has a long history, stretching from Andy Hardy's innocent dates with Judy Garland through to last year's wonderful The Spectacular Now.  But that's just the US, rich veins of coming of age cinema have also come from all over the world, with especially rich histories in the genre coming from France, Scandinavia and Japan.  The teen movie isn't, perhaps, so much a genre in itself as an iteration of various sub-genres.  There are romances, sex comedies, family dramas, crime movies, coming out stories, war films, all of which sometimes pivot around coming of age themes.  It's fitting, then, that the BFI has decided to devote a season (somewhat inevitably called Teenage Kicks) to the teen movie but while, like last month's selection of martial arts films, it provides a good primer on the genre and features many fine films the selection isn't as far reaching as it could be.

In this article I'll be taking key films from the BFI season as a jumping off point, then suggesting films that you can move on to, further exploring that element of the coming of age movie.

Carrie: High School Horror

John Carpenter's Christine

Throw a dart at a list of slasher films and you'll probably hit something with some relevance to a coming of age narrative, whether it's in the main body of the film or simply the grounding for the killer's motive, but there are also horror films that deal more directly with coming of age movie ideas.  Carrie may be the obvious choice, but it's also one of the best horror films ever made and one of the best high school films ever made, so it's the perfect choice for the BFI season.

Delving further into this sub-genre brings us immediately back to Stephen King, with John Carpenter's Christine, which channels key teen movie themes of first love through geeky Arnie Cunningham's (Keith Gordon) obsessive relationship with a car he repairs.  It's a film with great insight into the importance, as a teenager, of being cool and of being seen to be independent from your parents and, like Carrie but unusually for King, it has a decent ending.  Keith Gordon is great in the lead, credibly evolving from geek to dude and Carpenter does an especially fine job giving Christine (the car) a personality, certainly more so than Michael Bay has managed with any of the Transformers. 

When, in kickstarting the 90's slasher revival, Scream skewered the rules of the slasher it was inevitable that films that sought to break those rules would follow in its wake. One of the notable things Scream did was to crystallise in the public imagination the idea that only a virgin could be a final girl in a horror film, so of course a film came along to subvert that rule.  Cherry Falls isn't a great film, but it has a killer conceit at its heart.  The killer in this film ONLY pursues virgins, so the way to survive is to lose your virginity.  It's less explicit than it could be and the eventual reveal is kind of stupid, but while it's no classic Cherry Falls is fun.  The cast is game and the concept intelligently subverts both horror and teen movie concepts.  More than most of the 90's slasher cycle this is ripe for a remake, but it's still interesting.

Valerie and Her Week of Wonders, like Carrie and the later, also recommended, Ginger Snaps, triggers its horror through the onset of its protagonist's first period.  In Jaromil Jires' surreal, dreamlike, fairytale this key coming of age moment seems to plunge 14 year old Valerie (Jaroslava Schallerova) into a world where her grandmother has become a witch, her father is a weasally vampire (the look is part Max Schreck, part rat) and the town she lives in seems to have fallen under a strange spell.  The great thing about Valerie is that you can turn your focus to different aspects, different characters and have a different experience every time because these 72 minutes are so rich and strange.

More grounded than notions of possessed cars and fantasy worlds is another slasher that deals with a common coming of age experience, that of having a new parent in your life. The Stepfather could easily have been a grotty little B-Movie (and by all accounts became one when it was remade a few years back), but the screenplay by Donald E. Westlake and performances of Terry O' Quinn and underrated scream queen Jill Schoelen lift it.  Schoelen's character arc is better drawn than most final girls and her performance, set against O'Quinn's, makes her conviction that there's something off about her new stepfather convincing as a teenager's typical reaction to a new person in the house.  Of course she's right, he's actually a serial killer.  Overall though it's great to see a final girl who is smart and thinks things through rather than simply playing a reactive role.  For all that teens have big parts to play in slashers they're not often that complex.  This is an exception.

Mia Waskiowska and Matthew Goode in Stoker

2013 brought us what, for my money, may be the finest teen horror film since Carrie: Park Chan-wook's English language debut, Stoker.  Of all of these films it is perhaps the one that squares the coming of age and horror sides of its story best.  It has elements that are redolent of The Stepfather (the unsettling presence of Matthew Goode's Uncle Charlie) and further all the way back to Hitchcock's Shadow of a Doubt.  The coming of age element centres around the many awakenings that Mia Wasikowska's India has during the film, all pivoting around her 18th birthday.  There is the expected sexual awakening, seen in her interactions with a boy from school, with Charlie and, once, with herself.  There is also another kind of awakening; one of a darker connection she seems to have with Charlie, seeded in the film's first image but only clarified in its final scenes.  Stoker is also explicitly about growing up, which Park and DP Chung Chung-hoon graphically represent through a motif of shoes; first the same pair in increasing sizes, then a new pair, signaling India's transition to adulthood.  Stoker is a major work, whether viewed through the prism of horror, thriller or coming of age film and it's one you should see immediately spinning off this season.


Fast Times and Heathers: The first golden age of American teen movies
The first golden age of the American teen movie began in 1982 with the release of three pivotal films.  Within five months Porky's, The Last American Virgin and Fast Times At Ridgemont High.  Of these Fast Times, written by a young Cameron Crowe and based on a book he returned to high school for a year to research, is the right one for the BFI to show; it's easily the best and has an amazing cast, almost all of whom went on to bigger things. 

Lawrence Monoson, Diane Franklin and Kimmy Robertson
in The Last American Virgin

The Last American Virgin is a film that has long deserved more attention.  Part ribald sex comedy, part hard hitting drama, it doesn't always combine those elements perfectly and spends too little time on the drama, but much of it works brilliantly.  There are some great comic set pieces (the American Pie franchise owes the first 15 minutes a huge debt) and the drama, while rushed, does punch above its weight, especially in its final moments.  While the cast of Fast Times went on to bigger things this film's excellent cast largely faded into undeserved obscurity.  Lawrence Monoson is great as the geek with a crush on Diane Franklin, the new girl at school and there's a lovely, if small, role for Kimmy Robertson, who has her own crush on Monoson.  For both Monoson and Robertson's characters this is a film that, uncharacteristically for an American teen movie, deals with the harsher realities of being a teenager and admits that the hero doesn't always get the girl.

Of course there were teen movies being made and released in the 80's before these three films came along, and one of the more interesting is 1980's Little Darlings.  It's an odd film; a summer camp set comedy drama that seems to straddle American and European influences.  Its story sets Tatum O'Neal and Kristy McNichol against each other as teenage girls who have a bet on which of them will lose their virginity first during the summer.  This clearly anticipates the sex comedies that would come to dominate the genre in the 80's, but it also has silly slapstick sequences, like a mass food fight, which feel more out of a mid 70's Disney movie.  The European influence comes through in the more dramatic side of the film, especially O'Neal's crush on a camp counselor played by Armand Assante and McNichol's relationship with a local boy played by a very young Matt Dillon.  It's interesting to see a sex comedy that both approaches its genre from the perspective of two female characters and treats their relationships with a degree of seriousness.  It's schizophrenic at times, but engagingly played by O'Neal and McNichol.

The 80's teen movie had its share of oddities.  'Savage' Steve Holland carved a niche of his own with three absurdist comedies that have gone on to cult success.  The middle entry in this trio of films, One Crazy Summer, is a good laugh, but it has nothing on the films Holland made either side of it; Better Off Dead and How I Got Into College.  Better Off Dead is one of the strangest films of the 80's teen movie cycle.  The central story of Lane (John Cusack) deciding to kill himself after he's dumped by his girlfriend sounds depressing, but Holland filters it through a madcap surrealist comedy full of absurd characters, barmy running gags and offbeat punchlines.  The film features alumni of many other teen movie classics.  Curtis Armstrong, of Revenge of the Nerds, is hilarious as Lane's friend, who is constantly trying to find ways to get high and whose ski coaching amounts to "Go that way, really fast.  If something gets in your way, turn.  Diane Franklin is charm itself as French exchange student who falls for Lane and Cusack has perhaps the best track record in this genre in the 80's.  We'll come back to that.  Better Off Dead's greatest strength is its breathless inventiveness, the way it finds bizarre ways to approach situations that, even by this stage, were cliché.  For instance, Lane's crappy job in a burger bar eventually leads to a stop motion animated sequence featuring one of the burgers and a series of challenges to drag race is enlivened by the fact that the challengers talk like Howard Cossell.  It would be a crime to spoil more of the jokes.  This one of the best comedies of the 80's.  Just watch it.

Diane Franklin, Dan Schneider and John Cusack in
Better Off Dead

Holland hasn't released a film since 1989's How I Got Into College (he's working on a new one as I type though).  This is criminal.  How I Got Into College is another brilliant slice of madness, revolving around a guy who is desperate to get into the same college as the girl he's had crush on all through high school, thinking this will make her take him seriously.  Again, it's simply jam packed with gags, my favourite being a recurring one anthropomorphising the multiple choice answers on the college entrance exam as two guys discussing how Marlon (Corey Parker) is going to answer the question they are trapped in.  Steve Holland is a talent that the film industry let slip through its fingers once, let's hope they don't make the same mistake when Multiplexing finally happens.

John Cusack, inexplicably, isn't a fan of Better Off Dead.  However, he did have an incredible run in teen movies.  Hot Pursuit didn't work, but otherwise his filmography is full of classics from all corners of the genre, be it his small part in established classic Stand By Me, his lead in Cameron Crowe's Say Anything or Rob Reiner's often forgotten second film. The Sure Thing has, over the years, been swallowed by the reputation of the two films that Reiner made either side of it; This is Spinal Tap and The Princess Bride, but it more than holds its own in their company.  The Sure Thing is essentially an 80's teen movie take on It Happened One Night with Cusack as a college student on a cross country trip in pursuit of a girl he has been promised is the sure thing of the title.  He makes the trip with a nerdy and uptight fellow student played by Daphne Zuniga and, well, you know what happens.  It's a smart, engagingly played and very funny updating of a classic template, with Cusack and Zuniga bouncing off each other beautifully. There are also some lovely throwaway lines, like Tim Robbins introducing himself as "Gary Cooper, but not the Gary Cooper that's dead". I'm amazed that this isn't considered a classic romantic comedy, a classic teen movie or a more important part of Reiner's incredible early run as a director.

Clearly not all of the teen movies of the 80's that you've never heard of are classics, but there are still a lot of interesting films among them.  If 1985's Mischief is remembered at all today it is largely for Kelly Preston's full frontal nude scene (which, to be fair, is memorable) but despite the fact that it's cool guy teaches geek how to get the girl story is pretty generic it has one moment that really sets it apart; a line that defines the problem with every romantic comedy that doesn't work.  Late in the film, the relationship with Kelly Preston's character having broken down, the geeky lead says "I was so busy trying to fuck her that I never got to know her".  It's an insightful piece of criticism; a moment sees the film, surely accidentally, turn inwards and analyse itself and its genre.  It makes an otherwise unmemorable film one that sticks in the mind, if only for the implications that criticism has.  

Lea Thompson, Eric Stoltz and Mary Stuart Masterson
in Some Kind Of Wonderful

Some other oddities also stand out, such as the Keanu Reeves starring The Night Before, which has the feel of After Hours filtered through a teen comedy as Reeves looks for the prom date it turns out he accidentally sold and Three O' Clock High, which transplants High Noon to high school.  It's a bit clunky at times, but certainly an original idea.  More a rarity than an oddity is the film that Cameron Crowe wrote between Fast Times and Say Anything.  The Wild Life is rarely seen these days, but like Fast Times it's well observed and has an excellent cast, including Back To The Future's Lea Thompson, who had fantastic career in teen movies with those two, a fine performance in the more dramatic All The Right Moves and a supporting part as the 'perfect girl' in my favourite John Hughes penned film, Some Kind of Wonderful.

There are so many that I've yet to mention... early roles for Heathers star Winona Ryder in Square Dance (affecting, but for Rob Lowe's awful hamming as a mentally handicapped character) and Lucas... Goofy comedy Real Genius; a college set flick which has Val Kilmer, as a scientific genius, being more fun than in anything else he did before Kiss Kiss, Bang Bang... Ladies and Gentlemen, The Fabulous Stains; a hard to find punk movie with a young Diane Lane... Mask; a heartfelt (if sometimes slightly cloying) romance from Peter Bogdanovich, who made the greatest coming of age movie of them all: The Last Picture Show... These aren't all great films, but none of them is boring, all are, at some level worth seeing and they all contribute to a picture of a sub-genre that ruled the 80's, pulling in every genre under the sun.

Next Steps: Martial Arts Movies

The BFI's season of Chinese Cinema is currently running a selection of martial arts and swordplay films.  They've made some fine choices of what to show, but their selection does feel a bit like an exercise in box ticking.  There aren't many films that people familiar with martial arts cinema won't have seen a hundred times.  I'm not against that, it's always good to draw newcomers in to a genre and I recognise that the BFI has to bow to some commercial pressure and that, for instance, Drunken Master's name recognition will bring fans and newbies alike to the screenings.

With all that in mind, here are some suggestions for where to go next if you're getting in to martial arts movies based on this season.  I'm not going to suggest any hugely obscure films because I want to choose films that people CAN find and see, and because my own knowledge of martial arts movies, even after 15 years as a fan, is hardly encyclopedic.  If there's anything you love and think I've missed in this article, please mention it in the comments below or tweet them to me @24FPSUK.

A Touch Of Zen

Here's where I confess a great sin. I've not actually seen A Touch Of Zen.  I've been meaning to get around to it for years, and will soon, but that doesn't mean I can't suggest a few directions to go in following on from it...

Cheng Pei-Pei in Come Drink With Me

Five years before A Touch Of Zen, director King Hu had made a star of then 19 year old Cheng Pei-pei in the Shaw Brothers produced Come Drink With Me.  It's a pretty typical story with proficient martial artist Golden Swallow taking further training so she can rescue her brother from a group of bandits but it's incredibly stylishly shot by Hu and Cheng Pei-pei is one of those rare people who is immediately, self-evidently, a movie star.  Her martial arts prowess is strong (though the choreography, in keeping with the Shaw films of the time, is less intricate and slower than it would become), but even outside of that and her obvious beauty she simply has an ability to draw a camera whenever she's in frame.  From here you could go on to more of Pei-pei's films; she played Golden Swallow again in a sequel named for her character, and The Lady Hermit is another excellent martial arts film in much the same mould. Latterly, Cheng moved into more dramatic roles, beginning with Alex Law's Painted Faces.

Another way to go from A Touch of Zen is towards later swordplay films.  It influenced many well known films that are represented in the season, such as Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon (which, incidentally, features Cheng Pei-pei) and Hero.  Beyond these, Hu's own late period film The Swordsman and Ronny Yu's The Bride With White Hair are fine choices, as is Raymond Lee and Ching Siu-tung's New Dragon Gate Inn; an all star remake of Hu's Dragon Inn.  Lesser known is Tsui Hark's Green Snake; a wonderful, hypnotic oddity which wraps its martial arts sequences in a sensually told legend starring Maggie Cheung and Joey Wang, I highly recommend tracking that one down.

Classic Kung Fu Stars

The three people generally recognised as major kung fu stars in the west; Bruce Lee, Jackie Chan and Jet Li are all deservedly represented in the BFI season.  In Lee's case there is little to add, as his greatest film and his most popular (Fist Of Fury and Enter The Dragon) are both showing.  In the case of Jackie, Jet Li and the many other great stars who aren't so well represented in the season, there are many directions in which you could head after coming out of the BFI's selections.

Jackie is represented in the season by his breakout success Drunken Master (directed by the great Yuen Woo-ping), its brilliant sequel and his trend-setting modern martial arts movie Police Story, but in choosing these three films there is much about the clown prince of kung fu that the BFI have left unexplored.  Perhaps most surprising is the lack of any of the 'three brothers' films; an unrelated trilogy toplining Chan and his opera school brothers Sammo Hung and Yuen Biao.  Project A and Meals on Wheels are joyous and freewheeling; Chan at his finest as star and director, while Dragons Forever is a harder edged film, directed by Hung, who always brings out a tougher and more serious side of Jackie.  All three are among the truly essential martial arts films of any era.  It's also a shame not to see either one of Jackie's Armour of God series, these are his take on the Indiana Jones films and the second; Operation Condor, which took two years to shoot, is especially outlandish fun.  Fans might also want to check out one of his more dramatic roles; say Heart of the Dragon, Miracles or Crime Story.  Jackie is clearly no DeNiro (well, it's a closer run thing these days) but he is a rather more versatile talent than you might think.

Jet Li also has three starring roles in the season, in the first two Once Upon A Time In China films and in Zhang Yimou's visually stunning Hero.  All three show off Li's skills to fine effect and are a good jumping off point into Li's further filmography.  Especially recommended in the light of this season is Fist of Legend, a remake in which Li takes on Bruce Lee's iconic role from Fist of Fury and which will make an intriguing double bill with the earlier film.  Again I have to confess that, despite being impressed with everything I have seen him in, Li is someone whose work I still have to dig into in further detail, but now let's address some people who aren't so well represented in the season.

Yuen Biao and Joyce Godenzi in Eastern Condors

For my money Sammo Hung is the overlooked genius of the classic period of martial arts cinema.  A great star; a great choreographer; a great director; adept as a performer in both comedic and dramatic roles. I'm always disappointed to see him, in the West, so overshadowed by Jackie and by Bruce Lee.  Hung's greatest achievement as a filmmaker is probably his pair of Wing Chun films; Warriors Two and The Prodigal Son.  The latter may well be my favourite martial arts film of all time, and boasts fantastic performances from Yuen Biao and Lam Ching Ying as a naive martial artist and the opera star who takes him on as a pupil.  The mid film fight between Lam Ching Ying and Frankie Chan, emphasising the close quarters style of Wing Chun, remains one of the most breathtaking I've ever seen.  Outside classical kung fu films Hung also made the Dirty Dozen influenced Vietnam movie Eastern Condors, which has a star packed cast and some of Hung's best action (he slimmed down significantly for the part).  It's notable for several reasons; being perhaps the only Hong Kong martial arts film to star an Oscar winner (Haing S. Ngor); a prison camp scene later replicated for John Woo's Bullet In The Head and an extraordinary bad guy performance from Yuen Wah, who moves like no one else on Earth.  In recent times Hung has diversified in to character parts, demanding less action, but in Wilson Yip's Saat Po Long (or Kill Zone) he proved he could still hold his own with Donnie Yen.  Sammo has made dozens of films, and from his directorial debut Iron Fisted Monk to supernatural comedy Spooky Encounters to the Western influenced Millionaires Express and even up to his recent work, they all have something to offer.

Sammo Hung seems to have been a loyal friend as a filmmaker, and throughout the 80's he developed a stock company, formed largely of his opera school brothers (the Seven Little Fortunes).  For my money two members of this stock company really stood out and deserve to be better known by the wider movie watching public: Yuen Biao and Lam Ching Ying. 

Yuen Biao was the youngest of the Seven Little Fortunes and cut his teeth working as a stunt player in Jackie and Sammo's early films (in Jackie's early directorial efforts like The Young Master and Dragon Lord he can be seen doubling for a wide array of actors in some of their most acrobatic moves and on more than one occasion you can catch him doubling for his own opponent in fights), but he's also a decent actor, with a bit more of an everyman quality than some of his peers, something that Sammo uses brilliantly in both The Prodigal Son and Eastern Condors.  He generally worked in supporting roles, but he's always one of the best things in any film he appears in, and the moments you'll be picking your jaw up off the floor tend to be because of him.

Lam Ching Ying in Mr Vampire

If Yuen Biao was one of the most underrated martial artists of the classic period then Lam Ching Ying, as well as being a great kung fu player, was the most underrated actor in these films.  Again, this is something that Sammo Hung recognised in his best films, giving Lam the most challenging roles, including that of gay kung fu master Leung Yee-tai in The Prodigal Son.  In the English dub the camp voice derails the performance, but in Cantonese Lam's dignified performance carries the film.  Lam's talent brings a down to earth centre to the most outlandish of films, the fact he treats the material seriously means that Mr Vampire, with its hopping vampires and Buddhist magic that are so unfamiliar to Western audiences, doesn't provoke the derision that it otherwise might have.  That said, the same film also mines this quality in Lam's performance to great comic effect.  It's terribly sad that Lam Ching-ying's career was cut short by liver cancer.  He would have had a great third act in him as a character player.

Aside from these there are many other martial arts move figures worth investigating.  Donnie Yen has been a big star for a long time and I was surprised not to see his best known films Iron Monkey and Ip Man included in this selection from BFI.  My personal recommendations would be Saat Po Long (as recommended in the Sammo Hung section) and the film released over here by Hong Kong Legends as In The Line Of Duty which is, confusingly, actually In The Line Of Duty 4 (not that it matters) and which also features a stunningly kickass role for Cynthia Khan.  

Martial arts cinema isn't always a star's game and it's also worth investigating directors and action directors whose styles you find interesting.  Yuen Woo-ping gained a lot of popularity in the west from The Matrix and his distinguished directorial career takes in beloved titles like Drunken Master and Iron Monkey as well as the aforementioned In The Line Of Duty 4, Sammo Hung's star vehicle Magnificent Butcher (which does for Hung Ga what Sammo would later do for Wing Chun) and a pretty stupid, but immensely fun Under Siege knock off called Red Wolf, which I have a residual affection for because it was my first HKL dvd.  Also worth mentioning is Ching Siu-tung, but we'll come to him in the next section.

Where Are The Women?

Michelle Yeoh in Magnificent Warriors

I'm holding out some hope that the kickass ladies of Chinese martial arts and action cinema will have their own focus later in the season, but this selection of films is still a fine excuse to spin off and investigate some of them.  Three generations are represented in Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon; the aforementioned Cheng Pei-pei, Michelle Yeoh and a then unknown Zhang Ziyi.  Ziyi is also in Hero and The Banquet during this season, but Yeoh, one of the great female stars of martial arts cinema, is otherwise under-represented.  I would suggest starting with her starring role as a whip wielding rebel in World War 2 in the exactly as advertised by the title Magnificent Warriors.  Yeoh, a dancer rather than a martial artist, learns her moves by simply mimicking action, but she executes them brilliantly, has a go for broke spirit and is an effortlessly charismatic presence.  This is one of her finest films, but there is a lot of choice.  Not strictly a martial arts film, but set around that world, is the true story drama The Stunt Woman, featuring what remains Yeoh's best performance.  Among her pure martial arts films Police Assassins (also featuring Cynthia Rothrock, who did all her best work in Hong Kong) stands out, as does her leading role in Yuen Woo-ping's Wing Chun, which tells the story of the woman who invented the style.  Perhaps her most viscerally impressive hour came opposite Jackie Chan in Police Story 3.  She more than holds her own against an on form Chan and it is her, not him, who has the most impressive stunt in the film when she jumps a motorcycle on to a moving train.

Another face of martial arts cinema, though she never, until later in her career, did many of her own stunts, was Maggie Cheung.  In the BFI season she is magnificent, a vision, in Hero, and she's well known for her appearance in Wong Kar-wai's wuxia film Ashes of Time, but her heritage in the genre goes back to an appearance in Police Story as Jackie's accident prone girlfriend (the shot of her getting thrown through [stunt] plate glass is real).  She also appears in the aforementioned Green Snake, and has a seductive scene in New Dragon Gate Inn in which Brigitte Lin uses a sword to strip her of her clothing.  Also worth catching is Sammo Hung's Moon Warriors, but Cheung's finest pre-Hero martial arts outings came opposite Michelle Yeoh and Anita Mui in Ching Siu-tung's downright bizarre The Heroic Trio and its sequel Executioners.  These are among the strangest of martial arts films, but their madness and the chemistry between the actors is infectious.

A particular sub genre of Chinese action cinema is the girls with guns film and one girl who did quite a few of them, following a demure appearance as the girlfriend in Mr Vampire, was Moon Lee.  She made A LOT of films with Angel or Angels in the title and it's tough to tell which are the official entries in the series and which are simply knock offs, but Lee is fun in all those that I've seen.  She's also well worth seeing opposite Yuen Biao in Tsui Hark's fantastical Zu Warriors From The Magic Mountain.

Few, if any, female stars have such established careers in martial arts cinema as the male stars and those who do tend not to stay in as long, often thanks to the convention in Hong Kong that many actresses retire from the screen after they get married (this caused a hiatus in Michelle Yeoh's career).  Some do stay in, like the American born Cynthia Rothrock, fantastic in Police Assassins (also known as Yes Madam) and with Yuen Biao in Above The Law, but she has the worst taste of almost any major martial arts star and has made an incredible amount of crap.  The stinkiest I've seen is a Hong Kong production; Prince Of The Sun.  Another woman who stuck around for a while was Brigitte Lin, whose ethereal beauty suited the otherworldly nature of wuxia perfectly.  She's iconic in The Bride With White Hair and well worth seeing in the already mentioned likes of The Swordsman series, Ashes of Time and New Dragon Gate Inn.

I could go on, but then this article would have no end, and it needs one.  I'm no expert when it comes to martial arts, wuxia and Hong Kong action films and I feel like I've barely scratched the surface here (I, for instance, need to see MANY more Shaw Brothers films), but I hope that if you are relatively new to the genre I have given you a few titles you want to investigate and a few ideas on how you can spin off this BFI season and discover some wonderfully entertaining cinema.  I'd love to hear your comments and suggestions below or on Twitter.