Director: Fei-Chien Wu
Writer: Jing-Kang Chou
From: Cult Cinema
Watch: archive.org
Two Japanese prisoners facing execution are sent to oversee a lumberyard in occupied China. Their brutal administration, including torture, leads to a rebellion among the workers.
The small capsule description really sums it up. Monstrous bosses are exploiting workers at a labor yard until a charismatic fighter rises from among their ranks to unite them against their common foe. Not only are the bosses overworking, abusing, and torturing the workers, they’re planning to move them all to another lumber yard once the first job is done. Once that job is done, their instructions are to kill all the workers.
Basically it’s My Life as an Amazon Employee in martial arts form.
Our hero is present with little-to-no background. He’s apparently new, interested in neither the debauchery his co-workers get up to when given a night off, nor efforts to push back against the bosses’ worst abuses. Until he learns they’re Japanese, not Chinese. Then he leads his co-workers in a violent rebellion against the managers.
Torture, slave-labor conditions, imminent death: Let's let the "invisible hand of the market" do its work. They're a different race: Kill them and any that conspire with them.
While the workers are fighting against loyalists at the lumberyard, the hero faces off against the two managers. Eventually, one manager accidentally runs over the other with a diesel engine and then he himself gets killed by the hero. All the other workers rally around him and celebrate when they learn that the owner of the lumberyard has set it on fire to prevent the Japanese from returning and seizing it. THE END
It’s pretty easy to see this as an allegory for unionization, especially since so many of the debates about organizing the workers mirror standard union talks. However, that’s also what makes the movie kind of odd. I mean, it starts with workers being tortured so it’s hard to see anything the managers do afterwards as an escalation. Plus I kept wondering why the movie didn’t start with the rebellion and just have the rest play out as a sort of martial arts Les Misérables (and how great would that be?). To make things stranger, the hero only turns against the bosses and takes the mantle of leadership once he learns the bosses are Japanese. So no class consciousness or unity, only racial/ethnic unity. Weirdly, all the workers are united against the bosses from the start. It’s the leader who has to be convinced to revolt.
It’s even strange to think that the managers’ plight is aligned with the workers’ but they actively work to further the bosses’/government’s plans to exploit and execute all of them. The managers are Japanese prisoners facing execution. This job is their means to freedom. However, unifying with the workers seems like a clearer path to escaping the Japanese army and their sentence. Instead, the managers turn against the workers and torture them to further the wishes of the Japanese army.
Another curious element is that the owner of the lumberyard is generally played as being ignorant of or powerless against the actions taken by the managers. He’s ultimately accused of being a collaborator but finds redemption by burning the lumberyard down, removing it from the hands of the Japanese. The movie’s right when it calls him a collaborator/war profiteer, so it’s strange to see him get redeemed.
Ultimately the movie’s fine. It’s not offensive, has okay fight sequences with the final one achieving some real impressive moments, and isn’t terribly dubbed. However, it’s not great either and never rises to the level of being hilariously bad. Most of the time you’re waiting for the hero to have his radical spirit summoned. And I know all this reads like I’m looking at the movie through a purely ideological lens, that I’m judging it by my own standards as a former union organizer about how correct the hero and movie’s ideology is, but the movie’s about workers being exploited by their bosses and then rising up against them. I’m not imposing a reading, that’s the plot. The problem is that the movie takes way too long to get to that plot.
In the end, the movie’s neither great nor terrible, just a step or two above thumb-twiddlingly adequate. While that’s not enough to make me recommend it, that does put it head-and-shoulders above a lot of other movies on the Misery Mill so I won’t tell you to avoid it either. Plus the movie appears to be in the public domain, which is always a plus. I’ve added a copy to archive.org here.
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