Shingster wrote:I remember when I first starting writing review for DVDTimes (now The Digital Fix) I remember reading a somewhat stuffy academic article that alleged Cheh was a notoriously closeted homosexual, so I decided to be clever and wrote a review of New One-Armed Swordsman that touched upon this and suggested there was definite homo-erotic subtext. IIRC a while later Linn Haynes pointed out that the article I'd read was complete bollocks and I had to swiftly edit most of the review!
I suspect the truth is more that Chang Cheh was massively influenced by Sam Peckinpah, whose films were also deeply homoerotic because they're always about male camaraderie and masculinity, and with Cheh being chinese and working in what was (and in some ways still is) a highly sensationalistic film industry these Peckinpah-esque themes were amplified greatly.
That is were the term homosocial, which you can find quite a bit in Stephen Teo's writings, comes in handy when discussing same-sex scenes of brotherhood. It is very easy to overdue any particular cinematic reading whether it is a feminist, marxist, homoerotic, humanist etc... If you force it, it makes for bad writing. This applies to the comments I made about the cigar above. But as I said when you start to see patterns beyond just male bonding and it is part of an auteuristic style than there is something the director whether consciously or unconciously puts there.
While John Woo was highly influenced by Sam (and Chang as well), I do wonder to the extent that Chang Cheh was. You were starting to see an eclectic and auteuristic style to Cheh's work before the most influential works of Peckinpah's were made (now I'm a big fan of Ride the High Country, but this and the cut version of
Major Dundee were the only major films of Sam's before
The Wild Bunch came out in 1969; I'm not even sure these two came out in Hong Kong) For example: The images I posted above were from
Return of the One-Armed Swordsman came out before
The Wild Bunch.
I'm not saying any of this to take away anything from Cheh who is one of my favorite directors and is drastically underrated in western cinematic studies. I am not saying any of this to point to or try to question his sexuality. One can create homoerotic content and be of any orientation. I'm just writing that there is an overabundance of scenes which could be described as homoerotic.
