Verdict
Summary
A spaghetti western cross-pollinated with a chop-sockie kung fu movie, Shanghai Joe is a pretty great martial arts western hybrid with a hero who is literally better than everyone else in every single thing he does. He jumps higher, plays cards (shuffling like a magician) and poker better, using every weapon like a master, kicks harder, runs faster, and is wiser and smarter than every opponent he faces.
Plot:
A new arrival to America named Chin Hao seeks employment as a cowboy in Texas, but all he gets is vicious racism and hatred, but he has enough talent and toughness to outlast everyone.
Review:
Chin Mao (Myoshin Hayakawa) arrives in San Francisco by voyage from Shanghai, and he immediately books a stagecoach to Texas for work. Right away, he’s met with hostility and racism by everyone he meets, and every single time he handles each situation with dignity, grace, and a shocking ability to one-up his oppressors. When he arrives in the middle of nowhere in Texas, he tries getting a job as a cowboy on a ranch, but even though he passes all the tests, he’s laughed at and scorned, but he levels the playing field like nobody’s business. He does everything better than anyone else, but it doesn’t matter because nobody will give a job to a Chinese. Later, he finds himself with a job offer: He will rustle cattle, but it’s not what he expects. On his first day of work, he rustles a herd of Mexican “peons” who have been bought and paid for as slaves, but when the slave traders massacre the whole bunch of them instead of allowing them to escape, Chin turns against his employers and saves one of the slaves. This puts him in the crosshairs of a wealthy man named Spencer, who despises the fact that Chin has made a fool of him and his men. Spencer sends his small army after him to kill him, but Chin is way more a formidable man than he could’ve imagined. When Chin is tied up and thrown into a bullring, Chin not only kills the bull with one devastating kick, but he bounds out of the ring and escapes, prompting Spencer to hire the toughest of the toughest bounty hunters to track him down and kill him. When the bounty hunters (one of whom is played by Klaus Kinski) come to track him, they’re all in for the surprise of their lives when Chin turns out to be the toughest of them all!
A spaghetti western cross-pollinated with a chop-sockie kung fu movie, Shanghai Joe is a pretty great martial arts western hybrid with a hero who is literally better than everyone else in every single thing he does. He jumps higher, plays cards (shuffling like a magician) and poker better, using every weapon like a master, kicks harder, runs faster, and is wiser and smarter than every opponent he faces. He’s like Chiun in The Destroyer book series that became Remo Williams: The Adventure Begins. He’s just a complete untouchable master, which makes for some hilarious encounters in the movie. Every white racist in the movie gets humiliated and humbled by him. The movie is surprisingly gory too, so fans of several different genres will enjoy the heck out of it. The score by Bruno Nicolai sounds awfully familiar, though, and I would almost swear that it’s ripped off from another movie. From director Mario Caiano.
Cauldron recently released a great looking Blu-ray edition of Shanghai Joe featuring a new 2K restoration. It certainly looks a heck of a lot better than my big box VHS tape of the film! There’s a new commentary, an interview, a visual essay, a trailer, and an image gallery. There’s also a two-disc deluxe edition that comes with the CD soundtrack and a poster.
