1975 – Sleeping Dragon (Sultan Films/Emperor Films International)
[A Filipino-Hong Kong co-production filmed in the Philippines, Philippines release date 24th April 1975]
Directors Ishmael Bernal, Jimmy L. Pascual Story Ophelia San Juan Screenplay Wilfred D. Nolledo Producers Ophelia San Juan, Elizabeth Pascual Executive Producer Jimmy L. Pascual Cinematography Chris Chang Music Lucio D. San Pedro
Cast Raymond Lui [Shing-Gung] (Ricardo "Carding" Lung Guevarra), Lotis Key (Maria Linda), Eddie Garcia (Don Andres), Charlie Davao, Chan Ling-Wai, Lou Salvador Jr (Carding's Filipino Friend), Johnny Delgado (Carding's Filipino Friend), Joe de Castro (Carding’s Filipino Friend), Maricru del Gallego, Greg Lozano, Lee Chiu, Lau Jun-Fai, Danny Chow Yun-Gin [as Chow Kin], Lau Chong, Carlos Padilla Jr, Lucita Soriano, Tony Carreon [as Tony Carrion], Jose Garcia, Jose Villafranca, Alfonso Carvajal, Paolo Baron, Philip Coo, Jun Garcia, Paquito Salcedo, SOS Daredevils, Bayanihan Philippine Dance Co & Rondalla, Georgie Quizon, Manok, Penggot
KUNG FU/PERIOD DRAMA
NOTES by Andrew Leavold: I have been searching for two decades for a copy of this film and am yet to find trace of a single film print, video tape or digital transfer. If anyone can help me out, I would be immensely grateful!
A co-production between Jimmy L. Pascual’s Emperor Films International, a Filipino producer based in Hong Kong from the early Seventies until around the time of this release, and Filipino company Sultan Films credited to Ophelia San Juan – a writer turned producer (Ophelia San Juan Productions) – and Elizabeth Pascual, believed to be a Philippines-based relative of Jimmy’s. From all evidence available, it was Sultan Films’ only production; within the year, Jimmy Pascual had returned to the Philippines and his Emperor Films concentrated on the local market.
Sleeping Dragon is remarkable as co-director Ishmael Bernal’s solitary export title – the future National Artist had already helmed a number of critically-acclaimed but commercially unsuccessful films in various genres (action, comedy, fantasy). Although Bernal shares screen credit with Emperor Films’ Jimmy L. Pascual, we can only assume that Pascual’s directorial input was minimal, and the glowing Pilipino Express review reprinted below fails to even mention Pascual once.
From its historical sweep and attention to detail, Emperor Films clearly had high hopes for international sales, yet I can find very little evidence of theatrical releases outside of the Philippines, Hong Kong, and Pascual’s familiar hunting grounds (the Filipino diaspora in Hawaii, Guam, and the Continental US). Perhaps the kung fu market was on the decline; and although the subject must have held considerable appeal to its Chinese-Filipino producers and co-director, maybe the film was too “Filipino” for a global audience. Sleeping Dragon was certainly a disappointment for Jimmy Pascual, and one of the main reasons why he left Hong Kong and made smaller films for a Tagalog audience.
The Wilfredo D. Nolledo screenplay of Ophelia San Juan’s story, Sleeping Dragon, has been translated into an outstanding film by Director Ishmael Bernal with artistic evocations of the historical period – 1603 – in which the story, that of the events that lead to the first Parian or Chinese rebellion in the Philippines, occurred.
Yet, aside from its historical values, Sleeping Dragon utilizes popular materials such as kung fu and arnis de mano, and also romantic love, to reach a mass-oriented entertainment level. And by this method, presumably, put across to a wider audience some political values that belong more to a Rizal novel than to a standard Filipino movie.
In this case, however, Sleeping Dragon is not a standard Filipino movie. It is Philippine cinema that rightly belongs to the concept of culture that the New Society is energetically developing in all the arts, more eminently in music, the dance and theatrical stage than in the mass medium of the cinema, which is more complex as an art form.
Briefly, the story of Sleeping Dragon concerns the struggles of a Crisostomo Ibarra-Elias synthesis of a Chinese-Filipino hero, Ricardo Lung Gueverra (Raymond Lui) to relieve the oppression suffered by Chinese and Filipinos from the Spanish colonizers during the first century of the Spanish occupation of the Philippines through heavy taxation and forced labor. There is a love story, a triangle actually, between Carding (as Lung is called in the story) and Maria Linda (Lotis Key), daughter of a Laguna town alcade, and the Spanish alguacil mayor Don Andres (Eddie Garcia). Maria Linda is the antithesis of the proverbial Maria Clara: she is headstrong, wilful and, allegedly typical of the “indios” that the early Spanish colonizers encountered – not demure, and far from being subservient to the politics of their elders.
Sleeping Dragon is well-researched into the history of the Parian rebellion of 1603: there are the Three Mandarins who came to Manila from Cathay, ostensibly to look for the fabled Mountain of Gold (Paracale, possibly) but were suspected by the Spanish governor, Acuna, of espying on the fortifications and Spanish defenses in Intramuros, and the Chinese Governor Eng Kang who counted the number of his adherents to the fight for justice and freedom by the quantity of needles handed secretly to him by the Chinese residents of Manila and surrounding provinces.
The film also notably presents, side by side with kung fu, the Philippines’ own martial arts, the kali system of fighting. This is eminently and, we have to admit it, gloriously presented in Sleeping Dragon by a trio of Filipino actors, Johnny Delgado, Lou Salvador Jr and the late Joe de Castro. Delgado uses a prototype of the modern Batangueno knife, and he uses this weapon adroitly. Salvador practiced the art of arnis fighting, according to the credits, under Ernesto Presas, a sergeant in the Philippine Air Force who took time out to train Salvador in the intricacies of the ornate and lethal art, De Castro employs a pair of tui-fa (handle), a weapon introduced in the Philippines by the early Okinawan-Japanese settlers.
The Filipino system of martial arts supports the kung fu of Lui, and the sequences of fighting that punctuate the romantic and political dramatic situations in Sleeping Dragon point to a colorful Philippine past that might well revive the interest in Oriental martial arts, this time specifically on the Philippine kali system.
Sleeping Dragon is also notable for its original musical scoring, including the main title music that is symphonic, organic to the theme of the picture, and Filipino in idiom, composed and directed by Lucio D. San Pedro.
But the overall excellent quality of Sleeping Dragon, which involves a mixed group of Filipino, Hong Kong and Japanese players and technicians, can be easily attributed to the persipicacious direction of Ishmael Bernal, who handles crowd scenes effectively and whose training in the nouvelle vague cinema of the French is put into intelligent use in this entertaining, yet artistic, film.
Charlie Davao
PHILIPPINES – 24th April 1975
.jpg)
GUAM – 9th to 15th April 1976 (Hafa Adai 2, Tamuning); December 1976 (Cinema, Tamuning, as the second feature to a Jimmy Wang Yu film)
.jpg)
USA - 29th June 1976 (Tampa, Florida); March 1977 and June 1978 (Miami)
- Trailer (mp4)
No comments:
Post a Comment