Zhang Che highly admires the traditional male friendship of the "Taoyuan Jieyi", in his films, masculinity and male friendship are the eternal core, and female characters are usually just embellishments, even dispensable.
Trailer for Two Heroes
The trailer for the movie "Two Heroes" reads:
"A purely male film directed by Zhang Che, the founder of Chinese male cinema", "There is no woman in the whole film", "There is a long list of male names...", "Everyone is young and strong, everyone is brave and fierce"!
These slogans now seem a bit inexplicable and cute, but they embody the core features of Zhang Che's films - the strong promotion of male power and the deliberate dilution of women.
Even the people walking the streets are all grandfathers
Zhang Che's gender concept is more conservative, he believes that women's strength is not enough, not enough to show the charm of martial arts in the movie, women need to be protected, should not be like men throwing their heads and spilling blood.
Zheng Peipei in his youth
Zheng Peipei, the Shaw martial arts actress at that time, once learned Zhang Che's conservatism and stubbornness - it is said that when filming "Golden Swallow", Zhang Che arranged for two other chivalrous warriors to jump out of the window, but arranged for Zheng Peipei to walk through the door.
Zheng Peipei and Zhang Che theory: Why can't you jump out of the window?
Zhang Che said that you are a girl and it is not appropriate to jump out of the window.
Zheng Peipei in the heroic and sassy Zheng Pei in "The Drunken Man"
Recalling this matter many years later, Zheng Peipei still has a lot of criticism of Zhang Che. At that time, Zheng Nüxia had just participated in Hu Jinquan's "The Drunken Man", and in The film directed by Hu Da, girls could let go of their hands and feet to dance swords and jump over the wall and jump out of the window at will, without worrying about the problem of "should it or not".
"Revenge" is the inspiration for Li Bihua's writing of "Farewell to the Overlord"
With such a "blatant" preference for sons and daughters, Zhang Che's male films still attract a large number of fanatical female fans, including Yi Shu, Li Bihua, Xu Anhua and other female Wenqing.
The three brothers in "The Thorn Horse"
One of the important reasons is that Zhang Che photographed the brotherhood between men and men very beautifully, and the innocent and romantic atmosphere emanating from the bloody violence is that you can't stop the ceiling on the screen, and the blood plasma splashes bucket after bucket.
Zhang Che gave Jiang David Dillon a play
Zhang Che once said in the article: "People have no advantage of minions, since ancient times, they need to hunt and forage in a collective way to fight against beasts, and China has many chaotic worlds, men must unite and help each other, teach morality, and establish friendship in order to survive, so people advocate the three knots of Taoyuan, which is the highest ideal of men."
Dillon and David Ginger
Speaking of male friendship, we have to mention Dillon and David Jiang, good brothers of more than forty years ago. As the most shining pair of Gemini stars under Zhang Che and the most perfect interpreter of male friendship in Zhang Che's films, Di Jiang and Di Jiang have cooperated in more than thirty films, and have staged one scene after another of brotherly love scenes in different eras and in different identities.