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1—Ang Panday
English Translation: The Blacksmith
Year of Release: 1980
Director: Directors: Fernando Poe Jr. [as Ronwaldo Reyes]
Screenwriter: Fred Navarro
Adapted from komiks by Carlo J. Caparas
Producer: FPJ Productions
Cast: Fernando Poe Jr., Max Alvarado, Lito Anzures, Bentot Jr., Liz Alindogan, Paquito Diaz, Victor Bravo, Vic Varrion, Martha Sevilla, Bert Olivar, Max Laurel
Virtuous blacksmith Flavio is forced to brand innocent children as an order from Lizardo, the evil ruler of the land. One night, a meteor lands near Flavio’s house and is turned by the blacksmith into a dagger that has special powers. This prompts Flavio, his young ward Lando, his elderly mentor Tata Temio, and Temio’s granddaughter Monica, on a quest to stop Lizardo’s reign of terror.
2—Pagbabalik ng Panday
English Translation: Return of the Blacksmith
Year of Release: 1981
Director: Directors: Fernando Poe Jr. [as Ronwaldo Reyes]
Screenwriter: Tommy C. David
Adapted from the komiks Ang Panday by Carlo J. Caparas
Producer: FPJ Productions
Cast: Fernando Poe Jr., Max Alvarado, Tina Revilla, Lito Anzures, Bentot Jr., Rosemarie Gil, Lillian Laing, Jose Romulo, Ernie David
Lizardo, vanquished in the first film, is revived by black magic and seeks to recover his dominion. Flavio, disturbed by a Black Book prophecy that he will be defeated by a masked warrior, hears about undead corpses terrorizing other towns and seeks them out to provide assistance. On the way, he is overpowered by a monster and awakens in the company of the flying villagers who saved him. He learns that the disturbances are caused not by Lizardo but by another villain, Wanda.
3—Ang Panday: Ikatlong Yugto
English Translation: The Blacksmith: Third Installment
Year of Release: 1982
Director: Directors: Fernando Poe Jr. [as Ronwaldo Reyes]
Screenwriter: Fred Navarro
Adapted from the komiks Ang Panday by Carlo J. Caparas
Producer: FPJ Productions
Cast: Fernando Poe Jr., Dang Cecilio, Max Alvarado, Lito Anzures, Bentot Jr., Monette Garcia, Eddie Gicoso, Pons de Guzman, Romy Guarin, Eric Navarro
A destructive alien lands on earth and wreaks havoc on rural villages. Flavio has to resolve his romantic issues, since two women have fallen for him yet the Black Book has said that he should never marry in order to maintain his role as heroic savior. While searching for lost children, Flavio meets and is slain by the masked warrior, as predicted in the previous film. But his spirit now resides in the Black Book and his allies are able to use it to restore him to life.
4—Ang Panday IV
English Translation: The Blacksmith IV
Year of Release: 1984
Director: Directors: Fernando Poe Jr. [as Ronwaldo Reyes]
Screenwriter: Fred Navarro
Adapted from the komiks Ang Panday by Carlo J. Caparas
Producer: FPJ Productions
Cast: Fernando Poe Jr., Marianne de la Riva, Max Alvarado, Lito Anzures, Bentot Jr., Eddie Infante, Mario Escudero, Robert Rivera, Monette de Guzman, Ruben Ramos, Aida Pedido, Rowell Santiago
An adventurer, Don Cirilo, seeks to prove the existence of evil spirits and accidentally releases a malevolent one—which possesses and resurrects Lizardo. Lando, now grown-up, courts a woman who turns out to be a manananggal (self-segmenting viscera feeder). Flavio is able to transform his sword into a shield via the power of a mysterious asteroid, but his group stumble on an opening that transports them into a new dimension where nightmares can become reality. Upon escaping from this place, he seeks a final showdown with Lizardo.
How ironic that Fernando Poe Jr.’s directorial legacy should be maintained primarily by a quadrilogy of children’s fantasy outings. The less-productive fantasy of what he could have come up with if he had survived the trauma of necessarily dirty electoral politics should not detract us from recognizing that Flavio was the character that his self-conscious, easily parodied, spare and severe performance style matched perfectly. And before we lament that the series slipped irretrievably downhill after Poe had let go of it, we might derive some comfort in the awareness that George Lucas may have continued to hold on to his Star Wars prerogative for a spell, but that never stopped the smart-kid franchise from turning into a cineastic nightmare either. The Poe-directed cycle fares better, with an utter lack of pretension as well as careful attention to pre-digital special effects, during the moment when the expertise of local practitioners was at its height. FPJ supposedly insisted on upgrading Carlo J. Caparas’s realist komiks source to include fantasy and sci-fi elements, and the gamble certainly paid off beyond merely financial terms. Poe was similarly canny enough to start modestly and build up the sequels in increasingly ambitious terms. Although the heroics are unexpectedly old-fashioned, adults need not cringe, inasmuch as the series provides a decent share of humor, scares, strong-women roles, even a few queer-positive turns. Poe’s Panday legacy persisted after he let go of it, with actors-turned-politicians laying claim to the film character, plus a number of television series, including local TV’s first animated one; worth tracking down would be the first non-Poe take-off, Peque Gallaga and Lore Reyes’s Dugo ng Panday (Blood of the Blacksmith, a.k.a. The Blacksmith’s Legacy, 1993), starring the controversial senator Ramon “Bong” Revilla Jr. as the son of Flavio.
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Ang Maestro
Additional Language: Spanish
English Translation: The Master
Year of Release: 1981
Director: Directors: Fernando Poe Jr. [as Ronwaldo Reyes]
Screenwriter: Fred Navarro
From a story by Carlo J. Caparas
Producer: FPJ Productions
Cast: Fernando Poe Jr., Chat Silayan, Mario Escudero, Romy Diaz, Paquito Diaz, Jose Romulo, Mario Escudero, Bert Olivar, Max Laurel, Nello Nayo, Ruben Ramos, Edmund Cupcupin Don Pepot, Don Umali, Lorie Mumar, Carlos de Leon, Michael Pigar, Lito Anzures
Don Roque extracts a promise from swordsperson Maestro Carpio never to instruct any other trainee except his son, Ignacio de la Vega. But that night Hernan de Zuñiga, son of Carpio’s late friend Don Alfredo, arrives with a note from his father requesting that Carpio ensure his son’s expertise in swordfighting. Trained in secret, Hernan grows up to learn that his sister Carmen was abducted by Don Roque and imprisoned in a dungeon. While searching for her, he runs into Amanda, who’s studying swordfighting so she can challenge Ignacio to a duel to avenge her brother.
To say that Fernando Poe Jr. broke out in 1981 as an outstanding director-actor is high praise enough, with the best entry in his Panday series coming out the same year, although certain still-existing work from Gerardo de Leon, Gregorio Fernandez, and Ramon A. Estella from the First Golden Age exceed most work by their contemporaries and can also successfully challenge anything made by FPJ. Yet Da King deserves to be honored for the additional function that no other Filipino auteur excelled in—not (far and away) as performer, but as film producer. Toward this end, his readiness to indulge in syncretistic modes of production can be seen as a means of appealing to the widest possible reach, although it would be unfair and inaccurate to conclude that he repudiated all logic or tradition in his output. Ang Maestro, as an instance, draws mainly from the koboy films (the Pinas counterpart of spaghetti Westerns) that enabled him and his rival-cum-ally, Joseph Estrada, to rule the local box-office during most of the 1960s. The admixture of elements—drawn from such sources as the costume drama, swordfight epic, social realism (with both the hero’s family’s impoverished circumstances as well as the leading lady’s Romani-esque affiliation[1]), and revenge narrative—resolves in a sui-generis product that may be easy for aesthetes to resist, though fortunately movie fans will always be more receptive.
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Ang Dalubhasa
English Translation: The Expert
Year of Release: 2000
Director: Directors: Fernando Poe Jr. [as Ronwaldo Reyes]
Screenwriters: Pablo S. Gomez & Manny R. Buising
From a story by Fernando Poe Jr.
Producer: Millennium Cinema
Cast: Fernando Poe Jr., Nanette Medved, Maritoni Fernandez, Cris Villonco, Paquito Diaz, Ricardo Cepeda, Berting Labra, Bob Soler, Romy Diaz, Zandro Zamora, Johnny Vicar, Marco Polo Garcia, Dindo Arroyo, Gerald Ejercito, R.G. Gutierrez, Bong Francisco, Manjo del Mundo, Nonoy de Guzman, Tony Carreon, Marita Zobel, Maita Sanchez, Cecile Buensuceso, Bon Vibar, Dedes Whitakeer, Dante Castro, Jesette Rospero, Naty Santiago, Nanding Fernandez
Dr. Jaime de Guzman, a military neurosurgeon, suffers survivor’s guilt when his family gets killed during a burglary. He tries to start anew in Cebu with a fiancée and gets attached to her younger sister, Sheila. When the latter requires a sensitive operation, he volunteers for the job, but the girl dies after the procedure. To evade the blame and condemnation heaped on him by Sheila’s family, he flees to Manila and lives anonymously in a slum area. In volunteering to assist in a community clinic, evidence of his skill is discovered by Connie, one of the doctors, with whom he also develops a closeness. When a renegade military gang hides out in the neighborhood and requires his expertise, he recognizes the patient he has to heal and realizes that he has to resolve his past issues.
In terms of the genre practice from which he rarely strayed, Ang Dalubhasa was the last serious Fernando Poe Jr. film and may safely be regarded as the valedictory he unintentionally bequeathed. Its appearance though was so left-field that it barely got noticed except for his usual loyal patrons. The key to its achievement lies in how FPJ opted to confront the one property that distinguished (though “disadvantaged” might be more appropriate) his persona from all other major action stars in the country: his characters’ tendency to aspire toward elite respectability. Unfortunately for progressive-minded observers, he didn’t aim to deconstruct this property this time out; that might have arrived in a later film summation, if he’d managed to survive the soul-crushing consequence of a nasty presidential campaign. The measure of his creative restlessness lay in how he deployed aspiration in order to develop a narrative arc more attuned to his old and weary bearing. Hence aficionados might not be surprised in how regularly his character requires assistance from the allies who accompany him, but most may be astonished in realizing, in retrospect, that he’d managed to avoid staging action sequences for most of the film. Not that he hadn’t tried out something similar before: his lead role in Eddie Romero’s Aguila (1980) was epically complex enough to demand a lot more dramatic highlights from him than he ever tackled before or after. But where Romero wasted the potential of the material on already-crumbling Cold War ideals, Poe invests Ang Dalubhasa with a renewed fondness for the common people along with his usual bemusement and respect for strong women and feminized men. A final sequence where this agglomeration of Others is mingled with performers who usually get cast as villains in his own films, all awaiting his heroic return by gambling to pass the time away, provides enough subtle transgression to make Poe’s untimely departure afterward a grievous loss for Philippine popular culture.
Note
[1] The Sama-Bajau, who inhabit a number of countries in maritime Southeast Asia including the Philippines, are also called “sea gypsies” because of their nomadic lifestyle. They are not, however, Roma descendants, nor are any other ethnic group in the country.
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