Rating: 3.5/5
Cult Movie Challenge 2017 | 4/52 | Shaw Brothers
Master Sung Wu-Yang walks the temple grounds when a gang of fighters surrounds him. Although he is a pacifist in principle, he doesn’t understand their intent but fights them nonetheless.
Chih-Hao, a disciple of Master Sung, receives a letter that Ta-Ming is passing through. He shares it with Master Sung’s daughter and Chih-Hao’s love interest, Ying Ying. They hear the fight outside and come to Wu-Yang’s rescue. The fighters scatter, but Wu-Yang cannot take them on.
Ta-Ming arrives, and Wu-Yang marvels at Ta-Ming’s master, Shen Chin-Pei. Chih-Hao believes Ta-Ming will be ready for the tournament at this rate. Recognizing that his age affects his ability to train Chih-Hao, Wu-Yang sends Chih-Hao to study under Master Shen. If Chih-Hao can win the tournament, he will also win Ying Ying’s hand in marriage.
The film follows Chih-Hao’s journey through its ups and downs. As a beginner, he must start from the bottom.
The action takes a long time to get going—we get plenty of fights, but it takes an hour before they turn from petty brawls into something with consequences. Once it does, though, this becomes quite fun.
Martial arts aficionados will balk at the fighting here—the poses are for visual purposes, not for any practical use. While I appreciate “legitimate” fighting choreography, I’m more interested in visually striking fights than practical ones.
This film was the first Hong Kong film to top the US box office, paving the way for Bruce Lee’s Fists of Fury and kicking off the kung fu craze of the 1970s and 1980s. If you’ve heard the genre term “chopsocky,” this film inspired Variety to coin the term—not disparagingly but as a way of referring to the variety of martial arts films coming out of Hong Kong.
I was surprised to learn that Shaw Brothers, a HK company, made movies primarily in Mandarin. Historically, however, this makes sense—their primary audience was the Nanyang (南洋) market, which spoke Mandarin. After the Chinese Civil War and the establishment of the PRC, this market relied entirely on HK for Mandarin films.
Wang Chin-Feng.