The One-Armed Swordsman (1967)

The One Armed Swordsman (1967)

Director: Chang Cheh

Starring: Jimmy Wang Yu

One-armed and dangerous.

Fang Kang’s father was a lowly servant, but one who heroically died in battle to protect his master Qi Ru Feng from bandits. For his bravery Feng raised Kang as a son and trained him in martial arts. Qi Ru Feng’s other students and his spoiled daughter Qi Pei-Er, who secretly has feelings for Kang, took umbrage to what they perceived was preferential treatment to the servant’s son before Pei takes the whole ‘Treat them mean; keep them keen’ dating advice way too far and cuts of his freaking arm! Now months later Feng’s temple is under attack by the evil Long-Armed Devil and Kang puts his grievances aside to help his adopted father figure and becomes the one-armed swordsman.

So here is our second Shaw Brothers movie and this is the first time I’ll be talking about a movie from director Chang Cheh and star Jimmy Wang Yu who’ll be cropping up a few more times down the road. Chang Cheh would go on to direct future influential movies such as Five Deadly Venoms and Wang Yu would go on to star in a few more martial arts films where funnily enough he loses his arm again. Careless. But this is where both of them made their name and the one-armed swordsman character made Taiwanese Jimmy Wang Yu a big star in Hong Kong with the movie breaking box office records there.

Like Come Drink with Me the first time I had seen this film was as part of the reviews for this blog and therefore I am watching it with modern eyes and instinctively comparing it to later martial arts films rather than view it in context of when it was made. This is obviously unfair as the choreography, not to mention the budget, in modern movies such as The Protector and The Raid franchise are on a much grander scale. So the best thing to do would be to hold it up against King Hu’s Come Drink with Me and then see how it compares. I enjoyed Hu’s 1966 wuxia movie and gave it 7/10 in my earlier review, but is The One-Armed Swordsman Better? Well yes and no.

My biggest problem with the earlier film was in the editing department with the movie’s constant use of jump cuts which especially marred the climactic battle. I didn’t notice any jarring cuts this time so that was a huge improvement although I still wasn’t too fond of the camerawork if I am honest. Yes there are no jump cuts here that I noticed but there was a shaking camera that made some scenes hard to make out. It’s not the infamous shaky cam that plagues modern cinema or nearly as bad as a Taken film and it was clearly not done on purpose but it’s notable enough to point out. There is one shot for instance at Feng’s temple where we see him and his men sitting around a table and the camera zooms out but as it does so the frame notably drops a few inches before it is raised again. While that mistake is not at a crucial time, and to be honest is quite amusing, some of the ones during the final battles are really bad.

The final battle has real pacing issues for me too. Towards the end Fang battles the bad guy’s brother, and second in command, Smiling Tiger (Tang TI), but just when the fight is about to start we cut away to see a confrontation between the main villain Long Armed Devil (Yeung Chi-hing) and Qi Wu Feng (Tien Feng). Now I don’t have a problem with the confrontation on its own and it had to happen for plot purposes but for the whole time it was going on I was just desperate for the movie to get back to the Kang/Tiger fight. I don’t understand why they didn’t either have that fight before we see Long Armed Devil meet Feng or have that confrontation take place prior to the battle between Kang and Tiger and switch back and forth between both martial arts fight, but what we have here just doesn’t work. I have watched the Smiling Tiger/Kang fight twice now and I am still unsure as to just what happened at the end of it and don’t think it was filmed or edited very well.

 I also found the chorography in the fights was just not that good. Come Drink with Me’s weren’t great either but in that you at least got a few fairly long takes where Golden Swallow got to show off her balletic swordplay. Sadly you never do get anything to write-home about here. I did like the gimmick where the villains have created these swords that have a locking mechanism built in that allows them to trap the blades of their enemies which is pretty cool if a little silly. The bad guys themselves weren’t very interesting with Smiling Tiger and his constant laugh really getting on my nerves. I know the laughing is kind of implied with the name but that doesn’t mean it isn’t any ess annoying. I didn’t like the villain in Come Drink with Me either but I hated him a good way and wanted him to die, whereas here I just didn’t want Tiger on screen. Interestingly there was a character in the earlier movie called Smiling Tiger too and that person was a villain also. Maybe the Chinese just don’t like tigers? Might explain why they are doing their best to kill them off in the name of “medicine”.

The main villain Long-Armed Devil was a bit better than Smiling Tiger actually. Not because of his character, which was still wafer thin, but I liked how many different weapons he had. There is a long whip that presumably lends him his name but if that is chop by a blade he has these javelins attached to his back. If he runs out of those he still has his blade-locking sword and even a dagger too. I really loved the variety and he kind of reminded me of an ancient Chinese Boba Fett with all the gadgets. One thing I didn’t get was that for most of the movie his face is obscured before being revealed in the final act. It builds up a lot of mystery and intrigue making me think that it might be someone we had seen earlier in the movie and it was going to be a big twist, but it was a new character making me wonder why the bothered with the tease. At least when the James Bond pulled that trick with the leader of SPECTRE they had Blofeld have a hideous scar, but here it was nothing and it was very strange.

 I have been quite negative in my review this far but I haven’t even gotten to my least favourite part and that was the romance. After Kang Fang’s arm is cut off he is rescued and cared for by female farmer Xiao Man (Lisa Chaio Chaio). Unsurprisingly the two eventually fall in love and yeah, I don’t buy it. After Kang has been saved we go forwards for an undisclosed length of time and suddenly they are in love. We never see them fall for each other or learn why it just happens. Xaio Man is also such a boring character and while they try and give her depth with a backstory it just doesn’t work aside from the unintentionally hilarious explanation as to why she just to happens possess as book with one-armed sword fighting techniques. She’s also a constant drag with her hatred of martial arts and her nagging Kang about giving them up. Again going back to Come Drink with Me that movie had a main female and male character but didn’t feel the need to have an out of place love story in it which is to that movie’s credit. I get that they wanted the One-Armed Swordsman to leave this life behind at the film’s end and so needed the love interest but they could have gone about it in a much better way or given Xiao more depth.

To make matters worse the film tries to complicate things further by including a love-triangle with Qi-Per Er (Angela Pan) being dragged into the mix. Fang Kang at one point rescues Qi-Per Er from a couple of guys who were seemingly about to rape her and Xiao Man gets jealous of this and it’s unbearable. Qi Per-Er after her rescue then starts trying to seduce Kang and saying she wants him and I was just sitting there staring at the screen like “Bitch please, you cut of his freaking arm!” Yeah she is gorgeous and high-born compared to the plain-Jane lowly famer but come- on you cut of his arm! But she acts like that act wasn’t a big deal and even at the end her father seems angry that Kang doesn’t stay with his martial arts school which again makes me irate at his character. Your daughter chopped his arm off and he still saved her honour and your life you ungrateful cretin! Qi-Per Er even tries to justify what she did because Kang was arrogant. Wow. Even Kill Bill’s Bill would think that was one crazy overreaction.

So what did I like? Well Jimmy Wang Yu himself. I thought he was perfectly cast for this role. His eyes are just so full of intensity and rage and he’s totally believable. He also has that Clint Eastwood quality to him where he can convey a lot of emotion without saying anything. His character was very enjoyable too and while he was a tad under the thumb of his controlling girlfriend I liked him always choosing to do the right thing despite what she suggested. As cheesy as it was I also loved that his father’s broken sword he kept in remembrance of him turns out to be the perfect sized weapon for one-armed swordplay. There were some awesome moments too such as when one of the would be rapists, who had mocked his disability earlier, comes at him with a knife and Kang chops his hand off and the blade flies through the air impaling itself on a post with the severed hand still clenched around it. There was also a moment where several guys are coming at him and he just sits down to drink his wine while fighting them off. There was quite some competition to the kick-ass moment in this movie and as this is sort of an origin story I am tempted to review the sequel which I imagine can now just jump straight into some awesome action scenes.

One thing I did not think I would be complementing before watching this film would be how beautiful the scene where he loses his arm is, but no, it really was quite stunning. Yes it was ridiculous how little blood there was, and the restraint really surprised me, but chosen to film a scene which could have been horrific in a forest with falling snow turned such an act of barbarity into something quite poetic. I also suspect Kill Bill’s swordfight between Uma Thurman and Lucy Liu owes something to this. Of course having such a stunning scene so early on does make me wish that the rest of the film looked as nice or that the other sets had as much imagination put into them as this one did. But if they wanted one scene to stand out the most, they sure chose the right one. Come Drink with Me’s best looking scene was the confrontation at the monastery and relative to the plot it wasn’t an especially important one so kudos to Chang Cheh for making the most essential scene in this film, the moment where Kang becomes the One-Armed Swordsman, so memorable.

If I sounded overly negative when talking about the One-Armed Swordsman then that’s a shame as despite all my complaints it’s a good film. It’s just that this had all the potential to be an incredible movie. I’ll give it the same score as Come Drink with Me but I think I slightly prefered the earlier movie.

7/10- A highly influential martial arts movie that largely still holds up today.

Best quote: “Don’t you know I’ve always loved you?” “Loved me? You always did your best to torture me! You cut off my arm!” “Only because you were cold and arrogant.” Wow. Just wow.

Best scene: Our hero loses his arm in the falling snow.

Kick-ass moment: Fang Kang catches a thrown dart in his teeth!

Next time on A Bloody Tomorrow we go from a snowy forest in Hong Kong to a Japanese volcano, where we at last get to see the face of a certain white feline enthusiast.