The One-Armed Swordsman
Directed by Cheh Chang
Written by Cheh Chang and Kuang Ni
Hong Kong/1967
Shaw Brothers
First viewing/Amazon Prime
[box] Shih Yi-fei: Pei, don’t worry. So what if you cut off his arm? He’s not coming back anyway. We’ll just never bring it up in front of Sifu.[/box]
Japan has its blind swordsman Zatoichi, to whom I have formed some sort of addiction. The logical next step is Hong Kong’s one-armed swordsman. And a worthy and extremely entertaining step it was!
A servant saves the life of the master of a sword fighting school and loses his own in the process. In gratitude, the master takes his son Fang Kang (Jimmy Wang Yu) on as a student. The other students look down on him although he is superior in every way. The master’s daughter is secretly in love with him. She challenges him to a duel – which he insists must be hand-to-hand – and she slices off his arm in a fit of anger.
Kang flees the scene and is rescued by a farm girl with a complicated past. He falls in love with her but she wants him to put down the sword. He agrees but enemies abound and honor and loyalty keep drawing him back into the fray.
It must have caught me on exactly the right day. I thought this was a complete gas! In a movie full of colorful costumes and sets, wildly dramatic music, histrionic acting, and plenty of wire-work assisted sword play, the action never stops. We also get a love triangle that doesn’t slow the momentum down. Recommended to fans of this kind of thing.
The version available on Amazon Prime is dubbed into English by some fairly stiff voice actors. Might have been even better in the original Cantonese.
