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This is another good martial arts movie from Golden Harvest's first year of production. I give all the credit to the action directors and some actors. Three action directors are listed. First there is Han Ying-Chieh. He is the big boss, really, from the Bruce Lee movie "The Big Boss" he played the big boss. Also listed is Sammo Hung who would have been a mere 19 years old at the time. I don't know who gets credit for the fight choregraphy for the blind old lady but that was a masterpiece. Her fight sequences had everything, action, fun, and it was believable.

Chang Yi started as an actor with no martial arts experience for Shaw Brothers and his first lead there was in "King Cat". Clearly this man was practicing martial arts diligently over the next four years. He has the moves and stance of someone of first degree black belt by this movie. Plus, he can do a forward flip as good as any stunt man.

Another excellent actor is Shih Chun who first appeared in "Dragon Inn". This actor was one of the best and I am always surprised that he acted in only 26 movies. He has a few lifetime achievement awards and the last information I can find on him concerns his attendance at Cannes. Otherwise, there is scant information about him. I can only surmise he was also excellent at money management and those 26 roles provided him with all he needed for a life of security and comfort.

My copy is a strange one and I can't recall how I got it. It is a computer file that plays on a HDTV as widescreen but it is really about 10% cut off on the left side. The subtitles are hard coded and the dialog is German.

This is the good stuff for fans of this genre. I rate it above average and it is on my list to watch again when appropriate. So far I have watched it twice.

THE FAST SWORD (1971), from the then-newly created Golden Harvest Films, is a somewhat cruder, lower-budgeted version of the slicker swordplay films being done at the rival Shaw Bros. studio, but it compensates with an abundance of action and a raw, rough energy made possible by extensive location shooting in Taiwan. It's got ten major fight sequences evenly distributed among its 84 minutes of running time--eleven if you count the last one as two because of the short break in the middle of it when the heroes have to search the woods for their opponent.

The simple plot has to do with a hero, Nan Kung Cheng (Shih Jun), who confronts and kills the returning warlord who had slain his father, blinded his mother, and stole the family's manor 12 years earlier. An agent of the magistrate is sent to arrest Cheng and bring him in for trial. Since the agent, Chief Yen (Chang Yi), is a righteous man, Cheng agrees to go back with him, leaving his mother (Wang Lai) in the care of his sister, Lin Erh (Han Hsiang Chin), an aggressive fighter in her own right who wields a mean whip. The warlord's brother, Tu Lung (Miao Tien), sends a steady stream of bad guys to pursue and try to capture the two heroes. At one point a group descends on the Nan Kung family's farmhouse, capturing the mother and issuing an ultimatum to Cheng through his sister. The blind mother brandishes a heavy walking staff and has a couple of fight scenes of her own, inflicting numerous casualties. It all boils down to a big confrontation at the end between the three heroes (Cheng, Yen, and Lin) and the formidable Tu Lung.

The fight direction is credited to three names, one of whom is Han Ying Chieh, a regular at Golden Harvest in its early years, and another of whom is Sammo Hung, who went on to become a major kung fu star and film director in his own right. (Hung appeared at this year's New York Asian Film Festival on June 25, where I got to see him receive a Lifetime Achievement Award presented by surprise guest Angela Mao.) Hung also appears as one of the warlord's henchmen. The fights are pretty far-fetched, with a lot of slashing, flipping and leaping up and down impossible heights. Heroine Lin uses her whip to snatch hapless thugs and toss them around like rag dolls. But there are a lot of good sword maneuvers, as well as some hand-to-hand combat. Chief Yen has two swords in scabbards that he grips by the handles with the blades down and manages to deftly pull them out and thrust them backwards to dispatch opponents coming from behind. It's all fun to watch and the pace never flags. Most of the fights are filmed outdoors in natural settings.

Chang Yi, who plays Chief Yen, had been a leading man in Shaw Bros. films (THE SILENT SWORDSMAN) before heading over to Golden Harvest for a few years and eventually becoming one of the genre's foremost villains in the later 1970s (EAGLE'S CLAW, CHALLENGE OF DEATH). Shih Jun (Cheng) had been the star of King Hu's A TOUCH OF ZEN, as well as other Hu films, but made few other films in the genre. The female lead here, Han Hsiang Chin, is quite a vigorous action heroine and I'm surprised that I haven't discovered her before. In looking up her films on the Hong Kong Movie Database, I find that I've never seen her before, nor have I ever even heard of her other films, most of which don't sound like kung fu entries. (She resembles Chia Ling, another female star of kung fu films in the 1970s.) Veteran actress Wang Lai plays the blind, stick-fighting mother and of the many films I've seen her in, I believe this is the first in which she participates in full-fledged fight scenes. (Of course, there are dozens of films of hers I haven't yet seen.) The director, Huang Feng, was a mainstay of Golden Harvest and directed nine of Angela Mao's films in the 1970s, including WHEN TAEKWONDO STRIKES.

One disconcerting note, though, is the soundtrack's over-reliance on Dominic Frontiere's theme music for the Clint Eastwood western, HANG 'EM HIGH (1968). It's been ripped off by countless other kung fu films and it's played here over and over and over again.