The Chinese Boxer

Japanese karate fighters attack a martial arts school and kill the master and most of the students. The one surviving student withdraws to the mountain and trains for months: he learns the iron palm, hardens his hands in hot sand, and gets used to the cold in the snow. Then he comes back to the town. Jimmy Wang Yu wrote it, directed it and played the lead. The production is Shaw Brothers. Its place in film history is this: Hong Kong martial arts cinema had until then been built on swordplay. This film put the weapon down and made unarmed fighting the centre, opening the way for the kung fu wave that followed. It was made before Bruce Lee's first Hong Kong film. The narrative is built on the opposition between a Chinese fighter and Japanese karate men, a pattern that was repeated often in the popular cinema of the period. The fight choreography is simple by present standards; the speed is low, the blows come one at a time and the cutting is broken. Jimmy Wang Yu had already become a major star with One Armed Swordsman and moved to directing with this film. Who it is for: anyone curious about the origins of kung fu cinema and viewers of Shaw Brothers. Who it is not for: the script is thin, the characters are types, and the fighting is primitive next to the work of the following decade.