The One-Armed Swordsman

Fang Gang is raised at a fighting school. His father was a servant there and died protecting the master; to repay the debt the master took the boy in. The other students do not accept him. The master's daughter mocks him and one night there is a fight. She draws her sword and cuts off his right arm. The young man escapes and is found at a farm. A woman heals him. He has half a sword manual; part of the book has burned and only the techniques that can be done with one hand remain. Chang Cheh directs. Jimmy Wang Yu plays Fang Gang; Lisa Chiao Chiao and Tien Feng are in the cast. It is a Hong Kong production made at the Shaw Brothers studio. It is cited as the first production to take more than a million Hong Kong dollars at the local box office. The narrative shifted the axis of fight films, which until then had been dominated by women protagonists; a male centred, bloody and hard wave followed in later years. Chang Cheh is counted the founder of that style and opened a line of his own in fight cinema. The matter it treats is debt and belonging; Fang Gang wants to leave the school and the school will not let him. The fights are short and hard; showing blood was unusual for the period. Two sequels followed and the character was used again and again in Hong Kong cinema. Its limit is production; the acting is flat, the plot simple and the women thinly written. Who it is for: viewers who like martial arts cinema and Shaw Brothers productions. Who it is not for: the script is weak, the representation a problem, and the violence explicit.