User reviews

Everyone wants to kill Chung-Hsin Huang because that's their motivation. He wants to kill the man who killed his family, and that's his motivation.Feng Tien, the big, bad villain, wants 3000 taels of silver for killing Huang, because that's his motivation. He's also the guy who killed Huang's family. Got it? There's everything you need to know, or that you find out.

There's not much in the way of character exposition beyond getting these points across, because this is not that sort of movie. Instead, we get right down into action, with Huang killing some random people who want too kill him. Is done with a moving camera, a lot of cuts, and music that suggests Morricone's score for the "Man With No Name" trilogy. There are also references to other violent movies, defending the villagers like The Seven Samurai, or Shane, but not too many; this is not a movie about anything but The Good Guy against The Bad Guys, and there are a lot of bad guys for him to kill, so let's not waste any time.

Looked at in those terms, in the effort to make a competent potboiler, this movie succeeds very well.

Fan Mei-Sheng Fan and his gang seek a master swordsman with a valuable sword. (The so-called value of this sword becomes immediately irrelevant.) They enter one of my favorite sets on the Shaw Brother's outdoor lot - a restaurant or tea house on a lake. Huang Chung-Hsin as Jiang Dan Feng the Magnificent Swordsman sits there but looks like a bum. Fan Mei-Sheng kills three helpless people then the Magnificent Swordsman finally takes action and kills the entire gang. The opening titles roll with a song then to another tea house. At this tea house actor Wei Ping-Ao is telling a story. There is a robbery and a fight starts. This time Magnificent Swordsman steps in to fight before anyone gets killed. After the fight he is followed and ambushed. Wei Ping-Ao, one of the attackers, before dying asks magnificent swordsman to deliver a letter to his sister Xiu Xiu, played by Shu Pei-Pei. There are flashback scenes to establish her character. Magnificent swordsman finds her and tells her the truth. At first she gets all stabby about magnificent swordsman killing her brother but comes to deal with the fact it was self-defense and her brother was a jerk. She bandages where she cut him and the two develop a relationship. Her fiancée and the town continue to believe the magnificent swordsman is a murderer and hate Xiu Xiu. A gang of thieves enters the story. They extort money from the townspeople. The townspeople agree to pay, continuing to blame magnificent swordsman and Xiu Xiu for everything. The gang collects the money then reneges. Magnificent swordsman solves everything with an heroic end fight then wanders off like heroes did back then. This movie differs from other Shaw Brothers movies made during the golden age of martial arts movies from 1967 to 1984. Here we have more emphasis on story and a male/female relationship more about respect than romance. The action scenes are mostly swords and strongly resemble the style of the blind swordsman Zatoichi. There are a few quick strokes and magnificent swordsman leaves his victim with an "X" mark as if leaving a signature. Wong Chung-Shun does as much action as possible without a stunt double because the sequences all seem to be short - about 3 to 5 strokes then cut. This was standard and considered good for the time period and would have been better without the shaky camera effect. This seems to be Wong Chung-Shun's biggest role. He played in many other early martial arts movies. I will always remember him in the two Bruce Lee movies. In "Fist of Fury" he played the cook responsible for Bruce's master's death. Previously mentioned Wei Ping-Ao also played a bad guy in "Fist of Fury".Wong Chung-Shun died in 1976 at age 56. I must also mention Sammo Hung is listed as an extra. I watched the movie twice and he escaped my notice. My copy is the Celestial release 2006. All the extra features function but they are simple features like a slide show.

THE MAGNIFICENT SWORDSMAN (1968) is quite a change of pace from the usual fast-and-furious Shaw Bros. swordplay adventures being made at the time. It has its share of action, but the emphasis is more on story and character than martial arts. It has a relationship between a man and a woman at its core, but one based on mutual respect rather than romance and it has serious repercussions for both of them. Jiang (Huang Tsung-hsin) is a wandering swordsman hero who gets the upper hand in an encounter with a gang of robbers outside a small town and winds up being asked by a dying robber to go to the town to take something of his to Xiu Xiu (Shu Pei-Pei), the robber's sister. When Jiang arrives at her house with the news, the grief-stricken Xiu Xiu attacks him with a knife and wounds him. He explains to her the circumstances of her brother's death and she apologizes and nurses his wound. To make a long story short, the chief of the robbery gang is upset that the town is "harboring" Jiang and he makes various demands. He wants Jiang and he wants 3000 taels of silver. The cowardly townsfolk want the swordsman gone and agree to pay the money. The bandits attack anyway and bring along a villain with a whip, someone with whom Jiang already has a bad history. Jiang, of course, fights them all alone and the battle extends through the entire town as the hero guides his opponents into close quarters in back alleys, stalls, stables, yards and empty shacks to pick them off one by one, although the signature fight with the whip expert takes place out in the open street.

Huang Tsung-hsin normally played bad guys, but here he's a stoic, battered good guy with a wide hat that covers his face and a poncho, making him reminiscent of Italian western heroes, with guitar-based musical cues designed to underline that connection. Ching Miao plays the bandit leader. Tien Feng plays the whip-wielding bad guy. Shu Pei-Pei plays Xiu Xiu, the robber's sister, a girl living alone who fends off the marriage proposals of her callow boyfriend and winds up earning the ire of the townsfolk for letting the swordsman stay with her. It's a dramatic role, not an action one. Shu Pei-Pei was not one of the Shaw studio's great beauties, nor should this role have been played by one—it would have been a major distraction if, say, Li Ching or Chin Ping had played it. Shu is a very good actress and her character provides the emotional core of the movie. She stands by Jiang through thick and thin, recalling Chiao Chiao's character from Jimmy Wang Yu's two One-Armed Swordsman movies, the loyal farmer's daughter who became his faithful wife.

If I have a major problem with this film it's that the action scenes are all photographed with a hand-held camera. The rest of the film isn't photographed that way, only the fight scenes. It gets incredibly distracting when the camera comes off the tripod and starts jiggling all over the place, moving in too close and panning too quickly, or moving too far away and letting things pop up in front of the lens to block the action. However, the final fight is well done and makes use of large portions of the town backlot as the hero and his opponents wend their way through stalls, shops, yards and rooftops.

Not one of the best I've seen, but different enough from the run-of-the-mill Shaw Bros. entries I've been reviewing to make it stand out.

The Magnificent Swordsman is a highly interesting Shaw Bros movie.I can clearly see the influence of Yojimbo and Zatoichi in the way the movie shot and how the action scene happen.A skillful swordsman helping a village fight again a group of bloodthirsty bandits and the movie set up all that pretty well.Thank to the camera movement the movie give us many realistic sword fight and the main character acting is emotional enough to the point that i always worry for him every time a fight happen which very rare in a Shaw Bros movie when every main hero is a unstoppable killing machine.The minus point for me is although you can't blame a actors for bad acting in a movie you only need to see the action but for some reason the main girl keep bringing trouble to other people and annoy the hell out of me with her voice