Golden Swallow

I first saw this movie when I was 16 years old back in the 1970's during the kung fu craze. Our local cinema in Swindon showed a Kung Fu movie every Sunday and me and my mates used to go down and sneak in the back door and watch the latest flick.

I remember this movies as "Girl with the thunderbolt kick", but that's a terrible title as she doesn't have much of a kick, and most of the film centers around the male lead rather than "Golden Swallow".

Nevertheless the film is truly magnificent, with wonderful panoramic shots, excellent fight sequences and a story that is easy to follow.

After searching high and low for the film years ago, I gave up, but luckily for me Celestrial Pictures purchased the whole of the Shaw Brothers Back catalogue and has now started to release these great Kung Fu movies that were thought gone for ever. A search on Ebay discovered "Golden Swallow" was available, and a week later I am watching a fully restored, digitally enhanced DVD with a crystal clear 1:235 widescreen classic.

The quality looks like it was filmed in the last couple of years, not the mid 1960's.

Grab yourself a copy, get a beer out of the fridge, sit back and have 100 great minutes of entertainment.

This is the seventh film from Chang Cheh. Still finding his style, here Cheh is clearly influenced by concurrent chambara films from Japan. While there are a number of signature Cheh style scenes in this film, there many scenes that are very experimental for him especially the opening fight that's cropped in unique ways. The photography is very good, especially the outdoor shots and the composition is better then in many of his later films.

While titled, "Golden Swallow", as others have noted, it really should be called "Silver Roc" or "Iron Whip vs. Flying Swords" or something like that. The character Golden Swallow is in the film but director Cheh is more interested in the disturbed swordsman played by Wang Yu. He gets to kill scores of bad guys in numerous extended scenes while the title character is involved in four short fights at the most.

Is the film good? Well it is entertaining for the most part if a bit gory (with lots of bright red paint). The martial arts are good but many fights scenes are shot with a shaky hand-held camera much like many Japanese movies from the same time. It's effective but muddies up the choreography if that's what you're looking for. The signature zoom lens Shaw style camera work doesn't really get going until the mid seventies. Shaw director Liu Chia Liang can be seen for a second or two as a villainous swordsman.

Touted as the sequel to King Hu's Come Drink With Me starring Cheng Pei Pei, this movie is anything but. Except for the return of Pei Pei's Golden Swallow role, Chang Cheh's movie doesn't share any similarities with King Hu's original, clearly stamping his own take on his movie utilizing the lead character from Come Drink With Me, and relegating her to supporting role status.

As a fan of the original, this is downright disappointing, as I had expected to see Pei Pei kick some serious rear again as the fabled swordswoman. Instead, what we get is a story involving a love triangle of sorts, with costars Lo Lieh as Golden Whip Han Tao, a man who saved Golden Swallow from bandits and nursed her back to health, and Wang Yu as a beau from long time ago, who now calls himself The Silver Roc. The Drunken Cat, with whom Golden Swallow rode into the sunset with, is clearly forgotten and totally written out.

In actuality, this movie can be renamed The Silver Roc. The story centers on this figure, an orphan bearing a scar on the forehead similar to Harry Potter's, and is one of the fellow disciples to Golden Swallow's teachers. Disappearing one night to seek revenge on his family's murderers, he resurfaces to look for Golden Swallow, and does so by killing villains in her name, in an attempt to lure her out of seclusion. Being the self-proclaimed number one swordsman with an attitude helps too, and not before long, our trio will meet, with Golden Swallow being indecisive about both alpha males, that they have to duke it out to settle scores.

In Chang Cheh's signature ketchup blood style, this movie doesn't lack in the gore department, with really bloody scenarios, dismembered bodies, slashes to face and an inspiration to Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom, albeit done in a more straightforward manner. But some of the kung fu moves seemed recycled from One Armed Swordsman, especially Wang Yu's Silver Roc, who holds his sword akimbo similar to his One Armed days. And his much revered "Coup De Grace" killer move was never seen until the finale, and that too was too weakly executed and laughable. I wondered too about numerous scenes where characters liked to leap out of windows, clearly to a mat at the bottom, out of the screen. But one thing's a bonus, and that's having plenty of outdoor shots versus indoor studio ones, which boosts production values a little.

Still, it's a decent martial arts flick, but one which could have been miles better. With Wang Yu hogging too much of the limelight with his character in this movie, it suffers by neglecting the other leading characters by Lo Lieh, and especially Cheng Pei Pei, because the movie, after all, is named after her Golden Swallow, or in the original English title, it's the Girl with the Thunderbolt Kick (apparently it's a misnomer, she doesn't have that skill, nor executed any recognizable kicking moves).

If anything, watch out for a young Wu Ma as Hu Zhen, a supporting character and friend of Golden Swallow and Han Tao. Nothing memorable, but just a getting a kick out of recognizing a star (to me at least) in his earlier youthful looking days.

This film is a perfect example of why Cheng Pei-pei's characterizations were years ahead of their time. She was a truly independant and strong female role model without sacrificing any femininity. The closest contemporary I can think of would be Michelle Yeoh, yet Cheng did it back in the day and in some ways paved the way for stars like Yeoh.

There is a scene in this film which illustrates this point well. Cheng's character, Golden Swallow, is hurrying to save her friend's from killing each other but she's dragging another female character with her. The other woman does the cliche twist-the-ankle-while-running-and-look-pitiful move we have seen in in every cheesy chase scene. Cheng turns to her and gives her a look that says "What is WRONG WITH YOU? Why are you so helpless?! Get up and RUN!" before she practically drags her to her feet.

Reviewed and complained about The Man with the Iron Fists a couple of nights ago, and thought that throwback martial arts movie could have been good even with a muddled storyline if it had just had neat action and no distractingly bad digital effects.

Golden Swallow feels like that hypothetical martial arts movie with a messy narrative yet still delivering on the action and martial arts movie charms. Of course, it's not a throwback, and was made at a time when the martial arts genre in Hong Kong was thriving, but it still goes to show that an action movie like this can work simply by having good... well, action.

It feels like there's almost more time spent on action scenes than there is time spent on non-action scenes. I'm a sucker for any martial arts sequences, but ones where one person fights through a dozen or more other people with ease I'm particularly a sucker for, and there's some stuff like that here.

The melodramatic romance is a bit underwhelming, and the story is all over the place, but the fighting is exciting and fun, and that's the most important thing. Great fighting and a good story might make a martial arts movie great, which isn't the case here... but the movie's at least good, thanks to it having frequent and entertaining fights.