Return of the One-Armed Swordsman
(Duk bei do wong, 1969)

Chang Cheh

Hong Kong

101 min, color, Mandarin (English subtitles)

Review © 2005 Branislav L. Slantchev

The sequel to the superb One-Armed Swordsman is weaker dramatically but is easily a hundred-fold more intense, imaginative, and sometimes simply outrageous when it comes to execution. This film evidences just about every trick that Chang Cheh would go on to employ with ever increasing enthusiasm in his other films. Despite all the elements that this sequel has going for it, I must say that it was a disappointment because of the weak story. Still, with such exuberant action, this is not a film to be missed. Add the excellent performance of lead Jimmy Wang Yu, and you do have a winner.

Black (Fong Yau) & White (Whu Ma) Swordsmen	Dear Mr Fang, your farm taxes are overdue

In the first film, Fang Gang (Jimmy) has his right hand hacked off by a petulant woman who is in (unrequited) love with him. His martial arts skills thus having brought him nothing but trouble, Fang attempts to retire to a peaceful life with Xiao Man (Chiao Chiao). However, the brutality of the world outside their little domain intrudes time and again, forcing Fang to realize that he must maintain his training, if for nothing else other than defending his family. But despite his valiant efforts to deny his true self, he is eventually propelled back into the fray by his sense of justice and his keenly-felt responsibility that comes with superior skill.

Cheng Lui, Hoh Ban, and Tsung Hua	The ultra-pacifist couple

At the end of that film, Fang makes a second attempt to leave everything behind, and the sequel opens with him farming (not an easy task, wielding a hoe with one arm). Several years have now passed and he has successfully ignored the world, preferring to spend time in splendid isolation with his beautiful wife (Chiao Chiao continuing as Xiao Man). But this little idyll is about to be ripped to shreds, although this time the manner in which it was done is much less satisfying from a dramatic perspective than the first time around. By the time Fang agrees to participate in some massive blood-letting yet again, even his wife, whose unthinking pacifism would put any fundamentalist Quaker to shame, is urging him to do it. To excuse his hero's decision, Chang Cheh piles up the excuses so high that in the end Fang appears the helpless participant in events that overwhelm everyone in their path. This sort of Marxist thinking that denies individualism is repugnant, which is why I regard this film as inferior.

To hack or not to hack, that is the question	Ku Feng and Liu Chia-Liang: totally evil

But what are these forces that intrude on Fang's life so abruptly? In a development that may have something to do with his absenting himself from participation in worldly affairs, the entire region is falling under the dominion of not one but eight larger-than-life rascals, known as the Eight Kings. To assert their rule, they have deviously invited the heads of all clans to an ostensible competition in skills, but the ploy is too transparent. The kings' unsavory reputation for deceit has preceded them, and knowing that one is a liar usually puts paid on his ability to manipulate. But where tricks fail, brute force works just as well, so the kings have accompanied their invitations with threats to punish noshows. To demonstrate that they mean business, they have a couple of reluctant invitees killed (e.g., Lee Ho gets stabbed in a roadside eatery).

Ti Lung about to get gored by a beauty	Utterly, irredeemably, deliciously evil

Each of these villains has some particular schtick. Ape's Arms (Liu Chia-Liang) wields a mean sickle attached to a long chain; Poisonous Dragon (Kang Hua) not only has little venomous bombs but can actually shoot people with poisoned bullets; Hell's Buddha (Lau Kar-Wing) is master at concealment and surprise attack from the ground; Spinning Wheels (Tang Chia) has awesome metal spiked wheels that can be used as shields or deadly frisbees; Flying Fighter (Yuen Cheung-Yan) does seem to be particularly agile (courtesy of wires and trampolines); Hercules (Ku Feng in a clean-shaven head variety) is too strong for comfort (at one point he breaks an opponent's sword with his own by applying pressure although one has to wonder about his opponent's strength as well: the poor guy was holding his sword in the air at the time, so he must have been able to put up enough resistance to get it to break); Furtive King (Tin Fung) has a weapon that no one who has seen it has lived to tell about it; and last, though certainly not least, Thousand Hands, aka Hua Niangzi (Essie Lin Chia) is not only deadly at close quarters with weapons concealed in her robes, but can actually get to close quarters with her disarming feigned womanly helplessness.

Four of the youngsters: Wong Kwong-Yue, Tsung Hua, Lau Gong, Yau Lung	Cheng Lui appalled at Chen Hsing's plan

So these characters want to subjugate everyone else in sight. They have set themselves up in a fortified camp, and have compelled local clans to bow to them. They have not forgotten about Fang either, so they dispatch the Black and White swordsmen (Fong Yau and Wu Ma) to deliver the letter with the invite/threat. But Fang is skilled enough to protect himself, and in a sequence that would have been at home in any Zatoichi film, he blows out the candle and then displays his impressive swordsmanship with a few lightning strikes in the dark, leaving his stunned opponents to wonder at his moves and the holes in their clothes. He lets them go and although they threaten to come back with reinforcements, he seems up to the task of fending them off.

I will poke you with a stick until you die	Essie Lin Chia in falsely modest display

Not so with other clans, however. The head Chaoyang Sword Clan, Lu Long (Hoh Ban) comes with his two sons, Lu Da (Tsung Hua) and Lu Tong (Cheng Lui), in tow to ask Fang to join them in the defense of peace and tranquility. His argument is very simple: while Fang sleeps, the world around him is changing for the worse; Fang cannot ignore it, for if he does nothing now, he will have to do so much more later. There is no question in Lu's mind that Fang will not be able to enjoy his retirement, and at one point he actually tells him flatly that the choice is not up to him. When Fang bristles at the suggestion, incorrectly believing that Lu is threatening to force him, the old master explains that events will make it so and Fang will not be able to deny them. In this, he is prophetically correct, and that's something the guileless Fang cannot grasp just yet.

Do not make any embarrassing noises	Gratuitous luring of the innocent by Essie

Fang does decline to join forces with Lu and the others, however, and this leads to the tragic slaughter and incarceration of all clan leaders by the Eight Kings. With youngsters now in charge of the clans, the rest of the conquest seems assured. To effect their full submission, the kings send a demand to all clans that the sons cut off their right hands and then show up at the citadel to plead for the release of their fathers. Filial duty, very strong in Confucianism, is about to compel some of them to comply with the demand, but Lu's sons remember their father's instructions and organize the youngsters to plead with Fang to help them. From this point on, the film began to remind me very much of Kurosawa's Sanjuro, where a similarly skilled character reluctant to get involved in worldly affairs is drawn by his desire to help inexperienced youths who are in over their heads with much more sophisticated opponents.

Tsung Hua has a shiny blade fixation	Not much for tactics

Still, Fang's assistance is by no means certain when four of the youths go to plead with him. Unfortunately, while they are trying to sway him with a mix of logical and emotional arguments, the more hot-headed Shan Xiong (Chen Hsing) who has no taste for begging kidnaps Xiao Man to force Fang to help them. This, of course, spells nothing but trouble and even though Fang does accompany the youths to their meeting place, he does so only to rescue his wife. But events have, yet again, overtaken him, and while he slices his way through an endless supply of opponents, Lu Tong sacrifices himself to defend Xiao Man from the Eight Kings' gang in an attempt to rescue her (apparently, Shan Xiong's actions were freelance, not sanctioned by the others). When Fang finally realizes that, when he is moved when the desperate Mu Jun (Yau Lung) hacks off his own right arm, when Xiao Man pleads with her husband to repay the debt to Lu Tong, and when Fang gets it through his skull that Lu had been right all along, he must help the youngsters. It is this thick justification for his action that I did not like because it makes Fang look like he is forced by events rather than his inner essence to take up swords once again.

Typical Chang Cheh hero (Lau Gong)	I'm pregnant, not incapacitated

The rest of the film need not detain us except to say that what follows is a long series of martial engagements, each more fantastic than the previous. They are so bloody, and the body count so high that some extras show up on opposite teams after being killed in action. For example, Ti Lung makes an early appearance as Lu Hong, the young gentlemanly swordsman who is viciously tricked by Hua Niangzi, impaled on her dagger, and then stabbed with at least ten darts. In other words, he's most certainly dead. Ti Lung, however, later shows up among the thugs attacking our heroes. Ditto for Wang Chun who not only fights for the good guys but actually dies in the line of duty while on night patrol. But what is he doing among the men of Spinning Wheels? When China runs out of extras, you know we're in real trouble. Incidentally, it's not just Ti Lung and Wang Chung playing bit roles here. David Chiang, the subsequent one-armed swordsman, shows up as a good guy who gets his throat most brutally sliced.

David Chiang's cameo ends badly	Not what it looks like

Two things seem to stand out from this slaughter. First, Hua Niangzi is deliciously evil. Forget the fluttering eyelids, the modest covering of her mouth when smiling, the feigned helplessness, or the artful seduction. What really got me was her utter nonchalance when murdering unsuspecting men. When Lu Hong asks her why, she answers that there is no reason, she's doing it just for fun. When she is about to gore the long-suffering Mu Jun, she gags him, then tells him not to make any embarrassing odd noises, and then slowly thrusts her knife into his side, holding him until he expires. Her wily disposition enables her to trick one more youngster before she runs smack into Fang who professes to have known all along about her true identity although it is not exactly clear why he should have let her murder his followers if that were the case.

Wasn't Ti Lung supposed to be dead?	Random violence against furniture

This wholesale slaughter of his followers is the second thing to think about: during their trip to the citadel, Fang loses a lot of them to ambushes, then even more die when they storm the stronghold, and finally all of the youngsters perish in the final apocalyptic battle when the Furtive King shows up right after their premature victory celebrations. Only the old men remain in the end to hack their last enemy to pieces in a frenzied but belated retribution. It may seem that Chang Cheh intended this as an anti-war statement: after all, wars always take the young and the brave, leaving old men and cowards to enjoy the fruits of victory. It is a bitter irony of war that it may not really function in the Darwinian sense that people sometimes ascribe to it. Here's an instance where not a single young man survived (excepting Fang, but he does not count for his martial prowess is almost mythical at this point). When Fang throws his gold medal in the dust in disgust, he is appalled by the price that they had to pay to rid the world of the Eight Kings. And the price is indeed high: although a dozen of the old clan leaders have survived, their entire families have been destroyed. The film ends on this ambivalent note: it is a victory but it does appear to be a Pyrrhic one.

Jimmy Wang Yu is larger than life	Tin Fung is the Furtive King

The Celestial DVD is very nice with a restored print presented at 2.35:1 widescreen ratio and anamorphically enhanced. The Dolby Digital stereo Mandarin soundtrack is superb, with the frequent clanking of metal dominating it. The optional English subtitles are generally good too. Not many extras on this one, which is limited to the usual still gallery, talent files, and trailers. I have the one that's part of the trilogy boxset which comes in an attractive hard box. This is certainly the way to own this film, and own it you must. It's a treat for any Chang Cheh fan even if the fighting sequences a bit over-the-top (check out bloody corpses strung up in the trees), even if they do look ridiculous on occasion (the spectacularly awful wire-fu and trampoline-fu are cases in point), and even if the sentimentality oozes uncomfortably here and there (the two dream sequences where Fang imagines his wife running through a field of flowers in slow motion come to mind). So there, I said it, I liked it anyway.

December 17, 2005