Supreme Sword
    
Director: Ling Yun
Year:  1969
Rating: 7.5
Finding this on YouTube was a real unexpected pleasure. It is a Cantonese wuxia film from 1969 that is in very good condition and with excellent subs. You won't find many Cantonese films from this period with subs anywhere. In 1969 when this film was made the Cantonese film industry was on its last legs - at least for a while - as it had been overwhelmed by the Mandarin films coming out of Shaw and Cathay. This is quite good with solid production values and shot in color - again not that common as most of the Cantonese films were still in black and white. Not only that though, it also has three of the biggest Cantonese stars from that period. Legends in fact. Between the three of them they have around 1,200 films to their credit. Lengthy careers were part of this, but many of these Cantonese films were made quickly and cheaply - called Weeklies for the length it took to make them. This cheapness of course when compared to the Shaw and Cathay films helped lead to its demise. It counted on a few stars - mainly female - to keep it going. None of these three ever really made the transition to Mandarin films as other Cantonese actors had to.



Leading the cast is Connie Chan, an enormous star since she was a young teenager when she was introduced as one of the Seven Princesses who also included Josephine Siao, Petrina Fung and Nancy Sit. Chan was Hong Kong's sweetheart knocking out comedies, musicals (she was a pop star as well), action films and martial arts films. The few that I have been able to find are all terrific and it kind of kills me that this period has to a large degree been ignored and mistreated. I could watch these by the handful if someone would restore them.



Here she is Wang Tsui-ying looking for revenge. Her father ran an escort service and when he unknowingly delivers counterfeit gold to a customer, he is ruined and does the only thing he can - kill himself - and his wife does the only thing she can - kills herself. Leaving Tsui-ying to do the only thing she can - to fulfill her father's dying wish - revenge me. Fortunately, she is a master swordswoman and she begins to hunt down the men responsible and kill them. Along the way she comes across a vagrant named Fang Tien-hung who sleeps where he can and eats when he can. When she sees him getting beaten up by some thugs and refusing to fight back, she helps him. The vagrant is played by another legend - Walter Tso Tat-wah who was a mainstay of Cantonese films going back to the 1930's - he was the assistant in all those Wong Fei-hung films of the 50's and was still in films in the 1990's.




It turns out of course that he has a backstory that got him where he is - and once Tsui-ying runs into trouble, he shows what he is made of - a swordsman of great skills. They are up against the Four Tigers and their many men - one of the Tigers is none other than Sek Kin, one of the great villains of Cantonese film - famous in the West for his role in a Bruce Lee film but in Hong Kong that is barely a footnote as he was in over 500 films beginning in the 1940s.




But that's not all - choreographing this film were Lau Kar-leung and Tong Kai. Once these two moved to Shaw Brothers, they choreographed many great films. Here the choreography is less complicated, less quick than their future work but it is good with a lot of killing, blood letting, wire-work (that is a bit clumsy) and has a few imaginative pieces such as a killer who travels beneath the ground. What really works here though is a good plot and Tsui-ying's friendship with Fang that is based on respect and later a decision that she has to make at the end of the film to fulfill her promise to her father is quite dramatic. But for the most part I was just happy to be able to watch a film from that period of Hong Kong film history.