The Blade Spares None
Director: Teddy Yip Wing-cho
Year: 1971
Rating: 7/10
"I have this really nice girl for you to meet.". "Great,
what's her name". "Ho but everyone calls her The Blade Spares None. She is
the Blade". "Is she cute?" "She sure is". "Ok, what do I have to lose?" "Other
than your head, not a thing".
Nora Miao plays The Blade Spares None as a slicing dicing killing machine
who . . . well spares no one in this rather loony Golden Harvest sword-fighting
wuxia film from 1971. Golden Harvest had just been formed in 1970 when Raymond
Chow and Leonard Ho left the Shaw Brothers to start their own studio. Golden
Harvest was to make their name initially with Bruce Lee and later martial
arts films with Jackie Chan, Sammo Hung, Yuen Biao and others. Wuxia was
more the Shaw Brother's domain though in the late 1980's GH was to reinvent
the genre with Tsui Hark and Ching Siu-Tung. By then the Shaw Brothers had
stopped their film production and were focusing on television.
Nora Miao of course became famous when she appeared in three Bruce Lee films
- co-starring in two of them. They also reputedly had an affair at some point.
As best as I recall she plays the sweet demure girl in those films, but In
The Blade Spares None (which came out before the Bruce Lee films) and a number
of other films she is an action figure. In her career she was to jump back
and forth between action, romance and comedy and amazingly is still on occasion
acting today. I can't say she is totally convincing in her action scenes
but she approaches them seriously enough.
This film in its 100 minute running time is as close to non-stop fighting
as one can get. Literally from the first moment in the film Miao is riding
her horse and stopping to kill people. We have no idea why. The next minute
she is on top of a 30-foot tower challenging the men below who leap up with
one jump to only get killed and fall to earth below them. It turns out to
be a tournament that Prince Kuei is having to add bodyguards to his staff.
He is played by Paul Chang Chung who had been a pretty big star with Shaw
in the 1960's.
The story is as confusing as a pitch black orgy - Miao is looking for the
man who killed her father; Tang (the legendary Patrick Tse) and Chen (James
Tin-cheun who appeared in loads of GH films) are looking for the man who
killed Tang's entire family ten years previously; Miao's father assisted
in that dirty deed and basically more minions than you can count are run
through with swords. A few of these minions are Sammo, Jackie, Eddie Ko and
Lam Ching-ying. Yuen Biao must have been on holiday. It doesn't have the
lustrous look of the Shaw Brothers wuxias but it is rather fun with eyes
gouged out, gushing blood, more jumps and leaps than a three ring circus,
the old not my real face trick, everybody trying to kill everybody at some
point and the bad guy continuing to beat the crap out of the good guys with
a sword sticking out of his back, And the steely stare on Nora Miao.
