Lady with a Sword
Director: Kao Pao-shu
Year: 1971
Rating: 7.5/10
This sort of thing probably happened all the time back
in the old days of arranged marriages between families. It makes for a more
tragic narrative than one expects in a Wuxia from the Shaw Brothers. A mother
and her young son are coming back home after finding out that her husband
was murdered by the Flying Dagger and her son is nagging her to revenge him.
They stop for water at a small stream and four men show up to beat up the
child (who gets beat up a lot in this film and it sort of makes you glad
as he is rather annoying as children tend to be) and when mom tries to stop
the rough horseplay Jin Lian Bai (James Nam) tries to rape her but instead
kills her. The kid escapes and goes running to his Aunt to ask her for revenge.
Here he is luckier because the Aunt is Lily Ho and she is an expert swords
woman and all around bass-ass.
So in wonderfully fashionable garb - dressed in white to better show the
blood, an arresting straw hat set down across her eyes and her sword slung
across her shoulder she goes a hunting - and apparently this is a disguise
to fool everyone into thinking she is a man. Clearly men were not very observant
back then because it works. The annoying child comes along. All goes swimmingly
when she finds them - where else but at the local brothel where women are
fawning over them - and as Lily wades through a bunch of security men she
is about to kill Bai when she spots a jade medallion on him and withdraws
to the child's amazement. He was right there. You could have killed him!
Oh hell. This is not only the son of her family's closest friends who they
are indebted to for saving Lily's father's life - but she has been engaged
to but not seen the guy since childhood! But they have matching pendants.
What is a girl to do? Especially when he and his friends keep trying to kill
her. It takes some surprising turns with Bai's mother (Lin Jing with a filmography
going back to the classic 1948 film Sorrows of the Forbidden City) first
pleading for her son's life and then turning into a martial arts worthy foe
fighting for her son's life.
The action choreography stands out here with a few excellent set pieces of
one on many and one on one. Turns out that the man responsible for this was
Han Ying-chieh, one of the premier action choreographers around at the time.
The choreography tends to be complicated using both trampolines and wires
with lots of creative touches. Two of the films he was action director on
were Come Drink with Me and Dragon Inn - both which he appears in as a bad
guy which he almost always was as an actor due to his rat faced appearance.
