Deadly Breaking Sword, The (1979)

There are good Shaw Brothers movies and great Shaw Brothers movies. It’s sometimes hard to make a distinction when so much about the studio’s output was regulated by the house style. This insular approach was causing the studio to fall behind the curve at the box office by the late 1970s when rival studio Golden Harvest gradually stepped in with projects where talented filmmakers such as Sammo Hung and Jackie Chan were able to exert far more creative control over their work and thus stay competitive. Stuck in a rut, SB had little recourse over time, but to move its costume period tales of martial chivalry to its TVB television division. But at least until 1985, the studio kept a steady stream of new wuxia pian screening in theaters, some of which affording a few talented directors the chance to exert a little creative freedom of their own.

Into this climate came The Deadly Breaking Sword, a great swordplay movie that appeared at the wrong time. On the surface, it looks like just about any SB wuxia pian from the last decade. Production values are on par with your typical indoor set-intensive period production. There’s a plot of intrigue and revenge, gaudy art direction and traditional swordplay action from the veteran action directing team of Tang Chia and Wong Pau-gei. It stars the stoic Ti Lung, who helped forge a new wuxia image of a literary wandering swordsman a few years prior in such classics as The New One-Armed Swordsman (1971) and The Magic Blade (1976). In a nod to the prevailing demand for low brow kung fu comedy, top studio star Alexander Fu Sheng offsets Ti’s classical persona with a completely different role as a clowning and uncouth fighter in the Jackie Chan mold. The intense clash of weapons are almost trumped by the intentionally comical clash of disparate personas. Yet, an especially smart script rife with subtle genre parody from studio workhorse Ni Kuang and the very talented direction of Sun Chung whip this duo and their conventional setting into quite possibly the most balanced, delightful and slyly subversive wuxia pian the studio has ever made.

The movie begins with the traditional duel among two of the leading fighters in the martial world. Their nicknames say it all. Lian San (Michael Chan) the Throat-Piercing Halberd challenges Tuan Changqing (Ti Lung) the Deadly Breaking Sword to a fight to the death. Changqing’s gimmick, aside from bringing a coffin for everyone he fights, is breaking off a piece of his sword in each of his victim’s bodies. Although he boosts of having defeated many great fighters, his sword still has quite a bit of length to it, but it’s just one of those perplexing details that isn’t meant to be explained. Although Changqing succeeds in implanting another broken sword tip, San escapes death by fleeing and seeking medical aid in town from Guo Tiansheng (Ku Feng), the “Killer Doctor.” Tiangsheng uses acupuncture technique to not only cure San, but gradually alter him physically as he recovers.

Nearby, a rowdy martial artist with a hefty gambling debt named Xiao Dao (Alexander Fu Sheng) the Little Dagger is tricked by the owner of the Rui Xiang Gambling House into having to work for him to pay off a substantial house debt. The plan is hatched by the owner’s daughter Luo Jinhua (Lily Li), who is determined to make Dao her hubby. However, Dao’s mind is elsewhere for a new high-class prostitute named Liu Yinxu (Shih Szu) has arrived to work at the neighboring brothel and she’s become the talk of the town.

Yinxu’s reason for coming has nothing to do with selling her body. She’s determined to see that Guo Tiansheng is killed in reprisal for his betrayal of her brother (Ngai Fei), who is now rotting away in a prison. Desperate to free himself from his forced employment at the gambling house, Dao gladly accepts money from Yinxu to trick Changqing into coming to the brothel to hear Yinxu’s plea for help. The plan works, at least for Yinxu. While Changqing agrees to confront the doctor, Dao ends up right back where he started after Jinhua tricks him out of his newfound money.

After confronting a seemingly righteous Tiansheng, who willingly steps between a sword point and one of a handful of swordsmen he keeps around, Changqing begins to doubt Yinxu’s claims. Perhaps sensing this, Yinxu rehires Dao, this time to kill the doctor after he proved his fighting ability by defending her from an attack by the doctor’s men. This mix up guarantees that Dao and Changqing will clash. But when Changging finally figures out the truth, he joins Yinxu in preparing a trap for the doctor. But Tiansheng has a secret weapon and it’s a new and improved Lian San, who is dying to settle his old score with Changqing. This time, the breaking sword might need a hand from a certain little dagger.

Sun Chung keeps this plot stitched together perfectly, while creating just the right amount of mystery, slapstick comedy and martial arts. He also draws forth excellent performances from the cast that’s propped up by some genius dialogue, even in subtitled form. I’d share some, but most of it needs to be taken in context and I don’t want to spoil the fun.

Ti Lung is characteristically the straight man, but in making statements about his own gallantry and by posing everywhere he goes with a puffed up chest, he thinly parodies his own image. His interactions with Fu Sheng are enjoyable, particularly when Ti attempts to school Fu Sheng on the proper etiquette to being a gallant martial arts hero.

Fu Sheng gives one of his very best comic performances. With this film, I’d put him up there with all the great physical comedians such as Peter Sellers, Jerry Lewis and Jackie Chan. What he lacks in Jackie Chan’s advanced Peking opera skills, he makes up for in other ways such as twirling his dagger about with impressive skills of his own, sliding under hanging beads (for no reason – which is the joke), or just by timing a raised eyebrow perfectly while fighting three wannabe thugs. His first five minutes onscreen alone are priceless and if you don’t “get it” by that point, then you probably won’t care for the rest of his shtick. Then, of course, I’d feel sorry for you.

The other stand outs are long-time studio stars Lily Li and Ku Feng. Ku Feng has been such the bedrock character actor at Shaw Brothers that it almost goes without saying that any studio role he’s in will be great. But here he has the difficult task of playing the most deadly of martial arts villains, the non fighter who relies on cunning and other devious arts, in this case acupuncture needles. As for the always lovely Lily Li, she lights up the screen every time she appears. While not to presume anything scandalous, I’m convinced that Sun Chung had a special eye on her throughout the shoot by the way the camera especially favors her in this movie. I’ve always felt Lily Li was underused at Shaw Brothers. She often had minor roles in martial arts movies and even here plays second fiddle to Shih Szu, who is trumped up as the great beauty. But Li gets the better role anyway, where she gets to clown around with Fu Sheng and show more personality than usual.

Even more so than the movie as a whole, the martial arts choreography is certain to be misjudged based on the movie’s release date and on modern screen fighting choreography. It’s moderately slow, deliberate and doesn’t show any new gimmicks. There’s no getting around that. But Tang Chia and Wong Pau-gei have crafted what I would call a particular style of screen fighting (that I don’t have a name for) and they do it magnificently. It has a clarity and purposeful cause and effect presentation that is unsurpassed. Whether we’re seeing halberd versus sword, dagger versus sword, open hand sparring, or even halberd versus a freshly unearthed bamboo tree, the action is never repetitious, dull or empty filler. It all serves the story and the excellent physical performances of Ti, Fu and Michael Chan give it that extra boost. There is use of doubles for acrobatic moves, but for little else. The wirework used is limited, but very well done. I kept looking for the wire attached to Fu Sheng’s dagger in one particular scene, but never saw it.

Unlike his former partner Lau Kar-leung who went on to almost exclusively promote the development of screen fighting based on Shaolin kung fu, Tang Chia never abandoned the wuxia sword fighting he and Lau created for Shaw Brothers’ early wuxia pian in the 1960s. As I see it, The Deadly Breaking Sword presents the most finely-tuned and evolved version of this style of screen fighting. It would have been heralded as revolutionary had it been shown a number of years earlier, but by this point audiences, much like today, were more interested in high-speed sparring, dangerous stunts or flashy special effects.

The Deadly Breaking Sword could be considered a transitional wuxia pian. It contains the best of the older style swordplay, which was soon to be replaced by contemporary wushu technique and more advanced wirework. Yet it’s shot by Sun Chung with refreshing flair that minimizes old gimmicks like fast zoom-ins in favor of freeze framing for dramatic effect and creative camera placement. The high-brow stoicism of the older wuxia pian is brought forth in the roles of Ti Lung and Shih Szu. But this gets shot through by a layer of contemporary humor that ranges from Fu Sheng and Lily Li’s slapstick nonsense to slight jabs at the genre all across the board. Most of the stars had been around for a number of years, but Fu Sheng in particular was just emerging as one of Hong Kong’s leading actors, whereas Ti Lung was winding down. The music is also worth mentioning as a sign of new advances. Hong Kong movies rarely paid much attention to soundtracks up to this point and most studio music was made up of various stock recordings endlessly recycled. But in this case, Joseph Koo actually scored an original title song that was sung by pop singer Jenny Tsang, who also happened to be married to Fu Sheng.

It won’t suit everyone’s tastes, but from where I stand The Deadly Breaking Sword is flawlessly brilliant. Sun Chung seems to have known exactly what he was dealing with and how to make it work for a changing audience. I honestly laughed out loud frequently (rare for me unless Stephen Chow is involved), was fully engaged in the plot and character development, and loved every minute of the swordplay action. It beats a lot of the stuffy early wuxia pian and is superior, when looked at as a whole, to the visual fluff of some modern wuxia pian like House of Flying Daggers.