THE ONE ARMED SWORDSMEN (1976)

 

PHENOMENALITY: *uncanny*
MYTHICITY: *fair*
FRYEAN MYTHOS: *adventure*
CAMPBELLIAN FUNCTION: *psychological*

I can't resist giving ONE ARMED SWORDSMEN a "fair" rating just for the lovably wonky idea of trumping the legendary success of 1967's ONE ARMED SWORDSMAN by teaming up two single-armed sword-wielders against a mystery killer who's ALSO missing an arm. The notion smacks of a comical undercutting of the whole martial tragedy of a skilled swordsman forced to cope with his unique handicap by making the handicap ridiculously prevalent. And yet, SWORDSMEN is played mostly straight, with co-stars Jimmy Wang Yu and David Chiang playing the titular swordsmen, who sport different names from the characters the actors played in, respectively, the first two SWORDSMAN flicks (Wang Yu) and in 1971's NEW ONE ARMED SWORDSMAN (Chiang).

The film is also a detective tale in which a young boy witnesses a masked killer slay a martial arts master. The innocent youth is not slow to disseminate the news to the local communities that the master was slain by a one-armed man, and, in marked contrast to the fate of America's "Fugitive," everyone believes the story without question. Thus when two unrelated one-armed swordsmen happen to wander into this territory, they sometimes get attacked by officious individuals. When both swordsmen easily thwart these attacks, a lady restauranteur (I think played by one Viola Ku Yin) tricks one of the swordsmen into attacking the other, on the supposition that the other guy's the true killer and is making trouble for the innocent fellow.

The martial arts here are never better than fair, and given that Wang Yu and Chiang are billed as co-directors, I suggest that they had more interest in playing off one another as characters. All we really learn about the two battlers is that Wang Yu's character is the more serious-minded guy while Chiang's character is a little more jokey, promising to duel Wang Yu to death, but only under the most propitious circumstances. Some of this byplay is fun. Then at some point the heroes pretend to fight in order to draw out the true killer, who somehow manipulated others (like the lady restauranteur, who hangs out in the story till the end for some reason) so that the swordsmen would kill each other.

There's a fair amount of energy expended on the mystery angle, but it's only a means of getting the heroes to seek answers at a local Buddhist temple. This turns out to be the place where the killer has taken refuge, leading to a final (mostly bloodless) death-duel.

I've established that warriors with just one arm don't make a movie metaphenomenal, but there are some minor diabolical devices here, as the masked killer uses some "ninja-tricks" at the start, while at the conclusion he employs the old Lotte Lenya "knife-in-the-shoe" trick to exterminate someone else. So because of these briefly seen devices, this minor effort fits the pattern of the uncanny chopsocky.