The Blade

Tsui Hark is without doubt, as director and producer, the person who has meant most for the development of the modern Hong Kong film. After his commercial breakthrough at the beginning of the 1980s, he has set the tone and shown a rare ability to mix broad and narrow subjects into several different genres: as a director of fantasy films such as Zu: Warrior of the Magic Mountain, Swordsman, Once Upon a Time in China (produced by Hark who also directed some of them); gangster films such as Gunmen and A Better Tomorrow 3: Love and Death in Saigon, and historical adventure films such as Peking Opera Blues. Hark's achievements as a producer are many, but his greatest is the launching of John Woo as an independent auteur with A Better Tomorrow 1-2, The Killer and the trend-setting series A Chinese Ghost Story. Hark's knowledge of Asian as well as Western filmmaking and his incorporation of elements from for instance Peking Opera, make him one of the most interesting directors in Hong Kong; at a time when its film industry is depopulating due to the forthcoming Chinese takeover. Already ten years ago, obvious influences from Hark's earlier films could be seen in John Carpenter's underestimated Big Trouble in Little China. During the past years, Hark and his company; Film Workshop, have had several commercial setbacks; and he has chosen to overcome this through new productions of older, well known genre films from the late 1960s and the early 1970s. The latest such film, The Blade, is a new production of One-Armed Swordsman (1967) by Chang Cheh, described as a prototype for John Woo. The story about the fatherless On, his early training with the swords-master Ching and his loss of one of his arms when defending his daughter are archetypical ingredients in the genre, as is the hunt for the mythical swordsman ''The Dragon'' -the man who caused his father's death. Due to Hark's deep knowledge of the genre and his brilliant technical know-how, this is a new production that is motivated. Fantasy film in Hong Kong has seen the rising of a new moon, and a new direction in the wake of Wong Kar-wai's Ashes of Time (1994) and Ronnie Yu's The Bride with White Hair(1993), and one can only hope that Hark manages to maintain this trend. Jacky Kang J K

Orig. titel
Dao: Medverkande
Wing Zhao, Xiong Xin-xin, Su Tsui-yu: Producent
Tsui Hark: Manus
Tsui Hark, So Man Sing, Koan Hui: Foto
Keung Kwok Man: Musik
Wu Wai Lap & Raymond Wong: Talat språk
Cantonese