King Boxer (1972)

aka Five Fingers of Death

Original title: 天下第一拳

When kung fu master Sung (Ku Wen-Chung) finds that his best disciple Chao Chih-Hao (Lo Lieh) has nothing of worth to learn from him anymore, he sends the young man off to the school of Master Suen (Fang Mian), whom he deems superior to himself as a martial artist. The point isn’t just to better Chao’s abilities, but to turn him into the future winner of the Regional Kung Fu Tournament, an event so important, the school of the winner basically rules the (regional) martial world. Should the title fall into the hands of a school not as morally upright as those of Sung and Suen, a reign of terror over the non-fighting populace may very well commence.

Turns out that isn’t just two old kung fu masters being melodramatic, for the insidiously evil – and hilariously hypocritical – Master Meng (Tien Feng) is indeed planning on having his son, the also pretty vile Tien-Hsiung (Tung Lin), become the new champion to then indeed start on that reign of terror business. To that end, Meng invites every morally dubious fighter he can get his claws into to his school, and is certainly not averse to murdering Suen’s disciples when the opportunity arises.

Once Chao becomes established at Suen’s school, tensions mount further, for the young man, once completely trained even in the secret Iron Palm Technique, is certainly going to beat Meng Tien-Hsiung’s murderous behind handily. So Meng decides to get really serious with his intrigues, even going so far as to invite a trio of Japanese – gasp! – killers to his school, letting them kill, mutilate and be dishonourable to their hearts content, while Tien-Hsiung grins from the side-lines.

Cheng Chang-Ho’s (a Korean director more properly named Jeong Chang-Hwa who worked for the Shaw Brothers for decades) King Boxer was one of the breakthrough movies for kung fu cinema in the West, or at least on the US grindhouse circuit.

Working from a plot that was old when kung fu cinema was still in its infancy, it’s at first difficult to make out why exactly this of all films of the genre hit particularly hard. Cheng’s direction seems very state of the genre in 1972: the zooms come when you expect them to, the editing style is perfectly of its time and place, and everything looks and feels much like every other of the bloodier martial arts films made in Hong Kong of the era.

However, once the film gets really going, its attraction becomes very much clear – Cheng has an impeccable sense of timing, hitting the sentences of action and the punctuation of melodramatic revelations with absolute perfection (and very ably assisted by Wu Da-Jiang’s score). The escalation to increasingly bloody violence is just as perfect, until we hit on the kind of mutilation that really must have sold to the grindhouses; the choreography is of course impeccable. There’s such a perfect sense of timing, so much of the very specific kind of artistry experienced filmmaking hands can put into a genre movie that just wants to be a genre movie, and damn deconstruction, irony and cleverness on display in it, King Boxer takes on an archetypal quality. That the people involved were in reality probably just trying to churn out another Shaw production matters little when you look at the finished product of their labours.

This archetypal quality can also be seen in the character work. Of course the characters and their psychology aren’t deep, but they aren’t deep in exactly the right way, embodying their one or two character traits in exactly the right way (even if it’s being pretty but boring like main love interest Wang Ping) to feel like moving parts in an old tale that have been polished to be singularly perfect expressions of these traits.

Or, if you think I’m really laying it on a bit thick here: this is also a film full of joyfully intense bouts of kung fu, some great eye mutilation, a fantastically tense fight in the dark that’s just one of four connected climactic fights, and that wonderfully unsubtle score Quentin Tarantino borrowed a piece of for Kill Bill.