Five Fingers of Death (1973)

Thanks for the memories!

The performances transcend the film's tropes, grounding it in characters that feel more complete than this subgenre often produces.

what a terribly boring film. I'm sorry but this is absolutely not deserving of best picture and will be forgotten quickly. Entertaining and engaging cinema? No. Nothing performances with flat faces and mistaking silence for subtlety.

Blistering performances.

I have been browsing through a few Shaw Brothers films from the 70's of late and decided it was time to watch the one that is credited with bringing these films to the American attention. King Boxer (as the version I saw was called) sees promising young student Chi-Hao sent away to train under a new master in order that he may be able to win a martial arts tournament and thus prevent the local thugs from getting the power and prestige that would come were they to win it. Within this very basic frame there are lots of characters coming and going and lots of complications. While I wanted to like this aspect for doing more than the norm, the truth was that the film gives too much time to too many characters and tries to do too much with them in terms of their actions and changes of heart within the main plot.The impact this has is to make the film longer and slower than it can bare, which is a real shame because when it has pace it moves well. It could easily have lost 1 or maybe 2 characters to make the plot a bit leaner and lose 20 minutes or more from the running time and it would have been a better film for it. It doesn't help that the performances often err on the side of being too earnest and come over a little stiff. I liked Lo Lieh as a presence but he was guilty of this. By contrast I liked the minor turn by Shen Chan as he was smirking in his villainy. The rest of the cast tend to be a bit too sluggish and earnest which is a shame but doesn't extend to the action. On this front the film has a lot to recommend and the action looks and moves well. I would have liked a bit more of an impacting final few fights but it was good stuff even if the longer running time tended to rob the film of energy between fights.Another good Shaw Brothers film then, but it runs too long and is given too heavy a tone and as a result the film feels a bit too sluggish for its own good.

The first major martial arts import into states. Yep, before Bruce Lee's "Fist of Fury". Credit goes to Wang Yu's "Chinese Boxer" which started the trend of story-driven kung fu films. This, only coming two years later retains almost the same structure as that film, minus Jimmy himself. There's a lot more emphasis on building a story here than on the actual fights and it's understandable how that might dissatisfy most viewers who expect a martial art film similar to Wang Yu's "One-Armed Boxer" films which reverse that emphasis. Not a bad film as an addition to Shaw Bros. filmography, it certainly opened up new 'frontiers' for other films to come in terms of some of the new techniques, but as an entertaining martial arts film I would go for something a little more "kung phooey", like Wang Yu's "One-Armed Boxer" films.

Five fingers of death: Although previous Shaw Martial Arts epics had shown the influence of the American cowboy genre, none had paid such open tribute to it as this one, especially in the saloon fight scene. And though Shaw Bros. films had borrowed from the Japanese chambara (swordfight) genre before, none had done so with such success as this one. i suppose some of this had to do with the fact that the director originated from Korea, and thus brought a non-Chinese perspective to such borrowings, which certainly raises some interesting questions about culture; but in any event, this film presented real innovations in technology and technique in Hong Kong action films. for the first time in Hong Kong, the camera was given access to the whole of any given set, which meant shots from many different angles, such as the low-angle interior shot showing the ceiling of a room (the original American innovation of which usually credited to John Ford), or the high angle long shot that allowed visualization of a large ground area, or the frontal tracking shot.It is true that this was not the first hand-to-hand combat film of real cinematic substance - that remains Wang Yu's 'Chinese Boxer'; but on a commercial level, Shaw Bros. were right to choose 'Five Fingers' as their first major release to the West because, one might say, it was the 'least Chinese' of their action films, that is, the least dependent on purely Chinese theater traditions. Although this made no impression on the American critics at the time (who universally trashed the picture), it wasn't lost on American audiences, especially among African Americans, whose culture had always been - by necessity - an eclectic patchwork of borrowed elements and innovation. In 'Five Fingers' they were given the opportunity to discover the core of the story, in the earnest young man forced to make the extra effort to overcome social barriers and betrayal in order to have his merit recognized. This seems to be an issue universal to Modernity, but each culture has its own way of expressing and resolving it; 'Five Fingers' presented it in a way many Americans could relate to as well as Chinese.So is the film now only of historical value? Certainly not. For one thing this issue hasn't gone away. Secondly, some of the innovations leave much of the film looking as fresh today as it did on first release. Also the action is well-staged, and the performances, though a little too earnest, are crisp. The film is a might over-long, but the story does cover a lot of ground. And there are marvelous set-pieces through-out, such as the saloon confrontation, the fight on the road to the contest, the odd double finale.definitely looks better on a theater screen, but still impressive for home viewing: recommended.

"Five Fingers of Death" is a classic of 70's kung fu cinema. As the film that "broke out" HK cinema to the west, this is a must see for any serious fan of the genre. It's also a damn entertaining film, with hard-hitting, non-stop action, solid and mostly believable fight choreography and great over-the-top 70's era dubbing ("Oh I see ... so you want it THE HARD WAY!! HWAA!!")."Five Fingers" is an eye-for-an-eye revenge tale ... and I mean literally, eye for an eye! It's great to see Lo Lieh portraying a hero. He played so many great villains later in his career - including Pai Mei in the classic FIST OF THE WHITE LOTUS, which was one of the characters Tarantino used in creating the Pai Mei of KILL BILL.My only complaint is that I wish there was a better quality DVD - mine looks like it was a VHS transfer. Overall this is a great film - don't miss it!Bart Blackstone Film Club - Hollywood, CA