The Swordsman of All Swordsmen

Director Joseph Kuo's The Swordsman of All Swordsmen proposes, as martial arts films often do, a tale steeped in vengeance. King Hu regular Tien Peng plays Tsai Ying-jie, the last surviving member of a household that was slaughtered while he was still a child. Having spent the intervening decades honing his skill with a sharpened scabbard - all that remains of his father's treasured sword - Tsai Ying-jie has grown to manhood, dedicating himself to the destruction of the bandits who murdered his family. Despite hailing from the late 1960s (1968, to be exact), The Swordsman of All Swordsmen is reflective, compared to some of its more declarative contemporaries; less concerned with the specifics of how bodies violently intersect and, instead, preoccupied with the churning natural landscapes that house these duels. How sunlight refracts through leaves (while blind men fumble for their swords) or the way waves crash and froth on a bleak shoreline. Tsai Ying-jie's mission isn't as clean cut as you might expect either. The outlaws he chases have all aged into subtlety different variations of the kind of men willing to kill innocents to possess an ornate blade. Although a few do remain bullies others have matured into grumpy teachers or a doddering minor lord, weighed down by regret. Kuo's film, the director co-writing with Tien-Yung Hsu and Shui-Han Chiang, refuses an easy path for its hero, subjecting him to armies of anonymous heavies, poison-tipped arrows and, most unsettling of all, sobbing inquiries from a series of attractive caregivers who cannot believe that this is all the dashing Tsai Ying-jie wants to do with his life.