Strong and Moving!

Excellent but underrated film

It is an exhilarating, distressing, funny and profound film, with one of the more memorable film scores in years,

Blistering performances.

Solid kung-fu film about about a marital arts tournament, which is a serviceable enough of vehicle for a series of well done fight sequences. Oh, and someone gets killed and then needs avenging by our hero. The story is nothing you haven't seen before, but this Shaw Brothers production of a Wong Fei-hung tale is satisfying enough.

Minor but well-mounted Shaw Brothers production based on the exploits of Wong Fei-hung, the turn-of-the-century kung-fu instructor/acupuncturist/Cantonese folk hero. (Liu Chia-liang later directed two Shaw films--"Challenge of the Masters" and "Martial Club"--with the young Wong Fei-hung as the central character, but "The Master of Kung-Fu" is about Wong as an adult.) Here he's played by Hong Kong's greatest character actor, Ku Feng (you've seen him in everything from "The One-Armed Swordsman" to "The Heroic Ones" to "Bruce Le's Greatest Revenge"), and this role gives Ku the relatively rare opportunity to show off his considerable fighting skills--both barehanded and with a three-sectional staff. The plot revolves around stolen jade ornaments and an attempt to frame Wong Fei-hung for the murder of a fellow kung-fu teacher, a hot-tempered man who had argued with Wong. Beautiful attention to period detail and, of course, great fight choreography by Yuan Hsiang-jen and Yuen Woo-ping--but you shouldn't expect a lot of bloodshed, since Wong strove to avoid killing or seriously injuring his opponents! A compilation of fight scenes from "The Master of Kung-Fu" is available on YouTube.