The Silver Fox (1968)
The Silver Fox is a throwback, the last of its kind where the heroic swordsmen are women. Lily Ho (before she became one of Shaw Brothers' great erotica actresses) portrays the feared swordswoman Silver Fox, who as a child saw her father senselessly wounded and her mother raped. It's 18 years later and it's payback time.
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The Silver Fox is about one kung fu brother's betrayal of another and then the vengeance promised by the victim's daughter (the Silver Fox) 18 years later. The Silver Fox is played adequately by Chang Yi and her fight scenes are good, but not quite on par with Cheng Pei Pei or Hui Ying Hung's a few years later. There's a little bit of romance and little bit of sibling rivalry and the plot rolls along to its inevitable confrontation between both generations. But in the last 15 minutes things perk up with a pretty cool "cave of traps" and a sequence where confessions and revelations fly like arrows and a slew of ironic twists follow one another like rain on a rooftop. It's this last part which gives this a 6 rather than a 5, since it was so crazy and so earnest in milking the "Shakespearean tragedy" card that it had it's own over-the-top charm. Also this featured some nice outdoor locations and since this is a late 60s "martial arts world" film, the production values are still quite high. In later years kung fu films would concentrate on the fight scenes and skimp on plot and production design, but here the emphasis is still on chivalry and high adventure.