Have Sword, Will Travel 保镖

Lord Yin's escort agency is famous for being able to deliver anything, anywhere, and no bandit can stand in the way of its brave warriors. But Lord Yin himself is growing old, and this year he is not sure he can protect a government caravan carrying 200,000 in silver. His students step in to help the master with the escort, but the vicious bandit Chau (Ku Feng) and his men are already preparing an ambush...

Impressions: The film's rather odd title didn't come out of nowhere – Chang Cheh borrowed it from the American TV series Have Gun, Will Travel, and the structure of his film largely resembles the plot of a typical Hollywood western – a stagecoach full of gold, bandits lying in wait, a lone warrior of unclear origins and murky motives... The plot devices and dialogue are in many ways traditional, and so is the finale with its grandiose death of all the "third wheels," yet in this case the conventionality doesn't hurt the film but helps it – what we have before us is a solid, well-built example of a "swordplay" actioner that set the fashion in Hong Kong cinema for years to come.

As always, the man chiefly responsible for the triumph is director Chang Cheh, who achieves an impressive visual style, expressive performances and fairly spectacular duels (by the standards of the early 1970s, of course). The picture is interesting to watch, interesting to follow and interesting to study, since the framing, as always with Chang Cheh, is flawlessly composed here as well. The director, admittedly, is overly fond of slow motion and uses it far from always at the right moment or to good effect, though it does still serve its main purpose – emphasizing the drama of certain moments.

No less important to the film is its leading acting duo. For David Chiang and Ti Lung this is their second film together, and here it is already clear that we have before us one of the most organic screen pairings in Hong Kong cinema – both being character actors, Ti Lung and David Chiang are quite different, and each possesses a twofold charisma that lets him easily play either a noble hero or an unscrupulous villain without wearying the audience with monotonous roles. In this case Chiang plays a proud traveler with an acute sense of justice, while Ti Lung plays an arrogant and overconfident youth whose jealousy leads him too far. The beautiful Li Ching also makes a striking impression – it's a pleasure that, despite a certain "old-fashioned" quality to the acting, no sense of falseness or overacting arises. The plot is what it is, and so is the execution...

The fights deserve a separate mention. It's best not to expect anything stunning from them, but Have Sword, Will Travel certainly stands out for the better compared with Jimmy Wang Yu's films of the same period. The actors move much faster, their movements are more coordinated and you can sense real skill behind them, not just combinations memorized two minutes before shooting. For now Chang Cheh doesn't dare end the picture with a long twenty-minute one-on-one duel, so in the finale we get a large-scale "three against a hundred" massacre, and quality is partly replaced by quantity. That's a minus, but can you really demand the advanced fights of the mid-1980s from a late-1960s film?