The Deadliest Art
This action compilation was produced by Fred Weintraub
(produced Enter the Dragon) with the cooperation of Golden Harvest. The
film is full of terrific action scenes, but because of the sponsorship
of Golden Harvest the scenes used are all Golden Harvest films. This of
course leads to a fairly narrow scope in which none of the Shaw films are
represented. Even taking this into account, it seems that there could have
been a much greater diversity of films. Probably some 80% of the film is
devoted to the movies of Jackie, Sammo, Yuen and Bruce Lee. One other complaint
is that they bring no real historical perspective to the narration. You
get no sense of how this is all connected.
This is not necessarily a problem depending on
what you want as there are amazing clips of many of their films here. Since
this was compiled in 1990, there are obviously no post-1990 works of theirs
here. The quality of the film is very clean though it is not widescreen.
There are a few other welcome side streets that
this film goes down and a few unwelcome ones. Clips from Michiko, Angela
Mao, Yukari Oshima, Duel to Death are excellent. For some reason though,
time is wasted on such western martial artists as Keith Cooke, Peter Cunningham,
Keith Vitale and Karen Shepard. Who the hell are these people?
So this is basically for Seven Fortune fans. If
you are a fan of theirs, this is a nice compilation of many of their fights.
