Legend of the Branded Swordsman

Legend of the Branded Swordsman is a 1919 Laeralian martial arts film starring Eloi Liang and directed by Duc Tseng. A tremendous commercial success, the film produced to two sequels and kick-started the career of Eloi Liang, a breakout star of early Laeralian cinema. The film is also well-regarded by critics, who've praised the Legend of the Branded Swordsman's clever visual effects and fight choreography, pioneering techniques which would later become commonplace in Laeralian martial arts film. The film is now considered a classic in the wuxia, or Laeralian martial arts/swordplay historical drama genre. It received second place in the "Best IDU Classic Film" category at the 2020 IDU Film Festival.

Plot and Characters

Legend of the Branded Swordsman follows Wai Mengyao, an honest young man who is framed for a crime by a treacherous tax collector and branded with a hot iron, yet escapes execution and trains under a reclusive martial arts master before taking on the evil witch Tian Yuan and her army of undead feng szu le — reanimated vampiric corpses from Laeralian folklore.

The chief characters are as follows:

Eloi Liang (Liang Chonglin) as Wai Mengyao: Trained in Western-style theater and stage combat, Eloi Liang was among the first breakout stars of non-silent Laeralian film, and an early actor with appeal to both Rén and Arrivée audiences. Legend of the Branded Swordsman was only his second leading role; he went on to star in numerous other wuxia films. His highlands-style wushu was characterized by crowd-pleasing swift, high kicks; during his initial confrontation with the magistrate’s men, he manages to kick a mounted enemy off of his horse from the ground. He also has a very expressive face in common with many silent film performers of the time, and the director’s use of close-ups of Liang’s face during fight scenes highlights his varied expressions.

Paulette Wong as Tian Yuan: Donning heavy makeup, the actress who had made her career playing heroine or love-interest characters in traditional folk opera instead played the cruel-hearted sorceress Tian Yuan, who raised an army of feng szu le vampires to rule the land. While villainous roles were not new to her (Wong had played the role of a manipulative elder relative in the opera and later film One Hundred Miles Away, released in 1917), the role of Tian Yuan featured greater athleticism and special effects than Wong was used to. Tian Yuan’s abilities depicted on-screen included disappearing and reappearing in a flash of smoke, bringing feng szu le to life from their tombs, and fighting using claw-like blades and short throwing javelins.

Regis Kang as Master Kang: Regis Kang plays the elderly and reclusive Master Kang, whose mastery of the Five-fold Kick and past battles with the witch Tian Yuan leads him to take on Wai Mengyao as a disciple.

Jasper Yung as Magistrate Hwang: Jasper Yung portrays the greedy and corrupt magistrate of Mengyao’s hometown, who lusts after the beautiful Lady Zhenzhen. He falsely accuses Mengyao of theft, orders him branded, and seeks to have him executed out of jealousy for Lady Zhenzhen’s feelings towards Mengyao.

Germaine He as Lady Zhenzhen: Lady Zhenzhen is a beautiful young woman of Mengyao’s home village, who talks of marrying Mengyao at the beginning of the film. Even after Mengyao is arrested and condemned to death, she resists Magistrate Hwang’s advances. She is captured by Tian Yuan’s feng szu le army, and Mengyao’s fight to rescue her marks the film’s climax.

The film is directed by Duc Tseng, an early Laeralian action film director and choreographer known for his groundbreaking use of constructive editing techniques to portray breathtaking action sequences. Legend of the Branded Swordsman was his fourth film, and the second to be a commercial success.

Release

Although much photography was completed in 1918, prior to the outbreak of hostilities in the Laeralian Civil War, Legend of the Branded Swordsman was released in 1919 as Réne Gramont’s Committee for Democracy and Progress was in the thick of the fight against the Laeralsford government. Thanks to the connections of the film’s deep-pocketed sponsor, the movie magnate Claudius Wang, the film was released in theaters on both sides of the frontlines. However, the film’s apparent political undertones were grounds for objection on both sides. Censors in Prime Minister Brienne’s government nearly banned the film on the grounds that the film’s “indecent” combat sequences would corrupt impressionable youth audiences into hooliganism, while the heroic Mengyao’s initial exile from society by a treacherous tax collector was seen as a coded echo of Gramontist attacks on the First Allied Provinces’ corruption. In territories controlled by the Committee for Democracy and Progress, the film was largely popular with audiences—except at a screening in the wartime capital of Songshan, where viewers in one theater rioted over depictions of cowardly soldiers fleeing the witch Tian Yuan.

Nevertheless, the film was overall received exceedingly well by audiences and had great cultural impact; the painting “The Movie-House” by the painter Gustave Chiu (1920) shows movie-goers emerging from a theater screening the film. The success of the film also kicked off the career of its star, Eloi Liang, leading him to become a breakout star of early Laeralian cinema. Although ticket figures from the era are hard to come by, the film was still being screened in some theaters in spring 1921, nearly two years after its release.

Impact

Legend of the Branded Swordsman stood out from other adventure-film fare of the time with its breathtaking stunts and special effects. Unlike the clumsy wireworks employed by other films of the time to depict the martial arts heroes’ spectacular leaps, Branded Swordsman employed the innovative technique of having actors jump down from rooftops and then played the footage backwards to show them gracefully leaping into the air. The makeup techniques used to create the feng szu le was advanced for the time, far outshining other film creatures. The filmmakers also made great use of smoke and fog special effects to create an eerie atmosphere.

Legend of the Branded Swordsman’s fight choreography took Laeralian wuxia filmmaking in a radical new direction, ushering in the “Second Wave” of Laeralian wuxia film. Previous fight scenes were heavily stylized, often based on the stage choreography of traditional traveling folk opera troupes. Duc Tseng thrilled audiences with new, fast-paced sword fights, often interspersed with innovative close-up shots of characters’ faces as they fought to emphasize their expressions. It’s worth noting that the film’s star, Eloi Liang, and most of the film’s actors had no backgrounds in traditional folk opera, unlike the stars of many other wuxia films of the time. Liang himself had in fact been trained in Western stage combat, which contributed to his dynamic performance in Legend of the Branded Swordsman and its sequels, Return of the Branded Swordsman (1922) and The Branded Swordsman Versus the Lotus-Eaters (1924).