It is hard to say what is most amazing about this movie, but probably it is the release date: 1971. Why is this amazing? Because so much of this film seems borrowed from Rocky, except that Rocky dropped in 1976, which means that Sylvester Stallone is basically the American Jackie Chan, except not as good of an actor, which is saying something, because Jackie Chan is a lousy actor.
Anyway, our story starts as all good kung-fu films should, with dudes fighting - three in this case - inside some sort of temple. Annoyingly, all three are wearing black hoods with eyeholes and fairly similar, billowy kung-fu outfits (this is a period piece, despite subsequent Popeye references), so it's hard to tell whether they're all fighting each other or whether it's two-on-one, or what. But then an unmasked guy walks in and is like, "What the fuck?" One of the masked guys explains, "Master, you told us to go kill some guy, but these two pussies won't do it." The two pussies in question make some excuses, and the master says, "There's only one way out of this organization . . ." and here we're briefly wondering if these poor saps can get off with an exit interview or something, but then the master brings the hammer down: "Death!" So the master starts to wild out on the two masked traitors, and at one point one of them is taking up all the master's energies and says to the other, "Go! Save my son!" So the other guy bolts and the master doesn't even really sweat it (so maybe there's actually another way out of the organization, which is to run away really fast), and instead just kills the guy with the son.
Next we see a kung-fu school: Eight teenagers stand in a clearing wearing training pants pulled up too high, Jean-Claude Van Damme-style, and an instructor tells them to go through a series of moves. In the distance on a bluff is a kid of about eight, who follows along with the moves, but he looks tougher and his movements make those swooshing kung-fu sounds. Could this be the son that the one guy asked the other guy to take care of? Of course it is, although strangely, this won't be officially revealed till almost the end of the movie. Anyway, the instructor sees the kid and tells him to stop getting free lessons, and the kid has a comical dubbed voice, like a cartoon character, and just then his 12-ish sister shows up and says, "Jackie, father has told you you're not to study fighting nor be in a place where fighting is being taught." She really actually says "nor." Jackie storms off and runs into a wasted-looking old guy on the road. The old guy is like, where to, my grumpy young squire? And Jackie is like, I'ma find me a kung-fu teacher, old man, so clear out! And Old Guy is like, I'll be your teacher! and Jackie is like, Quit playin' and tries to kick some kid-fu to him, but obviously, the teacher just laughs a too-loud kung-fu laugh and easily parries Jackie's childish lack of skills. Somehow, this persuades Jackie that the old guy is a suitable teacher, and he accepts an invitation to meet Old Guy in the woods that night, proving that whenever and wherever in China this drama is set, they did not have afterschool specials there, because the whole set-up screams out "Young Jackie Chan's Face on a Milk Carton or its 19th Century Chinese Equivalent."
Jackie does meet Old Guy in the woods, and Old Guy has a big burlap sack and tells Jackie to get in, but first to take off all his clothes, including his undies, and suddenly it's like the Hong Kong version of To Catch A Predator, but actually it's OK. There's a snake in the bag and Jackie has to get in there to conquer his fear, and from that point for the next fifteen minutes or so, the whole thing is exactly like the training sequence in Rocky, except no snow or Philadelphia, but with a part where Jackie plays with other school children (reminiscent of when Sly Stallone runs from those kids) and a part where Jackie has to hold his arms out in kung-fu style while crouching, and there is a flame under his butt so he won't sit down and he has to hold an egg between his knees without breaking it, which is reminiscent of Sly Stallone chasing a chicken because when Jackie accidentally cracks the egg, there's a live chick inside. After all this training, which takes place entirely in secret, Jackie is a teenager and a kung-fu master. (Old Guy appears not to age at all.)
Next we see Jackie as a waiter in his uncle's restaurant. Local gangsters patronize the restaurant and are unrelentingly unpleasant - you know, the standard kung-fu gangster restaurant behavior: complain about service, skip out on bill, beat people up when confronted, summarily wreck the joint. Naturally, Jackie steps in with some skillz and vanquishes a trio of gangsters. They get excoriated by their gangster boss, who orders them to go back and beat Jackie (despite their protests that "he's pretty good"). They go back and - Surprise! - lose to Jackie again. After another dressing down by their boss, they set up an ambush for Jackie. Apparently he's the kind of waiter who also makes deliveries around town carrying a tray above his head, so it's perfect, because they can send this one pickpocket, who is sort of friendly with Jackie but works for their syndicate, to place the order, and then they lie in wait with visions of serious ass-whooping. The one flaw in their plan is that it's still the same three guys whom Jackie has now beat twice, so it's unclear why they think they'll beat him this time. And guess what? HE BEATS THEM AGAIN, AND THIS TIME HE ALSO GETS THEM VERY MUDDY IN A MUD PUDDLE!
Now, all through this, Jackie's dad keeps finding out that Jackie's been fighting and punishing him. He doesn't seem to wonder how Jackie got to be this fucking unstoppable fighting force, presumably because there are so many competent kung-fu fighters in this part of China that a person could be forgiven for thinking it's just a naturally occurring trait. Anyway, the first punishment is carrying a whole bunch of water in buckets, then the dad gets angry and throws a bunch of flower pots at Jackie, all of which Jackie catches using crazy kung-fu dives and stuff, and finally, the dad says Jackie has to punch broken glass, which is (1) a totally cruel punishment that would totally get child protective services in that household in a heartbeat and (2) strangely convenient, since they seem to have jars of broken glass just sitting around. Throughout all this, Old Guy is telling Jackie to keep fighting, so Jackie feels conflicted. (It's sort of weird, actually - every time Jackie gets in another situation where kung-fu ass-kicking is called for, he hesitates, obviously thinking of his father's wishes, and lets himself get beat up some, and then Old Guy is actually there, in the bushes nearby, watching. At these times, Old Guy is like a sports fan in the cheap seats, alternately grumbling under his breath and exhorting Jackie to fight.) When Jackie's one hand is all mashed up from the glass, Old Guy patches him up and treats it with special herbs, promising that Jackie's hand, although scarred up, will be stronger than before (hence, the title of the film).
At this point, we get a non-plot-advancing segment where the uncle's cruel landlord wants, you know, rent. This is bad, largely, it seems, because the landlord is a foppish guy with a British accent who has a lady who feeds grapes to him and spends all day beating people at Mah Jongg, except he doesn't even put his own tiles down, he drops flower petals onto the table or does a funny running-man-style dance, and there's this fat guy who interprets the landlord's gestures or flower petals and plays the Mah Jongg tiles. It's all very weird. Jackie, still wishing to heed his dad's orders, has told Old Guy he doesn't want to fight the landlord, and Old Guy is like, "Fuck that. Let's go whoop some ass!" But then Old Guy finally realizes how much his insistence on combat is complicating Jackie's life (what with the mobsters who want to kill him and his dad making him punch broken glass) and says, "I'll come with you to take care of that landlord." So they show up and Jackie says, "I'm here to pay the rent for the restaurant," and the landlord says, "A'ight. Where's it at?" And Jackie holds out his hand and opens his fist and there are only two coins there (one of them has a square hole in it, which is cool). "Twenty cents?!" cries the landlord. "That's an insult! Let's fight!" But then he does a bunch of crazy-goofy slow-mo kung-fu moves, proving that he is really not a good fighter, and Old Guy, laughing his crazy kung-fu laugh, tells Jackie to bounce, so Jackie does a sweet ten-foot jump over a wall to get out of there.
Once Jackie's gone, landlord offers Old Guy to gamble for the rental debt. They gamble inscrutably with dominoes, and Old Guy wins by USING A PIECE OF DANDRUFF TO COVER ONE OF THE DOTS ON THE DOMINO HE HAS. Because Old Guy is grimy for real. Also, his teeth are very crooked and his hair is always disheveled. Anyway, this segues to a fight, and Old Guy handily defeats both landlord and his fat guy assistant. Impressively, his coup de grace in taking on the landlord is farting in his face. (Prior to that, landlord rests while fat guy tries to beat Old Guy, and the grape feeding lady gives him some spinach, and then he tries to make like he just got strong and Popeye music plays, but Old Guy just laughs loudly and beats him.)
At this point, the movie starts to seem not so much like an actual movie as like a highlight reel designed to encapsulate the plot quickly. One of the gangsters confronts Jackie's (adoptive) father, they briefly discuss who Jackie's actual dad is, and then the gangsters have a quick meeting, in which they decide to burn down Jackie's dad's house, which they quickly do. Jackie's dad tells Jackie they have to leave town, and Jackie flexes and unflexes his scarred hand and asks no one in particular why he has to run when he hasn't done anything wrong. Suddenly Jackie is a dock worker carrying a heavy bag of something on one shoulder, and when gangsters come around trying to shake down all the longshoremen for protection money, Jackie goes all On The Waterfront on them and kicks some ass. Cut back to the gangsters we know, talking to the dock gangsters, and saying, "So now he thinks he's king of the docks, huh?" And then the guy who killed Jackie's biological dad (the one with the difficult-to-leave organization) is there and it turns out that he's the boss of all the gangsters, and now, time having passed, he has long grey hair and very very tufty eyebrows, and he tells them they need to kill Jackie and the way to do it is to use Jackie's friend the pickpocket as bait.
So you would expect that there would be some complex ruse where Jackie is chilling out and gets word that the pickpocket has been abducted by bandits and he rushes to help him only to find that it is a trap. Well, that's what I expected. I mean, I figured that "using him as bait" was shorthand for something, but apparently not, because in the next scene, the pickpocket is ensnared in a complicated rope harness system and is being hoisted to the top of a ship's mast, and Jackie is there, and all the gangsters are there, and everyone starts kung-fu fighting, after the pickpocket's obligatory pleas to Jackie that he should go, save himself, it's a trap, etc. As is well known, kung-fu fighting, even when it is two- or three-on-one, essentially proceeds in a one-on-one format, which is to say that some bad guy fighters hang back and look ready, while one bad guy takes on the hero. This movie is cool because you see these on-deck guys running around a lot, and they look like the catcher backing up a routine throw to first base, which is to say, a little bit goofy.
Anyway, kung-fu gangsters, in addition to respecting the one-man-at-a-time rule, are intensely hierarchical, so Jackie must dispatch the low-level guys before getting to the higher-ups. This is a good place for that, because the fighting takes place near water and many no-name fighters can get thrown into the drink to ignominiously comic effect. Eventually Jackie confronts the main gangster underlord (which is to say, the one who reports directly to the tufty-eyebrowed fatherkiller) and they have an epic battle that Jackie seems several times on the brink of losing, but manages to win after advice from
Strangely, although Jackie is, in Tufty's judgment, too tired to fight, he's not too tired for another marathon training session with Old Guy. This time Jackie wears a blindfold and Old Guy waves around a big-ass blue flag. Old Guy keeps saying, "Your flag work is too slow," which would make a good euphemism for something dirty ("Why did you two break up?" "His flag work was a little slow, if you catch my meaning."). This runs into the night, going directly against the best advice I ever received, which came from my high school jazz band director: "Never over-practice for a gig." But, you know, we really skimped on the kung-fu fighting in jazz band.
At the fight the next day, Tufty shows up with the fat guy who was Landlord's Mah Jongg helper, which is basically a concession by the film's producers that they ran out of actors, since there was absolutely no connection in the plot between foppish Landlord and tufty-eyebrowed super-gangster. Fatty has apparently forgotten about how Old Guy whooped him, because he starts the festivities by saying to Tufty, "Let me handle him." I don't have to tell you how fucking stupid it would be if, after all this lead-up, Jackie didn't even get to fight the guy who killed his biological father and ordered his adoptive father's house burned down because some fat guy wearing an ill-fitting vest with no shirt underneath beat him. Also, for being so into fair fights that he will wait until the next day to fight someone so they can catch their breath, Tufty Eyebrows Man seems to have no qualms about letting his employee tire his opponent out. But Jackie makes quick work of the fat guy, so it's all sort of a moot point.
Then Tufty says they should fight blindfolded, and Jackie agrees. They fight a bunch. At one point, Old Guy shouts unhelpfully from the bushes, "You are evenly matched, but he has more experience." Blindfolded fighting, while cool in theory, is, in fact, preposterous. Already, most choreographed kung-fu makes it look like fighters know exactly what their opponents will do. But with the blindfolds, it's that much more obvious, because even with those bullshit movement sound effects that kung-fu fighters' arms and legs make (presumably because they move so fucking fast), no one could really anticipate as well as these guys do (except Rutger Hauer in Blind Fury) (then again, the one dude's eyebrows are so fucking tufty, I could probably fight him blinndfolded, because there is just no way that he could ever move without a ferocious rustling; his changes of expression are probably louder than most people's full body movements). Still, the final showdown with Jackie and Tufty is nice if judged as ballet.
It takes about five minutes before Jackie so much as lands a blow, and another five minutes before you think he might have a shot (putting aside the fact that you know he has a shot, because (1) he is Jackie Chan, both in the film and in real life; and (2) the movie is called "Master with Cracked Fingers," not "Master with Tufty Eyebrows"). Unfortunately, the Crushing Death Blow(tm) is a little anti-climactic: After some fighting with weapons (Tufty reaches for a sword, so Old Guy says, "Use the trident!" and throws a trident whistling through the air to Jackie) and the ultimate abandonment of those weapons (they have one of those moments where their weapons are locked together and one of them punches the other, and after that they're like, "Oh yeah, we're kung-fu guys! This is totally more fun!"), Tufty delivers a bracing kick that sends Jackie tumbling. At that point, Jackie recalls some time (not previously shown in the movie) when Old Guy told him that when he appears spent, he should change tactics and be like, I think, a fly or bug or something, and try to seem unattentive and cowering, then surprise his opponent. That's good advice, but the way Jackie takes it is a little weird: Instead of staying on the ground and feigning injury so Tufty will draw near, he advances quickly, but low to the ground. Tufty doesn't seem fooled, since he engages Jackie easily, but then after a second, Old Guy says, "Use lightning fist," or something like that, and Jackie makes his hand into a claw of the sort that are in those "test of skill" vending machines where you try to pick up toys and drop them down a chute, with thumb and first two fingers making the grabby crane claw while ring finger and pinky are tucked back, and he hits Tufty in the neck with this hand configuration. It doesn't seem like such a hard hit, but I guess that's why they call it lightning fist (or whatever it is they call it - I don't really remember), because Tufty just dies.
Things that happen in this movie that don't advance the plot much, which I neglected to mention above:
- Gangsters attempt to rape Jackie's sister, so Jackie kicks their asses.
- Gangsters attempt to rape some random lady, so Jackie saves her, then kicks their asses.
- After being farted on by Old Guy, the landlord eventually swoons, crosses his eyes, and falls face-first through a paper screen.
- Jackie has Tufty pinned against a rock wall during the showcase showdown and he is trying to stab him with the trident, but Tufty keeps rolling to the side and Jackie keeps stabbing a little bit to the side, but not enough to catch up with Tufty, and you are like, "Dude, just stab an extra foot to your right next time!" but Jackie doesn't.
- Jackie's sister.
- Jackie's uncle who runs the restaurant.
- The lady who feeds the landlord grapes.
- The three guys who are there playing Mah Jongg with the landlord when Jackie and Old Guy show up.
- An old lady that Jackie accidentally knocks down when running from gangsters during one of those moments when he's trying to obey his father by not fighting.
- The pickpocket.
- The lady that Jackie saves from getting raped.
