Chor Yuen joined Shaw Brothers Studio in 1970. His first commercial success was The House of 72 Tenants (1973, included in this programme). But the several films after that all flopped. In 1976, he adapted Taiwanese martial arts novelist Gu Long’s Killer Clans (itself a rip-off of Mario Puzo’s The Godfather ) for the screen and broke all records. Since then he had made more than 20 Gu Long films. Full Moon Scimitar is a perfect combination of two genres, the martial arts film and romantic drama which Chor Yuen likes most, the wenyi-wuxia . A young swordsman seeks fame by defeating every renowned kung-fu master and in the course of this, loses the woman he loves and ultimately, his own self. The plot itself has a number of loopholes, but Chor Yuen is able to gloss over them with a mysterious and dream-like style, set off by Chan King-sam’s outlandish design of sets, such as the den which is the headquarters of the Satanic Clan and the Magic Sword Mansion.

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