The film:
About the Film
“Look out! Here comes the flying sword!”
The Mighty Hero Gan Fengchi 大俠甘鳳池 (1928) is a partially-extant silent film released in China by the Great Wall Film Company during a peak in popularity of the wuxia (martial chivalry) genre. The surviving 23 minutes of the film are filled with fight scenes, eye-catching sets, and special effects—notably multiple disappearances into thin air and an airborne clash between three “light sabers” that shoot out of the warriors’ palms. As we pick up the story, Gan Fengchi and his two child disciples are battling against officialdom, represented by the fighters Cloud Ace and Cloud Eternity. What accounts for the children’s defiance of authority? Have they been poisoned and forgotten themselves? Or have the officials they fight betrayed the people? As the two sides spar over the Circuit Intendant’s seal of office and the children right other wrongs, a challenge arrives to settle a decade-old grudge on Crouching Tiger Mountain…
The historical Gan Fengchi is said to have been from Nanjing and lived during the reigns of the Qing emperors Kangxi and Yongzheng. Gan became a figure of literature and folklore, including a Qing-era biography by Wang Youliang 王友亮 (A Brief Biography of Gan Fengchi 甘鳳池小傳), a two-part Republican-era novel entitled The Blood-Soaked Mighty Hero Gan Fengchi 血滴子大俠甘鳳池, and a later novel by Liang Yusheng 梁羽生. A Cantonese-language sound film of the same title directed by Lin Cang 林蒼, featuring a Ming restoration plot, was released in Hong Kong in 1939.
Chinese intertitles in the 1928 film have been translated where they differ from the English.
Daxia Gan Fengchi 大俠甘鳳池
Original English title: Kan the Great Knight-Errant
Directed by Dumas Young (Yang Xiaozhong 楊小仲)
Screenplay by Chen Zhiqing 陳趾青
Cast: Yang Aili 楊愛立, Hong Jingling 洪警鈴, K.L. Wang (Wang Guilin 王桂林), Tan Jianqiu 譚劍秋
Studio: The Great Wall Film Co. 長城影片公司
Year of release: 1928
Duration of extant clip: 23 minutes
Original bilingual Chinese-English intertitles
Translated by Frank S. Zhou
Learn more:
Watch the special-effects sequence of the lightsaber battle.
Watch other films with special effects on the “Sounds of Early Chinese Cinema” YouTube playlist.
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