The Magnificent Swordsman is a highly interesting Shaw Bros movie.I can clearly see the influence of Yojimbo and Zatoichi in the way the movie shot and how the action scene happen.A skillful swordsman helping a village fight again a group of bloodthirsty bandits and the movie set up all that pretty well.Thank to the camera movement the movie give us many realistic sword fight and the main character acting is emotional enough to the point that i always worry for him every time a fight happen which very rare in a Shaw Bros movie when every main hero is a unstoppable killing machine.The minus point for me is although you can't blame a actors for bad acting in a movie you only need to see the action but for some reason the main girl keep bringing trouble to other people and annoy the hell out of me with her voice

THE MAGNIFICENT SWORDSMAN Jiang Dan Feng (Huang Tsung-hsin) roams the land righting wrongs wherever he finds them. When he stops at a roadside tavern and sees a pickpocket try to rob a crowd of villagers, he promptly takes it upon himself to get their money back for them; he's just that kinda guy. When he's attacked by a pair of robbers at a watering hole, he allows the two to skewer each other by sidestepping their simultaneous thrusts. One of the dying men asks him to carry a message to his sister Xiu Xiu (Pei-pei Shu) in a nearby village. He does so (he's just that kinda guy). Upon arrival in the village, he lends a hand by singlehandedly pulling a stuck cart from a pothole in the street. When he delivers the message to the sister, he says of her brother, "He won't be coming back." She infers that he's killed her brother and tries to kill Jiang on the spot. Wounded, but otherwise unhurt, he explains how it all ended for her unscrupulous sibling: "He died at the hands of those he consorted with." Xiu Xiu's fiancé, upon hearing that another man is staying at her place, confronts Jiang and is easily rebuffed. Jiang then leaves, but returns when the gang led by the brutal Huang Da Ba (Miao Ching) invades the house looking for him. He is then "invited to dinner" at the gang's headquarters. En route to and from the dinner, he's attacked but handily overcomes his attackers. Meanwhile, Yi Sheng Lei (Feng Tien, who played Bruce Lee's sifu in THE Chinese CONNECTION), "The Deadly Whip," the man who killed Jiang's family, joins the gang. While Jiang looks and acts more like a Japanese samurai than a Chinese swordsman (think Toshiro Mifune), THE MAGNIFICENT SWORDSMAN plays out not unlike a western (think THE GUNFIGHTER with Gregory Peck by way of HIGH NOON with Gary Cooper). There's enough action to keep things interesting and, overall, not a bad movie- though not a great one, either.

THE MAGNIFICENT SWORDSMAN (1968) is quite a change of pace from the usual fast-and-furious Shaw Bros. swordplay adventures being made at the time. It has its share of action, but the emphasis is more on story and character than martial arts. It has a relationship between a man and a woman at its core, but one based on mutual respect rather than romance and it has serious repercussions for both of them. Jiang (Huang Tsung-hsin) is a wandering swordsman hero who gets the upper hand in an encounter with a gang of robbers outside a small town and winds up being asked by a dying robber to go to the town to take something of his to Xiu Xiu (Shu Pei-Pei), the robber's sister. When Jiang arrives at her house with the news, the grief-stricken Xiu Xiu attacks him with a knife and wounds him. He explains to her the circumstances of her brother's death and she apologizes and nurses his wound. To make a long story short, the chief of the robbery gang is upset that the town is "harboring" Jiang and he makes various demands. He wants Jiang and he wants 3000 taels of silver. The cowardly townsfolk want the swordsman gone and agree to pay the money. The bandits attack anyway and bring along a villain with a whip, someone with whom Jiang already has a bad history. Jiang, of course, fights them all alone and the battle extends through the entire town as the hero guides his opponents into close quarters in back alleys, stalls, stables, yards and empty shacks to pick them off one by one, although the signature fight with the whip expert takes place out in the open street.Huang Tsung-hsin normally played bad guys, but here he's a stoic, battered good guy with a wide hat that covers his face and a poncho, making him reminiscent of Italian western heroes, with guitar-based musical cues designed to underline that connection. Ching Miao plays the bandit leader. Tien Feng plays the whip-wielding bad guy. Shu Pei-Pei plays Xiu Xiu, the robber's sister, a girl living alone who fends off the marriage proposals of her callow boyfriend and winds up earning the ire of the townsfolk for letting the swordsman stay with her. It's a dramatic role, not an action one. Shu Pei-Pei was not one of the Shaw studio's great beauties, nor should this role have been played by one—it would have been a major distraction if, say, Li Ching or Chin Ping had played it. Shu is a very good actress and her character provides the emotional core of the movie. She stands by Jiang through thick and thin, recalling Chiao Chiao's character from Jimmy Wang Yu's two One-Armed Swordsman movies, the loyal farmer's daughter who became his faithful wife. If I have a major problem with this film it's that the action scenes are all photographed with a hand-held camera. The rest of the film isn't photographed that way, only the fight scenes. It gets incredibly distracting when the camera comes off the tripod and starts jiggling all over the place, moving in too close and panning too quickly, or moving too far away and letting things pop up in front of the lens to block the action. However, the final fight is well done and makes use of large portions of the town backlot as the hero and his opponents wend their way through stalls, shops, yards and rooftops.Not one of the best I've seen, but different enough from the run-of-the-mill Shaw Bros. entries I've been reviewing to make it stand out.