Master with Cracked Fingers
5.4 /10 1 Votes
Country Hong Kong | 5.2/10 IMDb Duration Language Cantonese | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
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Director Chu MuJackie Chan as Yuen Lung Chan (martial arts director)Fu Yai Se (martial arts director) Release date 1979 (1979) Tagline As a boy he was taught the secrets of Kung Fu, now he will use them to avenge his father's death. | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
Master with Cracked Fingers (Chinese: 刁手怪招; pinyin: diāo shǒu guài zhāo), also released as Snake Fist Fighter, is a 1979 Hong Kong martial arts film directed by Mu Chu and starring Jackie Chan. It is often cited as being produced in 1971, 1973, 1974 or 1981. The original footage was filmed in 1971 and released in 1973 as Little Tiger of Canton. The re-edited version entitled Master with Cracked Fingers was not actually released until 1979.
Contents
Synopsis
The film has a similar theme to Drunken Master (1978). The young and undisciplined Jackie (Jackie Chan) undergoes the tutelage of a nomadic master who has a rigorous training style focusing upon the hardening of the fist.
Jackie has been intrigued by kung fu since he was a boy, but he cannot afford to pay for lessons. He later meets an old beggar, "The Man Who Isn't There", who offers to teach him the secrets of fighting. After years of training under his sifu, his skills advance, but his father forbids him to practice. After a series of fights with a local gang of extortionists, and progressively more severe punishments from his father, he fends off the gang once more. In retribution, the gang burn down his house, killing Jackie's father. To avenge his father's death, Jackie agrees to a blindfolded fight against the gang leader, (Kwan Yung-moon).
Production
The film was concocted using footage from other films, primarily from a little-seen independent 1973 film entitled Little Tiger of Canton (aka The Cub Tiger From Kwang Tung) which featured a teenage Chan in one of his earliest roles. After Chan had become famous through films like Snake in the Eagle's Shadow and Drunken Master in the late 1970s, the footage was re-edited. Additional material from the Drunken Master era and new footage of Dean Shek and Yuen Siu Tien (in another appearance of his beggar character), was tacked on. A rather obvious Jackie Chan double was also hired and fought blind-folded in an attempt to hide the doubling from the viewers.
Release
Dick Randall took the amalgamated footage and employed actors to dub it into English, titling it Master with Cracked Fingers. Randall later sold the rights to 21st Century Distribution, who gave the film a limited release in American cinemas in 1981 under the alternative title Snake Fist Fighter.
As Chan became more popular in the West, particularly after the US release of Rumble in the Bronx (1996), the rights to release the film on VHS were passed or shared between a number of different film distributors.
VHS
DVD
Further companies also held the rights long enough to produce limited releases of the film on VHS and DVD and, as with those noted above, all were the English-dubbed 80 minute assembled version of the film.
Little Tiger of Canton
The original film, Little Tiger of Canton was finally given a DVD release in the west in 2007, under the title The Cub Tiger from Kwang Tung. It was released in the UK (region 2) on Showbox Home Entertainment's Rarescope label. This 85 minute film is in its un-tampered form, contains the original language and English subtitles. Due to the poor quality of the print, some of the subtitles are chopped from the foot of the screen, so the DVD contains an additional set of subtitles which appear whenever the originals are cropped or missing.
References
Master with Cracked Fingers WikipediaMaster with Cracked Fingers IMDb Master with Cracked Fingers themoviedb.org