King Hu’s Come Drink with Me and Chang Cheh’s One-Armed Swordsman are generally credited with launching the New School wuxia films that showed more realistic action, violence and faster fight scenes.

Cantonese-dialect cinema was descending towards oblivion when its fortunes were temporarily buoyed by the release of the martial arts epic Paragon of Sword & Knife in December 1967 and its "Concluding ...