Duel for Gold
Lo Wei closed a door and Chor Yuen opened a window. Just a week ago Shaw Brothers had released the last of their movies directed by the prolific Lo Wei. And now, seemingly from out of the blue, here’s Chor Yuen to pick up Lo Wei’s role as Shaw’s standard bearer for wild wuxia action.
But Chor Yuen didn’t come from nowhere, and thanks to his background he will turn out to be so much more that a simple continuation of Lo Wei’s legacy.
Chor Yuen joined the film industry young thanks to his father, a trained Cantonese opera performer and actor. By 22 he was directing Cantonese films. By 1970, when the Cantonese industry largely shut down, he’d directed 70 films in 13 years. From there he briefly joined Cathay, where he made his first wuxia film Cold Blade.
Since Cathay was also dying Chor Yuen moved over to Shaw Brothers just in time to rescue a film in crisis. Lo Wei had started filming Duel for Gold but he, and at least one vital cast member, had left Shaw Brothers before the film was finished. Chor Yuen was asked to complete the movie.
I’m not sure how much of the resulting movie was made by Chor Yuen and how much was made by Lo Wei. Certainly every scene featuring Richard Chen Chun was shot by Chor Yuen, as Chen Chun replaced the departed Chang Yi. Chen Chun’s in a lot of the movie, especially the final third, so I’m guessing the majority of the movie was shot by Chor Yuen.
The plot is a nice variation on wuxia standards that had started to become a little stale. We still have wandering knights with super human skills, but the moral code that underpins wuxia is gone, replaced with avarice.
Ivy Ling Po and Wang Ping conspire with their husbands Chin Han (Ivy Ling Po’s actual husband) and Tsung Hua to rob a wealthy money depository. But charming loner Lo Lieh wants the gold all to himself. Protecting the depository is Chen Chun, who has some designs of his own.
The result is entirely amoral bloody fun. And they even throw in a narrator (a rarity for Shaw Brothers movies) to wrap the whole package up in irony. The uniqueness of the staging and morality is matched by Chor Yuen’s framing; fresh to the Movie Town studio lot he uses a lot of new and interesting angles that present the familiar locations in a new light.
I have no idea how long this movie is supposed to be. The DVD copy I have is 93 minutes. The version that was on Celestial’s Golden Vault was 95 minutes. It was encoded at the same frame rate as my DVD copy, so that does not explain the runtime difference. And the BluRay release claims to be 98 minutes, but I don’t have a copy on hand to check.
Ian Whitney
Published: 2026-08-20