That Fiery Girl is a 1968 Wuxia film produced by Shaw Brothers, starring Cheng Pei-Pei as the titular heroine. Released in the same year as Golden Swallow and The Jade Raksha, That Fiery Girl surprisingly turns out to be among the more dramatic films starring Cheng to come out during the peak of her career in the late 1960s.
The swordsman Mei Feng-Chun returns home from training to discover his village, the Mei Clan, has been attacked by invaders from their opposing rivals, the Hulu Clan. Eager for revenge, Feng-Chun tries to infiltrate the Hulu Clan only to fall for the rival clan's daughter, Pearl (Cheng Pei-pei). Unbeknownst to them, an enemy from inside the Hulu Clan threatens to destroy them both.
This film contains examples of the following tropes:
- Action Girl: Pearl and Hsiao-hua, being played respectively by Cheng Pei-pei and Lily Li, two actresses known for kung-fu roles.
- Amazon Brigade: Perhaps its an obtuse reference to the earlier Cheng Pei-pei film Come Drink With Me, but another brigade of female warriors appears in the end of this movie to help battle the bandits, although this time its Xue-hua who leads them into battle instead.
- An Arm and a Leg: The Mei Clan Chief lose an arm to a bandit right in the opening scene.
- Badass Cape: On both Pearl and Hsiao-hua.
- Big Badass Battle Sequence: The film climaxes with Feng-chun leading a troop of Imperial soldiers to storm the bandit’s camp, with plenty of extras clashing each other, and loads of mooks and redshirts dying on both sides. For bonus points, the Imperial Redshirts are literally clad in red.
- Boxed Crook: The ultimate fate of the Big Bad, Chief Han Lung-Feng, making this one of the few wuxia films starring Cheng where the main villain doesn’t die.
- Daddy's Girl: Pearl, despite being a swordswoman and all-round badass, is still hopelessly obedient to her dad the clan chief.
- Genre Mashup: Wuxia plus romantic drama.
- Lured into a Trap: The wedding ceremony between Feng-chun and Hsiao-hua turns out to be an ambush, for bandits to come storming into the banquet, leading to a fight scene where Feng-chun kills several mooks while dressed as a groom.
- Red Is Heroic: Pearl wears a red outfit with a blossom-colored cape, and she is the titular heroine.
- Red Oni, Blue Oni: The two Action Girl protagonists, Pearl and Hsiao-hua. In a rather literal way, since fiery Pearl is always clad in red while mellow Hsiao-hua is wearing blue.
- Shield-Bearing Mook: Shield Bearing Redshirts, to be precise. In the final raid several Imperial soldiers are seen armed with shields.
- Shoot the Bullet: A variant, since this movie is set in a period before invention of bullets; during a fight with two bandits, one of them tries to fling a throwing knife at Pearl. Feng-chun, watching the fight from behind a window, throws another knife which knocks the bandit’s knife in mid-flight.
- Sleeping Dummy: The Chief of Hulu Valley tries to kill Feng-chun in his sleep by stabbing his bed and blanket repeatedly, only to realize underneath his blanket is a scarecrow.
- Wire Fu
- Wuxia
