Correct history of this edited film

The IMDb page of this movie is a big mess. Here's the history of this movie:

Master with Cracked Fingers, 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.

Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Master_with_Cracked_Fingers


Little Tiger of Canton/Cub Tiger From Kwang Tung is a 1973 Hong Kong martial arts action film directed by Chu Mu and starring Jackie Chan. Chan was 17 when the film was made in 1971, and it is considered to be his first starring role.

Cub Tiger From Kwang Tung was filmed in Hong Kong in 1971, but only saw a limited cinema release two years later. The small independent release was shelved after its brief run and never received an international release. In the late 1979, in the wake of Chan's success in Snake in the Eagle's Shadow and Drunken Master (both 1978), the film re-emerged at Hong Kong cinemas, in a poorly re-edited version with some newer footage of Dean Shek and Yuen Siu Tien spliced in, along with a rather obvious Jackie Chan double.

The amalgamated footage was sold to US film producer Dick Randall, who dubbed and repackaged it, and gave it an alternative title, Master with Cracked Fingers. The rights were subsequently sold to 21st Century Distribution who gave this version of the film a brief run in US cinemas in 1981, under the title Snake Fist Fighter.

Since Chan became more popular in the West, particularly after the US release of Rumble in the Bronx (1996), the repackaged film has seen numerous VHS and DVD releases from a wide variety of film distributors in the US and UK.

The original film, Cub Tiger From Kwang Tung was finally given an international DVD release for the first time in 2007. It was released in the UK (DVD is 0 region) on Showbox Home Entertainment's Rarescope label. This is the complete original 85 minute film, as it was released in Hong Kong in 1973, without edits and additions. It contains the original Mandarin soundtrack and imbedded English/Chinese 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.

Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Little_Tiger_of_Canton