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As much a benchmark as Fistful of Dollars, and a matter in both cases of opera enlarging genre. The opening hillside ambush has a white-robed figure stopping an imperial caravan en route to the city, a few moments later he's surrounded by corpses and helping himself to the magistrate in the sedan chair. Jade-Faced Tiger (Chan Hung-lit), bandit leader and lethal dandy, meticulous with pale cosmetics and generous with poisonous darts. The plan is to trade the captured official for the imprisoned outlaw master, instead they get Golden Swallow (Cheng Pei-Pei) coolly disarming a pack of henchmen at the tavern. "The trick is done. Now let's talk business." The lithe warrior has a curious helper, the scrounging sot (Yueh Hua) who strolls with warbling urchins and cloaks martial-arts virtuosity behind soused bumbling. "The world is full of sorrowful things," goes his song, bamboo staff and wine gourd comprise his balance. King Hu films for sumptuousness and rhythmic movement and the sense of opposites (action and contemplation, vengeance and mercy) bridged by beauty. (Sidney's Scaramouche and Kurosawa's Sanjuro are among the models for the melees.) The skirmish in the Buddhist temple moves to the courtyard for a well-placed piece of slippery fruit under the villain's foot, "why pray to a clay goddess when you can worship a living god like me?" Coins thrown like ninja stars, hordes of minions sliced by twin daggers, all part of Cheng's graceful fierceness. The ultimate foe is the wicked abbot (Yeung Chi-hing) who's tainted the code of Kung Fu, the heroic drunkard confronts him in the woods—collapsed cabin and arterial spray, "the graveyard becomes a vegetable garden." Tributes range from the lysergic (Ashes of Time) to the antiseptic (Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon). With Lee Wan-chung, Wang Chung, Shum Lo, Han Ying-chieh, Yuen Siu-tien, Ku Feng, and Wang Ruo Ping.
--- Fernando F. Croce |