Dragon Gate Inn (1967)
Jan. 31st, 2006 01:51 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
randy_byersKing Hu is widely considered the first great director of wuxia, or martial chivalry (or, as I first thought of them, flying swordsman), films. His movies have been very influential on later directors, and some of us first became aware of him after Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon (2000) came out and Ang Lee spoke of how the scene in the bamboo forest was a tribute to the one in King Hu's Touch of Zen (1970). On the Crouching Tiger commentary, Lee apparently talks about the influence of Hu's Come Drink With Me (1966), which he refers to by a literal translation of the Chinese title, Big Drunk Hero. That film starred Cheng Pei Pei, who shows up in Crouching Tiger as the villainous Jade Fox. More recently, Zhang Yimou also included an homage to the bamboo forest scene in The House of Flying Daggers (2004), and this is only the tip of the iceberg of King Hu's influence.
Come Drink With Me, which was made in Hong Kong for the Shaw Brothers studio, is often cited as a revolutionary moment in the tradition of wuxia films. (Stephen Teo has written an excellent overview and analysis of Hu's career.) After the success of that film, he broke away from the Shaw Brothers and made Dragon Gate Inn (also known as Dragon Inn) in Taiwan the next year. I "saw" it a few years ago on a bootleg tape that was so awful that I couldn't really make out what was happening. Recently I picked up what is apparently a bootleg DVD, and it is very good quality for a bootleg. There is apparently also a legitimate German DVD, but that's about it if you need English subtitles as I do.
It's worth hunting it down one way or another, because this is a beautiful, dynamic movie. It takes place in 15th century China. A rebellious official has been executed by an evil eunuch, and his family sent off in exile. After further consideration, the eunuch decides to have the family murdered too. This is to occur at the Dragon Gate Inn at the border. His agents go there to meet the victims, but first they are confronted by a wandering swordsman and then a brother and sister who have arrived separately to rescue the family.
But basically, after an early barrage of exposition, this is a thrillingly paced series of confrontations that escalate to the classic big finale. Mind you, this is not the manic pace of Hong Kong movies of the '80s and '90s. It has a more Japanese feel in the sense that there are periods of stillness between the action set-pieces, but the stillness is rife with a growing tension that the action then releases.
One of the presumptions of wuxia is that the characters have supernormal abilities achieved by their superior spiritual conditioning. One of the ways that King Hu revolutionized the wuxia film was by finding ways to suggest these supernormal abilities cinematically, mostly through innovative editing. Thus, for example, when the wandering swordsman Xiao enters the inn and sits down amidst a horde of bad guys, the first sign that he is in no danger is when he hurls a bowl of noodles across the room and lands it safely, spinning, on a table. Not long after that someone throws a dagger at him and he catches it with his chopsticks. At this point, we know this guy is someone to be reckoned with.
Hu also composes every frame beautifully, with frequent landscapes that look like classical Chinese paintings, very minimalist and pleasingly shaped. He moves from the natural beauty of the surrounding landscapes into tightly choreographed ensemble pieces within the inn, using the constrained space to amp up the tension. He is also very creative with the use of the soundtrack. (One place this bootleg falls down is in the reproduction of the mono soundtrack, which sounds thin and whiny at times.) As with stillness, he uses silence as tension builds, then a sudden burst of percussion to release it. He seems to play around with the sound editing, too, so that cries of people in combat are sometimes doubled, or echoed on the off beat of the action, like a stumbling fall.
David Bordwell has written about Hu's use of the "glimpse," where we see only a flash, or the edge, of the action. This was one way that Hu tried to suggest his hero's supernormal powers, as though they are too fast for the human eye to follow. This is also how he suggests flight, with quick cuts that capture fragments of the flight path, or a succession of cuts that show a character landing in different trees in a series of jumps, as thought the camera is chasing to keep up with him. There is a heady, headlong sense of movement at times, interwoven with dancelike interactions of groups of people and the movement of the camera through and around them.
Poetry in motion. Come Drink With Me and Touch of Zen are probably easier to find, and they are both great movies too. Touch of Zen is probably his masterpiece, transforming from a ghost story to realpolitikal intrigue to spiritual transcendence as the protagonist's scope of vision increases, like science fiction's conceptual breakthrough, or the unfurling of the whole wide world. All of his movies feature fierce female fighters, too, with Polly Shang Kwan in Dragon Gate Inn and the transcendant Hsu Feng in Touch of Zen joining Cheng Pei Pei in the pantheon of his frequently cross-dressing heroines.
Dragon Gate Inn was remade in 1992 by Tsui Hark and company. The basic story of the rescue of an executed official's family is the same, but all the main characters are different. The intrigue is thicker (layering Sweeney Todd into the mix) and the action is more frenetic. The finale is a hysterical stroke of Grand Guignol that has to be seen to be believed. It is perhaps a little too busy for its own good, and I think I prefer Hu's sparer original, but it's well worth checking out too, particularly for the performances of Maggie Cheung and the great Brigitte Lin, who is a worthy successor to Cheng Pei Pei and Hsu Feng.
Come Drink With Me, which was made in Hong Kong for the Shaw Brothers studio, is often cited as a revolutionary moment in the tradition of wuxia films. (Stephen Teo has written an excellent overview and analysis of Hu's career.) After the success of that film, he broke away from the Shaw Brothers and made Dragon Gate Inn (also known as Dragon Inn) in Taiwan the next year. I "saw" it a few years ago on a bootleg tape that was so awful that I couldn't really make out what was happening. Recently I picked up what is apparently a bootleg DVD, and it is very good quality for a bootleg. There is apparently also a legitimate German DVD, but that's about it if you need English subtitles as I do.
It's worth hunting it down one way or another, because this is a beautiful, dynamic movie. It takes place in 15th century China. A rebellious official has been executed by an evil eunuch, and his family sent off in exile. After further consideration, the eunuch decides to have the family murdered too. This is to occur at the Dragon Gate Inn at the border. His agents go there to meet the victims, but first they are confronted by a wandering swordsman and then a brother and sister who have arrived separately to rescue the family.
But basically, after an early barrage of exposition, this is a thrillingly paced series of confrontations that escalate to the classic big finale. Mind you, this is not the manic pace of Hong Kong movies of the '80s and '90s. It has a more Japanese feel in the sense that there are periods of stillness between the action set-pieces, but the stillness is rife with a growing tension that the action then releases.
One of the presumptions of wuxia is that the characters have supernormal abilities achieved by their superior spiritual conditioning. One of the ways that King Hu revolutionized the wuxia film was by finding ways to suggest these supernormal abilities cinematically, mostly through innovative editing. Thus, for example, when the wandering swordsman Xiao enters the inn and sits down amidst a horde of bad guys, the first sign that he is in no danger is when he hurls a bowl of noodles across the room and lands it safely, spinning, on a table. Not long after that someone throws a dagger at him and he catches it with his chopsticks. At this point, we know this guy is someone to be reckoned with.
Hu also composes every frame beautifully, with frequent landscapes that look like classical Chinese paintings, very minimalist and pleasingly shaped. He moves from the natural beauty of the surrounding landscapes into tightly choreographed ensemble pieces within the inn, using the constrained space to amp up the tension. He is also very creative with the use of the soundtrack. (One place this bootleg falls down is in the reproduction of the mono soundtrack, which sounds thin and whiny at times.) As with stillness, he uses silence as tension builds, then a sudden burst of percussion to release it. He seems to play around with the sound editing, too, so that cries of people in combat are sometimes doubled, or echoed on the off beat of the action, like a stumbling fall.
David Bordwell has written about Hu's use of the "glimpse," where we see only a flash, or the edge, of the action. This was one way that Hu tried to suggest his hero's supernormal powers, as though they are too fast for the human eye to follow. This is also how he suggests flight, with quick cuts that capture fragments of the flight path, or a succession of cuts that show a character landing in different trees in a series of jumps, as thought the camera is chasing to keep up with him. There is a heady, headlong sense of movement at times, interwoven with dancelike interactions of groups of people and the movement of the camera through and around them.
Poetry in motion. Come Drink With Me and Touch of Zen are probably easier to find, and they are both great movies too. Touch of Zen is probably his masterpiece, transforming from a ghost story to realpolitikal intrigue to spiritual transcendence as the protagonist's scope of vision increases, like science fiction's conceptual breakthrough, or the unfurling of the whole wide world. All of his movies feature fierce female fighters, too, with Polly Shang Kwan in Dragon Gate Inn and the transcendant Hsu Feng in Touch of Zen joining Cheng Pei Pei in the pantheon of his frequently cross-dressing heroines.
Dragon Gate Inn was remade in 1992 by Tsui Hark and company. The basic story of the rescue of an executed official's family is the same, but all the main characters are different. The intrigue is thicker (layering Sweeney Todd into the mix) and the action is more frenetic. The finale is a hysterical stroke of Grand Guignol that has to be seen to be believed. It is perhaps a little too busy for its own good, and I think I prefer Hu's sparer original, but it's well worth checking out too, particularly for the performances of Maggie Cheung and the great Brigitte Lin, who is a worthy successor to Cheng Pei Pei and Hsu Feng.
