A year has passed since the release of King Hu's blockbuster success at Shaw Brothers and two years since he had left Shaw Brothers Studio and went to Taiwan and co-founded his own studio to produce his next two films in Taiwan. This was the Taiwan still under the autocratic rule of the KMT, so it was surprising that his next two films focuses specifically on the cruelty of unchecked state-power.
In the run-up to the making of this film, Hong Kong and much of the world was caught-up in the exploits of a British spy called James Bond. Hu went to the movies and watched these films and was disturbed by what he saw and by what these movies implied in glorifying secret security organizations. As someone who had know life with both the KMT dictatorship and the colonial British authorities (including MI5) in Hong Kong, he saw no reason to praise them. Hu decides to make this film and A Touch of Zen (1971), in-part, as a criticism of the racist copaganda of the Bond franchise--using the Ming China secret police organization called the East Chamber (or Eastern Depot) Group (Dōng Chǎng in pinyin). This organization was suppose to be loyal only to the emperor, but was in-practice ran by eunuchs and corrupt officials in the Ming Court (according to this movie's own dating, the events here take place in 1457 in the last year of the reign of the Jingtai Emperor).
The opening of this film sees a family of a wrongly-purged Ming official being banished to the frontier of the country in exile. They are all attacked by agents of the East Chamber Group who have decided that they are too much of a liability to be left alive. The kids and guards are saved at the last moment by our first protagonists: two mysterious siblings who repel the assassins. Meanwhile, the other members of the East Chamber Group brutally commandeer the titular Dragon Inn and go out looking for the kids. Just after that we met another protagonist: a mysterious man in all white.
This second of the King Hu "trilogy" (along with Come Drink With Me (1966) & A Touch of Zen (1971)) carries over the Chinese Opera and Japanese martial arts cinema influence, but the music score is now incorporating Western music along with the Chinese Opera (specifically Beijing Opera) motifs and incidental music. The cinematography and the fight choreography has taken a big step up from where it was in Come Drink With Me (1966) The use of Taiwan's landscape and the costume design (which King Hu personally assisted with) are taken full advantage of. Hu wanted his first movie post-SB to count (and it would)!
This film took the Wuxia genre to another level (and it would have it's climax in Hu's next film). The fight choreography of Han Ying-jie is amazing and the fact that all of the protagonists are of near-equal strength to each other as fighters gives the action a special touch. Of course with hero protagonists this good, the villain antagonists have to bring it--and they do. The East Chamber Group are no slouches; unlike other martial arts and action films in-general, King Hu films do not like red shirts. The rank-and-file henchman are strong and if they have speaking roles they are really strong. The second and third in command are very formidable, but the big bad is possibly the strongest villain of any King Hu film. He is nigh-invincible and the heroes have to throw everything they have at him.
Another theme that comes into the movie after the halfway-point is racism. The Ming Dynasty saw China renew its territorial expansion into the Muslim Turkic frontier while fighting-off the former Mongol Yuans. All of this is playing in the background of the events of this movie. Two Turkic soldiers who were castrated (standard practice of the Ming) and forcibly-conscripted into the East Chamber Group defect to the heroes-side at the first opportunity and become crucial in the final fight of the film.
In the end, this film had a massive impact on the future of wuxia films and Chinese martial arts cinema as a whole. Shaw Bros came out with The One-Armed Swordsman the same year and King Hu immediately began work on his masterpiece. Dragon Inn (1967) became a massive hit with Asian audiences across the world. It broke box-office records in Taiwan and South Korea, and was the second-highest selling film in Hong Kong after...a James Bond movie. The combination of Japanese sword-play, Beijing Opera, and naturalism set in the Ming Dynasty made this hugely resonate movie for a generation of increasingly pissed-off Chinese cinema-goers enduring smug colonial and authoritarian rule in Hong Kong and Taiwan, respectively.
No comments:
Post a Comment