King Hu's 1967 Dragon Inn inspired a revolution in Chinese wuxiau (swordplay) melodrama. The film retains interest today although it is, certainly, not a great work notwithstanding the full Criterion presentation on a recent Blue-Ray DVD. You will like this film to a greater or lesser degree to the extent that you are interested in intricately choreographed combat with swords, daggers, and arrows staged in various locations and involving different martial arts corps de ballet. Dragon Inn has no appreciable plot, no narrative twists, and no real suspense -- characters snarl and make quips about each other, but they don't come with any sort of appreciable back-story. We don't know what, if anything, is at stake. The objective of all the combat could be epochal -- the salvation of the Imperial Chinese State -- or it could be a rivalry between competing schools of calligraphy. It doesn't really matter so long as the complex duels are expertly staged. In many respects, Dragon Inn is almost avant-garde in its eschewal of anything like a conventional plot, motivation, or characters. The picture shows how an extremely pure form of genre picture can overlap quite unintentionally with the avant-garde. In some ways, the movie resembles Wim Wenders great modern-dance epic, his film about Pina Bausch -- in both cases, different ensembles of performers, distinctive but, nonetheless, ciphers, perform motions intended to define the limitations of their bodies, the velocity and, conversely, the slowness with which they can move, their ability to maintain balance while engaged in frenetic gestural motion, all the while exploring the parameters of the space in which they are deployed. Dragon Inn ultimately is a film of staggering abstraction -- it can't be enjoyed as a story, but rather must be approached as a series of variations on a theme: a person with a sword again and again decimating 4 to 12 opponents in combat.
A powerful, blonde-haired eunuch has seized control of the Ming Dynasty. He executes one of his ministers and sends the official's two children, a boy and a girl, into exile. When the eunuch sends assassins to murder the young refugees, a mysterious group of swordsmen (and a woman warrior) intervene to slaughter the murderers and save the minister's children. At a border outpost in north China, an unprepossessing tavern stands in a desert of stone cobbles. This is Dragon Gate Inn, a adobe brick building that looks like something imported from a Sam Peckinpah movie. The Eastern Depot, a nasty group of killers converges on the Inn where the executed minister's children are hiding. A series of swordfights ensues. When the protectors of the children prevail, having wiped out about a 120 members of the Eastern Depot death squad, the chief eunuch himself appears borne on a palanquin to the sound of barbaric horns. The swordfighters protecting the children march up a mountain, apparently planning to cross into Tartar country. On the winding mountain pass road, more fighting occurs between the heroes defending the children and the eunuch who is himself a lethal swordsman. After an epic ten minute battle, the surviving heroes kill the eunuch although they are all badly wounded in the struggle. The film ends with a single valedictory shot -- some figures filmed from behind walking forward toward other warriors next to limpid lagoon. We can't see who these people are and the scene remains wholly enigmatic, a elegiac dying fall to all the mayhem.
Dragon Inn exhibits the intricate cross-fertilization between American Westerns and Asian action films. The starkly utilitarian tavern in the middle of nowhere, chili pepper ristras drying on the porch offering the only accent of color, is a staple of American westerns from Howard Hawks to Tarantino (who borrows extensively from this movie). The quirky denizens of the inn are similar to the loners who assemble for action in films like Rio Bravo and John Ford's Westerns. There are long set pieces in which the lone swordsman demonstrates his prowess -- he pitches a bowl of soup across the room so that it lands in front of the bad guy without spilling a drop; on one occasion, he catches a dagger hurled at him between his chop sticks and seems to swill poisoned wine without any effect. (The good guys are always plucking arrows out of the air with their bare hands. When they get slightly cut, they express outrage, amazed it seems that they could even be touched by an adversary's weapon.) The Eastern Depot villains are bad hombres, none of them distinguished by much in the way of character or, even, identifying features (they wear black) -- after all, they all "strut and fret" their brief time on the stage only to be exterminated by the heroes. The bad guys are so vicious that they hack a half-dozen hapless porters to death in recompense for them merely asking for a "gratuity" for hauling the villains' luggage (most;y chests full of swords) across the desert of cobbles and its adjacent canyons. The brother swordsman (part of the sibling duo) makes an insouciant entrances similar to Mifune's appearance in Yojimbo strolling across the wasteland with a sneer and an emerald green bumbershoot slung over his shoulder (the umbrella conceals his sword). It takes half the film's 111 minute running time to define the group of heroes, the counterforce to the eunuch's henchmen -- ultimately, there are five of them lead by Mister Wu, the proprietor of the inn, and formerly a general in the imperial army. One curiosity of the film is that the heroes relentlessly taunt the blonde-haired eunuch about his castration. This is a little disingenuous because two of the swordsmen defending the official's children are eunuchs themselves -- they confess that they were hauled away to the "castration parlor" for defying the villain. The chief Eunuch has something wrong with him (at one point it is said to be "asthma") and he reels and staggers between intricately balletic swordfights in which he is surrounded by all of the good guys. The good guys have all of the advantages and, so, in the end, the viewer is conflicted - you feel more than a little sneaking admiration for the grit of blonde, snarling eunuch: he fights to the last and, when his head is cut off, you get the sense that he would keep up the battle even beheaded if only this were possible. The final battle epitomizes the film: in the first stage, hordes of henchmen are cut down; this is followed by hand-to-hand duels between expert swordsmen, and, at last, we reach what is called in video gaming the "boss stage" -- this is when the surviving good guys square off against the biggest and baddest of the villains. In Dragon Inn, this fight is spectacularly picturesque, staged in high mountains gilded by the sun with the valleys overflowing with mist. It's like a Chinese scroll unrolled before our eyes and leading from landscape highlight to highlight, each scenic vista accompanying by a spectacular sword fight.
There's nothing to the movie, but it's abstract premise. It reminds me of John Carpenter's Assault on Precinct 13 -- what if a film were made that suppressed everything but the fighting sequences? On the Criterion disk, there is a short but indispensable video essay on the movie's editing and the way action is staged -- you will miss much of what makes Dragon Inn remarkable if you don't watch this extra. In fact, I recommend that you watch this segment before the movie itself. It will help you better appreciate what you are seeing.
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