Blood of the Dragon

A fighter known as White Dragon must get a list carrying the names of those supporting a rising to the prince who leads it. Against him stands the prime minister, who wants the list in order to crush the opposition. One thing makes the task harder still: the prince he is bringing it to also wants him dead, because he is settling the score for a humiliation his father suffered in a duel years before. The film works with the moulds of Hong Kong martial arts cinema of the seventies; the tension between loyalty and revenge is what drives the account. The account uses the list not as an aim but as an object that brings out what everyone intends. Jimmy Wang Yu plays the lead in Kao Pao-Shu’s ninety six minute Hong Kong film, completed in 1971.