The Fate of Lee Khan

An inn on the steppe in the Yuan dynasty. The women working there are all agents of the resistance, playing waitress, cook and innkeeper. The person they are waiting for is Lee Khan: the empire's most powerful man in the region, who holds a copy of the rebels' battle plans. Lee Khan comes to the inn. The plan is simple: take him there. But Lee Khan has a calculation of his own. King Hu directs. Li Li-hua plays the innkeeper, Angela Mao is one of the resistance, and Roy Chiao plays Lee Khan. The structure is almost entirely in one place. The first part introduces the customers, cheats and spies arriving at the inn; the tension is built between the tables before any fighting starts. King Hu counts as the director who changed the sword film as a genre. He builds the fights on movement taken from Peking opera and cuts them in fragments; the leaps that hang in the air are a pattern he introduced. The number and function of the women is striking for its time; they carry most of the narrative. The interior of the inn is used in detail: the galleries, the stairs and the arrangement of tables become the geography of the fights. Who it is for: viewers who like classic Hong Kong sword films and King Hu's cinema. Who it is not for: the first half is slow, there are many characters, and the sides are confusing without the historical context.