The Swordsman in Double Flag Town

To keep a promise made to his dying father, a young man crosses the desert to Double Flag Town to claim the bride he was betrothed to as a child. The town does not take him seriously; he looks clumsy, unlettered, entirely ordinary. That changes when he kills a man who assaults her, because the dead man's brother is a swordsman the whole region is afraid of, and he is coming to settle it. He Ping stages the film less like a wuxia than like a western. The dust, the emptied street, the shutters coming down, a town waiting for an hour to arrive: the traces of Sergio Leone and High Noon are right there on the surface. The fights are not drawn out and most of them are over in seconds. It stands as one of the first wuxia films made on the mainland after 1949 and as the opening part of the director's trilogy.