Dragon Inn: Poised for Battle

Dragon Inn’s earliest and most casually brilliant set piece is one of the few constructed for a single performer. Shih Chun, a regular Hu collaborator who would go on to star as the scholar-fool in A Touch of Zen, plays an enigmatic wandering swordsman named Xiao Shao-zi. In a movie built around dramatic entrances, he makes a particularly memorable one: crossing a stream with near-angelic poise, dressed in white, a green parasol on his shoulder. He sits down for lunch at the Dragon Gate Inn and proceeds to reveal his badassery in cunning little spurts of action. As will happen in subsequent fight sequences, featuring other newly arrived heroes, he finds himself surrounded by enemies but is obliged to see how long he can keep his identity under wraps, delaying all-out slaughter to the last possible second. This suspension of conflict results in one delightful sight gag after another. When one of the assassins demands that he hand over the noodle soup he has just ordered, Xiao flings the bowl across the room, where it lands on his enemy’s table without so much as a drop spilled. After someone slips poison into Xiao’s drink, he plays dead for several agonizingly long beats before spitting into his would-be killer’s face, and he later matter-of-factly orders another round of liquor midskirmish.

Clocking in at almost twenty minutes, this sequence unfolds within the confines of the inn, showcasing what the director can accomplish in such a stage-bound setting. Without sacrificing precision, Hu switches up his approach, alternating between stretches of languor and frantic motion, between long shots that map out zones of brewing tension and close-ups that relay the information being exchanged in the characters’ gazes. But it is Shih, with his spooky saucer eyes, who gives the section its steady pulse. His inner stillness is a blank slate onto which any mood can be projected, allowing a scene to pivot nimbly between levity and dread. Playing a character on whom nothing is lost, he’s the on-screen embodiment of what Hu sets out to create with the nuts and bolts of his film grammar: a heightened watchfulness operating underneath a tightly controlled surface.

Dragon Inn was the first time Hu perfected the interplay of widescreen compositions, fluid camera work, and rhythmic editing that would make him one of the most extraordinary formal innovators of his era—an auteur with an instantly recognizable signature, at a time when Chinese cinema had barely any to claim. Evincing the lasting influence of his earlier work as a set decorator at Shaw Brothers, a Hu scene can feel storyboarded to within an inch of its life, the product of an obsessive mind imposing order on chaos. He’s nothing if not a neat freak, and he makes a running joke out of the fact that his heroes are too: in the heat of battle, Xiao takes the time to tidy things up, cleaning blood off the tip of his parasol or ripping a loose piece of fabric from his clothing. Hu handled the conventions of wuxia as though they offered a kind of security, a framework so familiar and time-tested that it freed him to tackle more exciting challenges. In his films, the plasticity of the medium works in tandem with the puzzle-piece maneuverability of human figures, making for a subtle kind of rhyming effect.

While the martial-arts movie is sometimes viewed as the Asian counterpart to the western, Dragon Inn is so packed with choreographed movement (courtesy of Hu’s great collaborator Han Ying-chieh, who also stars in the film) that a more appropriate comparison might be the musical, a genre in which the physicality of a performer can seem in the same instant to be both the narrative force driving a scene and just another element in a director’s grand visual design. With no preexisting interest or expertise in martial arts, Hu conceived his fight sequences as spectacles akin to the dancing and acrobatics he would have seen in the Beijing opera productions he frequented as a child. Dragon Inn establishes its kinship with the musical right out of the gate­—in that dazzling sequence with Shih Chun, which is performed primarily (remarkably) from behind a table—but the association becomes all the more inescapable as the film approaches its final act and begins to open back out into the world beyond the inn.

In the scene that marks that shift, the movie’s one female knight-errant (Shangkuan Ling-fung), disguised as a man, gets to crouch behind walls and somersault over obstacles. Flanked by assassins, she annihilates them one by one, in a tracking shot that situates her against a vast expanse of sky. The soundtrack is a marvel of musique concrète, all scurrying feet, clanging metal, and heart-stopping caesuras, sometimes augmented by the nervous clacking of luogu percussion. After building the film’s opening hour primarily out of interior shots, Hu finally embraces the delirium of the sun-drenched outdoors, and it is thrilling to watch the fighters occupy the sprawl of the desert, no longer hemmed in by the inn’s claustrophobic spaces. While the characters relish their new range of motion, the film’s style indulges in intermittent moments of rupture. Rugged landscapes, with twisted trees and craggy mountains, cut into the elegant compositions. Where before Hu was content to watch the action mostly from a cool remove, he now uses just enough quick zooms, pans, and cuts to make us unsure of how to piece together what we’re seeing.