I first saw Legend Of The Mountain (1979) four years ago on a Masters Of Cinema Blu-Ray. It’s still the most visually stunning wuxia film I have ever seen. I came relatively late to really exploring the genre, having grown up on such martial arts gems as Little Mad Guy (1982) before graduating to the heroic bloodshed films of the eighties and nineties. At this point though it’s very clear that King Hu is the master of wuxia.
Come Drink With Me (1966) is early King Hu and remains a landmark from the vantage point of film history for having reinvented the genre. In terms of King Hu’s personal development as a filmmaker some of the breath taking beauty of his later work is already present, particularly in the scenes at Drunken Cat’s (Ngok Wah) house and Golden Swallow’s (Cheng Pei-pei) roof top chase sequence. The fight at the inn which occurs early on in the film is also really impressive, displaying Hu’s adeptness at choreographing the camera around fights.
The weak link in Come Drink With Me is in its third act, almost precisely when the character Drunken Cat begins to kung-fu rocks. Until that moment the film had belonged to Golden Swallow and her antagonist Jade Faced Tiger (Chan Hung-lit); she the fearsome lone warrior, he the sadistic mad man clothed in white. Then, with the third act, it’s all about Drunken Cat. Golden Swallow fades into the background, a sub plot, going so far as to even deny viewers a proper show down with her mortal enemy. It feels as though the entire movie has changed, as if the last reel of a different film was cut into Come Drink With Me to replace a lost ending. It also doesn’t help that Golden Swallow is far more compelling and charismatic than her male counterpart.
Admittedly this criticism may be the product of Dragon Dynasty’s deplorable subtitles. It’s hard to follow a film where names and off handed remarks either keep changing or seem like some dadaist exercise. Out of nowhere the character of Drunken Cat is suddenly referred to as “Fan Hero”. Of course bad subtitles can be part of the fun with these movies, particularly when the movie itself is very obviously bad. In the case of Come Drink With Me this situation was frustrating more than anything else.
