It's China in the year 1547. A minister has been executed and his two younger children sent into exile ... officially. The Eunuchs in charge and the bad boys of the Eastern Gate intend to kill them at the Dragon Inn on the border. As they move, however, an assortment of skilled swordsmen (and one swordswoman) show up at the Inn...
King Hu's martial arts movie has nasty villains, loner heroes, magnificent wide-screen Eastmancolor images (restored in 2013) and all sorts of crazy fight sequences in a dazzling array. There seem to be a few plot holes (people keep pausing in their fighting to talk), but that may be a matter of the standards of the Taiwanese cinema as opposed to my more western ideas. What strikes me in the storytelling technique is that the film maker seems to have seen and been influenced by the Man With No Name" trilogy, or at least YOJIMBO and SANJURO, drawing the same conclusions about cinema that Leone had. Chun Shin's character enters the Inn and encounters the agents of the Eastern Gate with the same wry, skilled, deadly sense of humor that Eastwood showed in his performances.
I'm not familiar with Taiwanese film-making of this era and genre. My experience has tended toward the Hong Kong offerings, with an emphasis on the Jacky Chan and Stephen Chow comedies. This is a very impressive introduction to the style and to King Hu
