Taiwan, 1967
Directed by King Hu
With Shih Chun (Xiao Shaozi), Tsao Chien (Wu Ning), Polly Shang-Kuan Ling-Feng (Chu Wei), Hsieh Han (Chu Xi), Bai Ying (Minister Cao), Miao Tien (Commander Pi), Han Ying-jie (Commander Mao)

The film opens with a wide shot capturing an impressive parade of warriors and officials streaming from the long wall of a palace, which makes up a thin line marking the horizon in the background. The people are arrayed in a couple of parallel, long, neat lines; between the lines moves ahead a solid, square block holding at its center a palanquin where a leader is sitting. A stentorian voice-over gives the context and the names: this is the middle of the 15th century, when the Ming dynasty let eunuchs rule the Chinese Empire; the man in the palanquin is Minister Cao, the most powerful of the eunuchs controlling the cogs and wheels of the bureaucracy and the security apparatus, in particular the special units of intelligence and police whose members are the stone-faces men parading with Cao; a play between low-angle and high-angle shots introduce to the audience Cao’s main acolytes, Commander Pi and Commander Mao.
This striking geometric presentation of a ruthless power is followed by a few, tense, graphic scenes giving the narrative its starting point. Cao has been coming to the scene of a public execution whose victim is a former minister and a fierce opponent of his. Meanwhile, this opponent’s female relatives are escorted away to a distant prison. But an unexpected event disturbs the plan: a single man, visually a surprising, isolated mass standing in a tree grove, compels the guards in charge of the prisoners to stand still even as one of the woman is fleeing; caught by surprise some obey his orders while he fights with the others.
Chu Xi would reappear later with his brother Chu Wei: again, the camera captures isolated figures walking through a forbidding rocky landscape, sticks moving inside a wider geometry. Earlier, another man appeared walking alone in the other part of the region where most of the film takes place, Xiao Shaozi becoming another isolated figure standing out awkwardly against a perfectly linear horizon, another lonely person ready to cope with a well-organized group, a detachment of Pi and Mao’s men occupying the rectangular space of the titular inn, in this vast, partly rocky and partly steppe-like corner of China where the commanders hope to capture back the women and guards that escaped them when Chu Xi first intervened.
The story is about the defeat those few persons inflict to a paramount power, how their skills with arms and tactics break the order that rows of warriors and carefully planned politics pretend to impose. The tension delicately builds up and is cleverly managed. Xiao Shaozi’s arrival at the inn reveals step by step, in a constantly playful manner and not just through dramatic stunts, his skills and perspicacity, till he eventually humiliates all the warriors settled there. Then comes the inn’s owner, Wu Ning, who has been on a trip; and later Chu Xi and Chu Wei knock at the door, pitching the film into a more complex, eventful course: it is the wicked and cunning fight between the malevolent men of power and a quartet of people united by their hatred of the eunuchs – Wu Ning was a former assistant of the executed minister while Chu Xi and Chu Wei, who is actually a sister of Chu Xi and not the young man everyone believes the character is, used to be his pupils; Xiao Shaozi is Wu Ning’s best friend, whose past remains a mystery but who cuts a brash and stubborn figure resenting abuse of power. More episodes turn the clash bloodier till the rebels manage to save the prisoners and to defeat Commander Mao, who is killed, and Commander Pi, who must run away.
The anger of Cao leads to inevitable reprisals: but the clever flight of the rebels moves the plot into another place and into more spectacular and symbolic levels. Set in gorgeous mountains, the fight now pits Cao, embodiment of an evil force that has perverted the political system as well as kung fu to serve selfish and devious goals against a group of simple individuals formed out of chance and relying on their own skills to defend fairness and respect. The ultimate, long-winded fight does not involve, like before, countless fighters rushing against a single person and dramatic, deadly efficient but barely credible swings of the blades: this becomes an astonishing pursuit through a huge space slowly weakening and bleeding the good while the bad seem indomitable – till the coup de grace, sudden, grisly and mind-blowing.
The kinetics of the sword fighting has actually evolved to be an audacious and impressive show. If the first fight between Chu Xi and the guards is shot from enough distance to capture the various changes of position the film slowly focuses on singular and stunning gestures, delivering a closer observation of the tension creeping over the faces, a fragmented vision made up of spectacular shots skirting any continuous description of the fight. Unexpected and amazing ideas crop up till the final showdown where incredible feats are contrived to beat the adversary, from forming a twirling circle to flying from tree to tree – at this point the film clearly feeds off the magical and fantastic adventures of a ghost story.
The dizzying visual performance of the fights, as splendidly shot as the landscapes are, gets an even more enticing and intriguing value from the touch of irony the characters have and the deliberate implausibility of the actions. The self-confident and deadpan attitude of Xiao Shaozi and his highly focused and skilled behaviors once he is in the inn upset and fascinate – a killer he may be, but graced with talent and humor, able to mock his victim one he has proved to do the impossible, like using the sticks he holds to eat his noodles to stop just in time the course of a scudding knife. That would set the tune for the rest of the rebellion which is not a manly, bloodied struggle but also a human adventure poking fun at the flaws of the characters, in particular Chu Xi, and offering a scathing view of the adversary, bold moves for a wu xia pian that strengthen the sympathy of the audience for the heroes.
“Long men ke zhen – Dragon Gate Inn” is also a wu xia pian playing up the female values: one of the key characters and of the best sword fighters turns out, in a complete surprise, to be a young woman. Chu Wei graciously represents a woman definitely apt at playing the same game than men, proud of her intelligence and fortitude, committed to the victory of principles over cynicism. A few low-angle, medium-sized, delicately composed shots are enough to suggest Xiao Shaozi is so impressed as to feel love, but the film never strays from a study of camaraderie that puts a woman on an equal foot with men and avoids to pigeonhole her in a more romantic, powerless role. What the future holds for her is unknown – but it derives from her adventures at the Dragon Gate inn: in the final shot, she is one of the three characters moving away to the left of the screen, the two others being her brother and Xiao Shaozi. Time is dusk and Wu Ning and the women they set free are on the right; both groups have bidden farewell; all those persons stand in a single line, delineated by a river on the foreground and the horizon on the background. Thus this final shot does emphasize the end of the story and runs contrary to the initial shots, as the nefarious geometrical order of a selfish power gives way to a more natural, simple, and human relation between decent and fair people carried by life’s peaceful stream.