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After “Come Drink With Me” Hong Kong director King Hu probably could have stayed with Shaw Brothers Studio, but instead left the country for Taiwan where he would form his own company and in the years to come, make some of the best movies of his career. While the budget and conditions had certainly changed, Hu continued exploring the themes of his last feature in “Dragon Inn”, arguably his most popular movie aside from “A Touch of Zen”. As one of the most referred to entry in the wuxia genre, it not only provided cinephiles with great fight choreographies, great performances and a wonderful setting, with the architecture of the inn itself being the star of the show, “Dragon Inn” also proved how the genre would blend a highly entertaining formula with a very interesting and (after all these years) still quite appealing social commentary about the relationship of subject and ruler.

After “Come Drink With Me” Hong Kong director King Hu probably could have stayed with Shaw Brothers Studio, but instead left the country for Taiwan where he would form his own company and in the years to come, make some of the best movies of his career. While the budget and conditions had certainly changed, Hu continued exploring the themes of his last feature in “Dragon Inn”, arguably his most popular movie aside from “A Touch of Zen”. As one of the most referred to entry in the wuxia genre, it not only provided cinephiles with great fight choreographies, great performances and a wonderful setting, with the architecture of the inn itself being the star of the show, “Dragon Inn” also proved how the genre would blend a highly entertaining formula with a very interesting and (after all these years) still quite appealing social commentary about the relationship of subject and ruler.

In the late ’60s and ’70s, swordplay films across Taiwan and Hong Kong reemerged to a new wave of popularity. King Hu’s „Dragon Inn” (1967) took several box offices by storm and won the Golden Horse Award. By critics, it is regarded as one of the keystones of the genre, which influenced many others. And “Vengeance of the Phoenix Sisters” – by the “Dragon Inn”s editor Hung-min Chen – is one of the notable examples. As Professor Ru-Shou Robert Chen noted, the director followed the genre conventions of the wuxia set up by “Dragon Inn” (with the obligatory figure of the inn) but was also able to leave his trademark. Hung-min Chen found his inspirations also in westerns, and some scenes bear the visual style of Japanese chambara films. The latter has an explanation in the director’s biography – in the early 60s, as a Central Motion Picture Corporation employee, he...