The Fate of Lee Khan

King Hu’s Yingchun ge zhi fengbo (The Fate of Lee Khan, 1973) marks the director’s return to Hong Kong after seven years in Taiwan – a period that yielded his two most acclaimed and enduring works, Long Men Ke Zhan (Dragon Inn, 1967) and Xia Nu (A Touch of Zen, 1971), released by Union Film Company. Hu had walked out of a contract with Shaw Brothers Studio immediately after the breakout success of Da Zui Xia (Come Drink with Me, 1966), playing out the time-honoured conflict between ambitious artist and iron-fisted businessman, and set off to Taiwan. However, the promise of greater artistic freedom proved to be a double-edged sword. Dragon Inn’s unprecedented success had propelled Hu and the entire wuxia pian genre to even greater popularity, but the subsequent passion project of A Touch of Zen was marred by an overlong and unwieldy production, botched distribution (playing in hacked-up versions to most territories) and a decidedly cooler reception by the viewing public, who perhaps found the film’s elegance and lofty spiritualism at odds with a developing appetite for leaner, meaner kung fu fixes.¹ A Touch of Zen would eventually receive its laurels after premiering fully restored at the 1975 Cannes Film Festival, gaining Hu international recognition, but for now his career had taken something of a hit. The solution, it seemed, was to go back to the inn. 

Martial arts cinema and the Hong Kong film industry at large were undergoing a major shift at this time. King Hu had helped usher in a new era of wuxia pian, but with the explosive arrival of Bruce Lee onto the scene in 1971, chivalry and swordplay were already beginning to fall out of fashion in favour of unarmed combat and highly physical stuntwork.² Star power, too, had become a bigger factor than ever. The Shaw Brothers powerhouse now had a veritable challenger in Golden Harvest, founded by producer and fellow Shaw Brothers defector Raymond Chow, who was able to entice Bruce Lee into a two-picture deal by offering him substantial creative control.

This two-picture deal at Golden Harvest was also an appealing prospect to Hu, as he would be afforded enough freedom provided the studio could maintain rights to whichever film they deemed more commercially viable – between The Fate of Lee Khan and Zhong lie tu (The Valiant Ones, 1975), they opted for the former.³ Both films are spectacular examples of Hu’s craftsmanship at its most narratively efficient; they are tight, thrilling and immaculately staged. But it is in The Fate of Lee Khan that we can best see how Hu weathered this transitional period in both his career and the artform.

Like Dragon Inn before it, The Fate of Lee Khan immediately follows Hu’s own hand-painted opening titles with rapid-fire historical table-setting. The year is 1366, the waning days of the Yuan dynasty. General Zhu Yuanzhang prepares to overthrow Mongol rule. A group of Zhu’s disciples gather at the remote Welcoming Spring Inn, where they have caught wind that fearsome inspector general Lee Khan (Tien Feng) plans to obtain a secret map from a spy among the Han rebel forces. The inn’s proprietor, Madam Wan (Li Li-hua), enlists the help of four plucky street criminals (Angela Mao, Helen Ma, Hu Jin, Shangguan Yan’er) to pose as waitresses in anticipation of Lee Khan’s arrival.

Angela Mao – here as pickpocket “Peony” – was already an established star at Golden Harvest prior to the Bruce Lee boom. Before starring alongside Lee in Enter the Dragon (1973), her appearances in He qi dao (Hapkido) and Tie zhang xuan feng tui (Lady Whirlwind, both 1972) had elevated her to legendary status. Aside from being a highly-skilled martial artist, Mao approached the rich characterisation of her roles with a seriousness that set her apart from her peers.⁴ In The Fate of Lee Khan, her role is more two-dimensional, but Hu was not one to enforce dramatic arcs onto his characters, and here the details come from the interplay between the various denizens of the inn rather than any individual. The film was marketed both domestically and internationally with Mao front and centre – the perfect mix of name bankability and genuine martial arts aptitude that audiences had come to demand. (This was to be the only collaboration between Angela Mao and King Hu, but it’s worth mentioning that Mao now has her own restaurant in New York City, so we can consider this her big break into the hospitality industry.) 

Hu assembled his regular players to round out the large ensemble but, in the spirit of the many hidden motivations and sliding allegiances in the film, had them play against type. For instance, Hsu Feng contrasts her swooning heroism in A Touch of Zen with a delightfully villainous turn as Lee Khan’s steely-eyed sister, Wan’er; Roy Chiao, the unconquerable monk who delivers divine transcendence at the climax of that same film, here plays Lee Khan’s increasingly suspicious right-hand man, Cao (a double agent for the Han rebels). Tien Feng, playing the titular Mongol, would continue to embody menacing or unscrupulous types in King Hu’s later pair of films made in Korea: Shan zhong zhuan qi (Legend of the Mountain) and Kongshan Ling Yu (Raining in the Mountain, both 1979). Li Li-hua, although not a martial artist, lends the necessary commanding screen presence to the film’s most substantial role, Madam Wan, having been a recognised star since the 1940s in all manner of films, from erotic dramas to Shaw Brothers Peking opera adaptations. Her appearance here suggests the old guard – an earlier era of Hong Kong cinema that Hu respected and wished to carry through.

The exceptional female ensemble in The Fate of Lee Khan makes this a prime example of King Hu’s “greatest legacy”, as Stephen Teo calls it: “…the popularisation of the female knight-errant figure as a revitalising heroine in both the wuxia and kung fu forms.”⁵ David Desser makes the case that this element of Hu’s films is “historically overstated”⁶ as their value as feminist allegories is negligible, but Teo’s claim that Hu “virtually created the image of female stoicism in the martial arts”⁷ is certainly evidenced by the wave of women-fronted films that immediately followed Come Drink with Me and Dragon Inn, and the debt to King Hu cited by Tsui Hark and Ang Lee in their own contributions to the female knight-errant canon decades later.⁸

As the final entry in the unofficial Inn Trilogy following Come Drink with Me and Dragon Inn, The Fate of Lee Khan maximises the potential for the interior layout and mise-en-scène of the inn setting to be incorporated into the film’s structure and tonal complexity, beyond simply just a stage for the action. In the opening half, Hu establishes the space, stakes and character dynamics, mounting the tension with a constantly cluttered frame – tables, chairs and balconies enter by surprise on different planes, and our attention is dawn to the bustling movement between them as the camera follows the characters’ gazes. The tone, while tense, is often comedic as we observe the fussy, lecherous or outright hostile customers square up against the serving staff, who have no qualms with hurling stools and dishcloths to incapacitate misbehavers. 

At the exact halfway mark, Lee Khan’s classic villain entry, heralded by three sets of henchmen, throws everything that’s been established into disarray. The space becomes compromised, and as characters’ allegiances inch closer to being revealed, the demarcated lines of morality are made more visible in the physical space of the inn.⁹ Multiple camera set-ups in this second half see Hu play with depth of field and the framing of groups against individuals, pushing the image wide open. The climactic skirmish out in the open air works as stark visual contrast to the tight interiors – now no motive is left unseen.

What distinguishes the action in The Fate of Lee Khan and The Valiant Ones from Hu’s other films – and certainly those which had come before – is the presence of choreographer Sammo Hung, who was as representative of the new wave of Hong Kong martial artists as Angela Mao, if not more so. Earlier King Hu films had been choreographed by Han Ying-chieh (who plays the itinerant begging musician here, a reused stock character from Come Drink With Me), but Golden Harvest’s prized stuntman Sammo Hung was Hu’s pick to help him bridge the gap between wuxia style combat and kung fu. There is no shortage of swordplay in The Fate of Lee Khan, but as assailants are disarmed – or, in many cases, the blades are literally broken, offering a neat metaphor for unarmed combat’s domination – the kung fu takes centre stage. Teo notes the multi-dimensionality of this type of action, as a character’s mastery of unarmed combat communicates a higher level of skill, if we are to understand unarmed combat as traditionally the highest form of combat.¹⁰

Hu’s penchant for trampolines and Hung’s penchant for backflips are unsurprisingly an excellent match, and Hu’s abstracted editing style (the effect of “momentary indiscernibility” coined by David Bordwell as “the glimpse”¹¹) complements Sammo Hung’s own style of blurred motion. Bordwell has done the maths and tells us the average shot length in the final reel of the film is 2.4 seconds, but many of Hu’s “glimpse” shots run between 7 and 14 frames.¹² Cross-cutting rapid flashes conveying pure (often physically impossible) motion with the impressive legibility of Hung’s stuntwork creates an altogether different rhythm and effect in both The Fate of Lee Khan and The Valiant Ones. The expertise of the performer shines through, but the ecstatic, faster-than-the-eye quality still propels these sequences along.

The final moments of The Fate of Lee Khan see almost all our heroes dispatched. There is an overwhelming sense of collective effort to triumph over evil, which remains a key component of King Hu’s cinema. When Lee Khan finally meets his fate, he is felled by a flurry of kung fu blows, abstracted into kinetic flashes by Hu’s rapid cuts. We are left with heroes slain, the inn burning, but the battle won. King Hu has prevailed.

Yingchun ge zhi fengbo/The Fate of Lee Khan (1973 Hong Kong 105 mins)

Prod Co: King Hu Film Productions, Golden Harvest Company Dir: King Hu Scr: King Hu, Chung Wang Ed: Yung-Tsan Liang Phot: Chao Yung Chen Mus: Joseph Koo

Cast: Li Li-hua, Angela Mao, Helen Ma, Hu Jin, Shangguan Yan’er, Tien Feng, Hsu Feng, Roy Chiao

Endnotes