I doubt that a more entertaining film will play Chicago this summer than The Fate of Lee Khan (1973), which screens three times this week at the Gene Siskel Film Center in a new digital restoration. Lee Khan may not be the greatest work by director King Hu (that would be either Dragon Inn or A Touch of Zen), but it contains so many pleasurable moments that it may be his most satisfying to watch. The film comprises a thrilling mix of comedy, action, and intrigue, combining the joys of multiple genres into a seamless whole. It also centers on the exhilarating—and ever-timely—theme of liberation, not only with regard to oppressed societies in general, but to women in particular. The Chinese-born Hu (who made many of his best films, including this one, in Taiwan) has been justly celebrated for his strong female characters, and Lee Khan contains a good half dozen of them; the women here are assertive, independent, and great fighters to boot. Yet one of the more remarkable things about the film is that it never pronounces its themes too obviously. They’re integrated gracefully into the action, propelling the drama with subtle moral force.
Hu punctuates the action-comedy with moments of great suspense, which he achieves, in Hitchcockian fashion, by attaching narrative weight to the smallest details. Liu tells Wan Jen-mi early on that not only is Lee Khan sending spies to Spring Inn in advance of his visit, but that more undercover resistance fighters are on their way too. The anti-imperial fighters will reveal themselves, Liu explains, by paying their hostesses with specially marked coins, and this bit of information imbues every time a customer takes out money with a sense of breathless anticipation. Hu achieves similar effects with small objects later in the film when Lee Khan and his entourage show up and the team of resistance fighters works together to retrieve the stolen rebels’ plans from a locked chest in the general’s room. This passage, which occurs after all the guests have revealed their true natures, merits comparison with the revered wine-cellar sequence in Hitchcock’s Notorious (1946), as Hu cuts brilliantly between Lee Khan’s room, where one of the serving girls tries as quietly as possible to break into the chest, and the dining area of the inn, where the other rebels cunningly distract the general’s men. Many critics have noted that Hu helped rejuvenate the wuxia genre by incorporating lessons of Hollywood-style editing, and I’d argue that his success in this area was seldom more effective than it is here.
Directed by King Hu. In Mandarin with subtitles. 106 min. Fri 6/28, 8 PM; Sat 6/29, 3 PM; and Wed 7/3, 6 PM. Gene Siskel Film Center, 164 N. State, 312-846-2800, siskelfilmcenter.org, $12.
