Kong shan ling yu

It's amazing that a film as accomplished as this can fade from the collective memory - or at least the IMDb as a representation of it.

At a time when the Hong Kong industry was churning out its most popular product to a schedule, their greatest director King Hu took his crew off into a remote area and filmed this and LEGEND OF THE MOUNTAIN both featuring his elegant star and producer to be Hsu Feng.

Don't let anyone kid you that this is a work of art removed from the crass commerce of the Shaw Brothers and the rest but it is one clearly more seriously undertaken in the same tradition of the swordsman film.

They build up to the acrobatics in a way that gives them, if not plausibility, at a least suitable place in the film. The one piece if violence - White Fox murdering the lieutenant - is neatly turned into a grim joke. Plausibility is also derived from the detail of monastery life. No kung fu monks here. The inhabitants are spooked at the thought of working for a living too.

However this and the robbery plot are secondary to the beauty of the wide screen imagery, with each position in a camera movement a perfectly judged composition. The viewer carries away a sense treat memory of fabric, stone, foliage and water inhabited by attention getting characters.