How two of King Hu’s best martial arts movies, Raining in the Mountain and Legend of the Mountain, have hardly any fight scenes
- Shot simultaneously on location in the mountains of South Korea using the same actors, the films are spiritual rather than gladiatorial
- King Hu knew little about martial arts styles, being more interested in the aesthetics of movement and Buddhist ideas about transcendence and nirvana
Although King Hu helped launch the new wave of wuxia films with Come Drink with Me in 1966, the director – unlike many of his contemporaries – was not particularly interested in martial arts styles. Hu often said in interviews that he knew little about martial arts and used his knowledge of the movements of Beijing Opera when discussing fight scenes with choreographers.
The director’s primary interests were the aesthetics of movement, and – even though he was not himself a Buddhist – the ideas of transcendence and nirvana. His fascination with both is illustrated in two of his later masterpieces, Raining in the Mountain and Legend of the Mountain, both of which were filmed between 1977 and 1978 and released in 1979.
The two films are intriguing in many ways. They were shot on location in South Korea, making use of the country’s many Buddhist temples and mountainous locations. What’s more, both films were shot at the same time, with the two shoots taking place in parallel rather than back to back. Even though the storylines of the films are completely unconnected, Hu used the same cast members in both films, with actors swapping between roles during the two shoots.
Raining in the Mountain and Legend of the Mountain are also not strictly speaking wuxia films, and perhaps they are not even martial arts films at all.
The former, which is deeply philosophical, features some scenes of kung fu rather than sword-fighting, but focuses more on the deceitful relationships of the characters. The latter, an entertaining story about a demonic ghost, has action scenes featuring magic and supernatural explosions, but no martial arts. But the way the characters move about the sets and locations of both films is choreographed with the precision and accuracy of a martial arts scene.
Raining in the Mountain also features northern Chinese-style acrobatics, as well as long “Zen” leaps which were often carried out with the aid of trampolines, and Legend of the Mountain uses wirework to enable a character to fly.
How Jimmy Wang’s One-Armed Boxer gave kung fu films a tougher look
The opening of Raining in the Mountain is a cinematic tour de force which features a thief and her accomplice creeping around the vast grounds of a Buddhist temple. Hu uses a wide-angle lens to locate them in the landscape as they move, and frequently shoots through doorways to add mystery. Rival groups of characters are often shown moving around the frame at the same time.
The two films, Hu said in a 1979 interview in the book King Hu in His Own Words, were intended to be very different, despite their shared cast and location.
“Legend of the Mountain is the love story of a human and a ghost. It’s a Song dynasty short story. It tells about a struggle that occurs in the ghostly realm. The ghost’s main objective is to be reincarnated as human. But being a ghost has its convenient aspects – for example, you can work magic,” says Hu. The script was written by his wife, Chung Lin, at the time the dean of arts at Hong Kong Baptist University.
Raining in the Mountain, which Hu wrote, combines a storyline about different groups of individuals vying to steal an ancient Buddhist scripture from a monastery with that of a group of monks jockeying to be the next abbot. “A monastery is a collective that has to be governed,” Hu said. “For those who are in charge, is there also a contradiction between their philosophy and their actions?”
Eventually the abbot chooses a criminal to replace him as he has no desire to take the position, and the scroll is copied and burned to demonstrate that the material object itself has no value – it’s what it says that counts.
Hu says his original idea was to contrast the esoteric way that Buddhism was practiced in India with the more practical form of the religion in China. The story moved away from that, but the two films do show differences between the Chinese Buddhism of Raining in the Mountain and the more mystical Tibetan form which provides the backdrop to the story in Legend of the Mountain.
In the latter film, Hsu plays the pernicious ghost-demon Melody, who is scheming to steal a Buddhist scroll from a naïve young artist who has been hired to copy it. If she obtains the scroll, it will give her power over other ghosts and demons. Melody tricks the artist into marriage and, as the film unspools, it becomes clear that all the characters in the film except the artist are ghosts. A lama battles Melody throughout, and the two duel by playing drums.
The temple in the film looks vast, but in actual fact is a composite of several temples in South Korea. Producer Sun Jiawen said: “Each day we spent four to five hours trekking the mountains, looking for remote temples. We spent 20 days and travelled nearly the whole of Korea. The big temple in Raining in the Mountain was in reality several temples edited together.”
“The architecture of Korean palaces and temples is entirely similar to that of China,” Hu told film critic Liang Liang in 1978. “In the past, the architectural plans for Korean palaces had to be approved by the Chinese imperial court, because Joseon used to be a vassal state of China,” he added, referring to the dynasty that ruled the Korean peninsula from 1392 to 1897.
Hu’s demand for authenticity led to trouble at one temple. The production crew found a 100-year-old Buddhist scripture which Hu wanted to shoot, but the monks forbade him. So the film’s crew entered the temple disguised as tourists with cameras in their bags, bribed the monk in charge of the library, and filmed it anyway.
This resulted in the imprisonment of the producer and two crew members for three days. The footage containing the images of the scripture was smuggled to the US Information Agency in Seoul, where it was hidden from the authorities, and can be seen in the film’s library sequence.
In this regular feature series on the best of Hong Kong martial arts cinema, we examine the legacy of classic films, re-evaluate the careers of its greatest stars, and revisit some of the lesser-known aspects of the beloved genre. Read our comprehensive explainer here.
Want more articles like this? Follow SCMP Film on Facebook
