King Hu is a killer filmmaker. He made movies for Chinese audiences. Never paid any attention to foreign markets. This paid off in spades for one of the greatest films of all time, "A Touch Of Zen".

As great as that movie was this film is probably more important. Without "Lee Kahn" there might not even be an Asian film industry, and we would all be poorer for that.

After Bruce Lee died the "Kung Fu" market was lost and consigned to fad status. The apex and the nadir for the genre was when "Chinese Hercules", an insignificant film otherwise, actually made Box Office number 1 grossing movie list.

Both before and certainly after "Chinese Hercules" the main drive of Kung Fu movies was hucksters looking to turn a quick buck. They'd pick up the cheapest product they could (Chinese Hercules was rumored to have a $5,000 US negative cost) and then sell the pictures at a flat fee, usually one to three hundred bucks a week.

Flat fee films would never play the big first run houses. They were consigned to the grind houses. In LA that was in theaters like the World on Hollywood Blvd. The World was a "prestige" grind house, next to the porno Pussycat Theater. Most of the grind houses were downtown near skid row. You'd get 4 films for a $1 admission price and most of the theaters were open 24 hours. They employed an usher whose main job was to wake up the tenants who found it cheaper than a hotel room.

For the few who wanted to see one of the films it was an education that a DVD will never be able to recreate.

One of my perverse favorites from this time was a movie called "Hong Kong Cat". These guys had picked up for almost free a bunch of really bad Thai and Taiwan kung fu flics. They were so bad that there decision was to get a cheap but nifty looking black and white poster and then just cut out all the fight sequences and stick them together in any fashion they happened to fall in. This was amazing cinema. Some guy you'd never seen before would throw one punch and then there'd be a 3 minute fight scene featuring a whole different bunch of guys fighting and on and on for seventy minutes! Sometimes the fighters would re-appear later on but most of the time they didn't.

Then in the UK censorship had gotten ugly. They cut the films up so badly it was like watching hard-core porn on an R rated cable channel.

The best example of this was in Lee's "Way Of The Dragon". Lee walks out into the alley with the thugs and in the next shot he walks away from the alley while the thugs lie all beaten up on the ground!

"Sight and Sound" is a stuffy, pretentious British FILM magazine. Right around this time they published an article by Tony Ryan's called "Threads In A Labyrinth".

Ryan's was attempting to do for Chinese movies what Donald Ritchie had done for Japanese movies with his work on Ozu and Kurasawa.

The Labyrinth article attempted an auteur semiotic examination of Chinese cinema by examining King Hu's "The Fate Of Lee Kahn" and Chang Cheh's "Golden Swallow", with a history of each director's work until that time.

Ryan's article was brilliant and ended with the comment that these two men were merely examples and served his point to illustrate what were merely threads in a dense impressive cultural labyrinth. (Hence the gooney title)

Of note were his observations on the way the Chinese read films. In Western films we read left to right so that a plane flying right to left signifies danger and creates tension (as a simple example of composition). The Chinese read up and down and use a different dialect.

He also pointed out that the cultural imperative. To describe a phenomenal feat, such as jumping 6 feet straight up, the Chinese theater was used to a sort of hyperbole; so that the viewer had a different set of filters when watching a film.

Suddenly kung fu movies had cachet! Hong Kong's response was to up their price.

The Hollywood distributors response was to pick up more American indy and Italian films (Last House On The Left, giallo being the immediate beneficiaries, films like "They Call Her One Eye (Thriller)" "Gone In 60 Seconds" and "Sword Of Vengeance" (Part 3 of the Lone Wolf and Cub films) got chances they wouldn't have had otherwise.)

"The Fate Of Lee Kahn" started things rolling. It got a two week run at the Fox Venice (known for it's art film leanings) and at the Oriental Theater (known as a second run house), completely side stepping the grind houses.

In England it was used to side step the censors. Distributors rented theaters. To see the film you had to sign up for a private membership. To get the private membership you merely had to buy a ticket.

In America this practice is called Four Walling, where the distributor would take his film and rent the theater for the time needed, keeping all the profit. It was new in modern film distribution in England.

The end result was that in Europe, "Lee Kahn" made 86% of the Best Film Of The Year lists. In England some of the great Chinese movies suddenly had a new market.

Hong Kong didn't make much money from those deals. The USA was still the prize, but all the quality films were deemed too expensive. For a few thousand dollars you could buy some old Green Hornet episodes, splice them together and have a new Bruce Lee film, one that even played on the Champs Elysee in Paris complete with a 15 foot, half block long mural of Lee.

For Chinese movies the only thing selling were the super cheap Bruce Lee rip offs and the occasional hum dinger like "Master of the Flying Guillotine" and Chang Cheh's "Five Deadly Venoms".

And that could have been the fate of Chinese movies - the odd cheap film and the Art House presentation. But then came home video and "Black Belt Theater".

That's got little to do with King Hu though.

This is a film worth having.