Raining in the Mountain (1979) King Hu’s Spiritual Heist (Review)

When you hear stories of directors using the same sets, locations and actors for two movies on the bounce, the sort of names that would fit the bill belong in the same conversation as Roger Corman and his peers. This is not what you expect to hear about King Hu. Yet, he shot Raining in the Mountain and Legend of the Mountain back to back with the same cast of regulars you can find throughout his entire body of work in the same area of South Korea in the same beautiful ancient monastery. Where King Hu differs here from Corman is the class of the productions: Hu is regarded as one of the grandmasters of martial arts cinema, pre-dating the boom of Bruce Lee and the Shaw Brothers international successes. Raining in the Mountain and Legend of the Mountain may both centre around a scroll and feature the same players and locales, yet the films themselves couldn’t be more different. Legend is a fantasy movie featuring malevolent spirits and magical powers, Raining is equal parts heist picture to steal the scriptural text of “The Mahayana Sutra”, hand-copied by Tripitaka and part process to see who will be the successor of the current abbot.

Eureka’s Masters of Cinema present this release with a commentary from the always good value Tony Rayns and a visual essay from David Cairns. Earlier, more mainstream titles have seen the light of day, either through the Eureka or 88 films that chimed in with their release of Come Drink with Me – not to be confused with the similarly titled British TV dine-em-up.

With the release of this and its sibling, we are well into the outliers of his body of work. Much of his earlier, more famous work played out like traditional martial arts cinema, only more epic in its values as afforded by being shot on location in Taiwan. Hu’s relationship with martial arts was almost entirely contrary to his peers. More traditional Shaw brothers’ directors employed fights in a way where you’d never go more than 20 minutes without seeing someone throw down. Here, you are talking about maybe 5 minutes throughout the film. Another aspect of the martial arts film is incredibly convoluted plotting that invokes the history of China and its many dynasties and civil wars, which again is another way that Hu diverts from the norms.

Raining on the Mountain is a film from a legendary voice of the martial arts genre that has a meagre plot and little fighting. The resultant film is a slow one. Away from those parameters, addressing the film on its terms and you will find something that moves at quite a clip. While no one may be fighting, that doesn’t mean there is no movement. The cast never sits still with all the separate parties skulking, running, dipping and diving around this lavish historical complex giving the cinematographer, Henry Chan, ample opportunity to experiment. All King Hu movies are gorgeous on the pure premise of the locations and wide-angle lenses he uses, capturing the full majesty of Taiwan (South Korea, in this case) and its historical landscapes. While it would be imprecise to describe this as anything other than slow, that doesn’t mean there isn’t a feast for the eyes somewhere else in the mix.

The two most famous faces in Raining in the Mountain are Hsu Feng (A Touch of Zen) and Tien Feng (King Boxer & Fist of Fury). Hsu Feng is White Fox, a female thief and the moral centre of the film whose character goes through the most development and growth, yet, we also see her engage in the most combat. Her fights involve trying to steal something in scrambles where all the would-be thieves are trying to ply their trade whilst also avoiding detection. Tien Feng may not feature as prominently as they first appear. He is a military man attending the succession event hoping to benefit from either the theft of the priceless script or whoever the next Abbott might be. The number of times he changes plans makes him appear weaker than his grand ideas of position imply. Interestingly, his lieutenant Cheng-Chang (Kuang Yu Wang) emerges from his shadow to become the biggest threat.

Therein is a recurring theme employed throughout Hu’s script. He introduces a character in a scene where they appear to be affluent, intelligent and powerful, only for events to unfold with unexpectedly fatal or life-changing consequences which show them to be ruled by greed and selfishness. This thematically plays into the idea at the core of who is and isn’t deserving of power. The deserving accept Buddhism into their lives, and those who don’t – well, they aren’t so lucky.

In his early career, King Hu made two definitive martial arts films with Touch of Zen or Dragon Inn. As Cairns discusses in his visual essay, Hu struggled to get films made after the international success of Bruce Lee, as the thing which audiences demanded changed almost overnight. Gone was the international interest in patient, character-driven dramas with a few action set pieces. In their place was a demand for more visceral, internationally accessible movies fronted by stars like Lee and Gordon Liu. After that cut off, you can see Hu double down on what made his films tick. With his later films being slower, more patient and much more likely to lean into Chinese history, mythology and mysticism – the double bill he produced for a year in South Korea are emblematic of this evolution. As such, the audience who would get the most of Eureka’s newest entrant to the Masters of Cinema stable changes. Raining in the Mountain will not satisfy demands for action, spills and thrills – instead, he cuts closer to the work of Thailand’s Apichatpong Weerasethakul: a directorial voice as alluring as it is alienating.

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