According to legend, more than a decade before Jackie Chan stumbled and swayed his way to stardom in the kung fu comedy Drunken Master, a 12 year old Chan played a child beggar alongside another inebriated wushu master. The film was the 1966 Shaw Brothers classic Come Drink with Me and the snockered shifu in question was Fan Da-pei, aka Drunken Cat, played by Yueh Hua. According to Wikipedia the original Chinese title of the film translates to "Great Drunken Hero" but the real hero of the story is a character named Golden Swallow who isn't drunk at all.

If you go looking for an American 60s action movie with a female protagonist you might find Faster, Pussycat! Kill! Kill! and then you likely won't find anything else. The two films couldn't be more different. While Faster was an exploitation film relying on cleavage to sell tickets, Come Drink with Me launched the career of the first female action star*, Cheng Pei-pei who plays the protagonist Golden Swallow. While the king of bad taste John Waters called Faster, Pussycat! Kill! Kill! "beyond a doubt, the best movie ever made" it was a financial flop and was either ignored or reviled by critics of the time. Come Drink with Me was a hit with critics and fans alike.

Come Drink with Me is a quintessential kung fu movie. It's got physics-defying fight scenes, Shaolin monks, terrible sound effects, bright red blood splatter and kung fu masters with supernatural abilities. The film opens with the son of a Governor getting kidnapped by a gang of bandits calling themselves the 5 Deadly Tigers. They want to use him as leverage against the Governor to get their master out of jail. The Governor instead sends his daughter Golden Swallow to free her brother.

I'm using wuxia and kung fu interchangeably here but there is a difference between the genres I think is worth mentioning. Kung fu movies tend to feature more "reality" based combat, while wuxia incorporates more fantasy elements. By "reality" based combat, I don't mean that the combat is realistic, but that the fights don't typically include fantastical supernatural abilities. Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon is a good modern example of wuxia while Donnie Yen's Ip Man films are straight kung fu movies.

While Come Drink with Me is considered a wuxia film, the supernatural elements are somewhat subdued. Golden Swallow's fights don't include much mystical kung fu wizardry. Sure, she has lightning-fast reflexes and can run up walls and such but she's not blocking sword strikes with her mind or anything like that. Drunken Cat, the aforementioned "great drunken hero", and his rival the evil Abbot Liao Kung do manifest supernatural abilities, such as summoning some kind of wind vortex from their hands but this is a relatively small portion of the action.

Golden Swallow is the kind of empowered female character you are much more likely to see in these old kung fu movies from the 60s and 70s than in any western-made action films from the same era. She destroys henchmen left and right for the first half of the film before Drunken Cat becomes more than a side character. Yet she still has to be rescued by a more powerful male character, so rest assured the patriarchy was alive and well during this era of Hong Kong cinema.

The film tries to shift focus to Drunken Cat in the second half and the story suffers for it. Drunken Cat's backstory seems tacked on, as if the filmmakers realized halfway into filming that they couldn't make a whole movie with a female protagonist. This interrupts Golden Swallow's character arc and robs her story of a satisfying ending. She doesn't get to improve her skills and defeat her rivals herself. Instead Drunken Cat intervenes, saving her again and completing his own character arc.

In spite of all that, Cheng Pei-pei still manages to steal the show. Before her film career Cheng was a ballerina. This was one reason director King Hu chose her for the role. Cheng's graceful, precise movements speak of her skill and inner confidence from the moment she appears on screen, even before her first fight. We can tell at a glance that this is a woman who knows what she's about. She lends an operatic quality to the fight scenes, with sweeping, flowing motions favoring style over realism in a way that would come to define the genre. Come Drink with Me was the realization of revolutionary secret: martial arts movies are dance movies for dudes.

*Mary Fuller could be considered the first female action star. She stared in silent action films in the early 1900s but her career was short-lived, especially in relation to Cheng Pei-pei's career which spanned more than 5 decades.

wuxia

Come Drink with Me: Female Empowerment and Dance Movies for Dudes