Come Drink with Me · reception & legacy
1966 · King Hu
How Come Drink with Me has been received, argued over, and remembered.
The arc
A big hit for Shaw Brothers in 1966 that made a star of Cheng Pei-pei, it was little seen in the West for decades — until Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon (2000) sent cinephiles back to the source and it was recanonised as the film that reinvented wuxia.
What's debated
The perennial fan gripe: Golden Swallow is the icon on the poster, so why does the film keep handing the spotlight to Drunken Cat — is it really her movie at all?
Its footprint
The inn showdown is the ur-text for decades of martial-arts inn fights, echoed everywhere from Ang Lee's Crouching Tiger (which cast Cheng Pei-pei as Jade Fox in open tribute) to the swordplay homages of Tarantino, who spent years publicly flirting with a remake.
Where it stands
The 'you must have seen this' entry point of the wuxia canon — the film martial-arts cinephiles hand you before anything else, and a fixture of King Hu appreciation threads on Letterboxd.