Red Detachment of Women

The original tropical-gothic melodrama whose storyline was co-opted during the Cultural Revolution for both a dance drama and a 'model revolutionary opera'. Apparently there really was a women's militia which rebelled against local tyrants in Hainan Island in the 1930s. But this script is an outright fantasia, part Caged Heat (women in chains in torture dungeons) and part Maoist dogma (underground communists guide the uprising and the heroine's greatest moment is signing her application for Party membership). Xie Jin delivers the propaganda but doesn't disguise his nostalgia for an older current in romantic film-making; the film looks like a cousin of Black Narcissus, complete with the dishy Wang Xin'gang in the David Farrar role.