Red Sun (Soleil rouge)

 Toshiro Mifune, Charles Bronson,  Alain Delon and Ursula Andress.

 That's it, what else do  you need? Go watch it already.

 OK, fine: Red Sun is a French-Italian coproduction from 1971 shot, like so many Spaghetti Westerns, in Almeria, Spain. It was directed by Terence Young, a brit whose output was as varied as it was diverse; He's best known for a couple of early Bond classics (Russia With Love and Dr No), but his work also includes The Jigsaw Man, Safari and Triple Cross. While the premise - Samurais and cowboys! sounds a bit cynical (as well as awesome), Young was clearly interested in the subject; He had previously written an original script for the '60s OSS117 films that moved the action to Tokyo.

 So let's talk about those samurai, then. They're guarding an ambassador from Japan, who's travelling from San Francisco to Washington to present a ceremonial blade to the president.
 Unfortunately for them, the train is robbed by a notorious outlaw gang led by Link (Bronson). His second in command, Gauche (Delon) snatches the ceremonial katana and kills one of the samurai... and shortly afterwards betrays Link and leaves him for dead, taking all the loot.

 The ambassador revives link, and tasks him to help the surviving samurai, Kuroda (Mifune), with bringing back the weapon before a week is done, or do as honor demands (hara-kiri). He then gives Kuroda a rope with seven knots to remind him of his promise. This, of course, becomes an extremely badass visual reminder as every morning the samurai unties one more knot.

 While he tries to escape a few times, Link's goals actually align with Kuroda's; he wants to hunt down Gauche to discover where he took the money from the train robbery. The problem is that the samurai is honor-bound to kill Gauche on sight.
 It's a buddy comedy, then, as the two men develop rapport and respect for each other - with the added bonus that since Kuroda of course is the straight, ultra-serious half of the duo, Link must then pick up the slack and be the talky, funny one. And Bronson hits it out of the park, playing his outlaw with a genteel, easy charm, and some pretty damn funny lines.

 On their way they pick up Gauche's main squeeze Cristina (Andress), your traditional feisty, amoral western whore, to use as a bargaining chip. They also piss off a band of marauding Comanches on their way, setting the table for one of those forced alliances at the end as Gauche joins the heroes to hold off an indian attack.

 It's a little more violent and sleazy than you'd expect, given its pedigree; the action is pretty bloody- mostly bloodstains, but there's a couple of squirting wounds as well, and Andress shows a fair amount of skin. Standard disclaimers for all spaghetti westerns apply, though the threat of sexual violence never crosses over into actual unpleasantness. Link does behave in a pretty ungentlemanly way; it's easy to see why Cristina prefers Gauche over him.

 The action is great - I don't think Young had done any westerns, but he'd directed his share of war movies and worked with a killer lineup of actors, so he knows how to frame his trio of badasses for maximum impact. There are a lot of cool stunts, explosions, and a pretty impressive fight in a burning field- but my favorite stunt has to be an early one where Link tries to escape by tumbling down a scree-covered mountainside, and Kuroda just runs down the same slope, nimbly keeping pace. Or maybe an explosion where someone ducks under a detonating train carriage; Seemed pretty dangerous.

  The actors are still the main draw, and they're all obviously great. I've already talked enough about the two leads, but Andress is great in a thankless role - scheming and mischievous - and Delon has a lot of fun playing a seriously dickish asshole. I knew I loved him in this when he pretends to kindly help someone up to a moving train, only to shoot him off it, and then looks pleased as punch with himself. Using his charisma for evil.

 So yes, this one is very much worth it. I'm not sure why it's not better known.

A Touch of Zen

 How about... a three-hour Chinese epic?

 Well, Taiwanese, to be accurate. Originally released in two parts in 1970 and 1971, A Touch of Zen was made by Shaw Brothers legend King Hu after he moved out of mainland China, but it still tells a very Chinese Wuxia story set in the Ming dynasty.

 Gu Sheng-tsai (Shih Chun) is an amiable fourteenth-century slacker who elected not to take the administrative exams to become a scholar for the government; instead, he makes a living as a scribe and painter off a stall in the market in his small town.
 But once he notices his latest out-of-town client is up to some sneaky business, he's set on a trail that ends up with him discovering that his new neighbour, the fetching Yang Hui-zhen (Hsu Feng) is being hunted by the government. Her father was a magistrate who tried to expose an eunuch's corruption and got a death sentence for his whole family instead. And now the corrupt governmental forces are closing in on her.

 The pacing is, as you'd expect from a three-hour movie... sedate. But even though there's very little action in this first hour, the plot is interesting and Gu makes for a fun protagonist. He's the lone non-fighting character in the movie - Yang turns out to be a phenomenal, monk-trained warrior, and her co-conspirators are all defecting generals and soldiers.

 Gu falls in love with Yang, and vows to help her with his, um, knowledge of war literature; Of course his strategies end up carrying the day. The second hour of the movie is a huge amount of fun, as Yang, Gu and the sympathetic local magister run a series of ambushes and stratagems to fight the overwhelming army that's coming to get her.

 This is where the movie gets properly epic. The first act was restricted to just a few locations - the town market, Gu's house, the derelict manor where Yang is crashing. But as lady Yang reveals her backstory we're treated to some stunningly beautiful landscapes, and we also get a gorgeous-looking and extremely cool fight at a bamboo forest; A classic, and extremely influential, scene.
 The climactic confrontation and culmination of Gu's planning is, unfortunately, at night, and in town, but it's a fun scene in its own right. The problem is that... well, there's still another hour before the movie finishes after that.

 And this is where the movie kind of lost me. The last third keeps some ties to the main story, with the pivot being a great scene where Gu goes from celebrating his successful ruse to realizing the cost it had in human life, as a group of monks come to burry the dead. But the events thereon feel a bit like leftovers from the main plot, a denouement that doesn't add a huge amount to the movie and focuses mostly on new characters - the Buddhist abbot Hui-yuan (Roy Chiao) who barely figured in the first two thirds of the story, and a new antagonist.
 Hui-yuan is a cool character - a badass, pacifist/fighting monk whose sense of justice won't let him look away from the court's excesses (although he seems to have no problem when his charges ruthlessly cut down fleeing soldiers). But his role and involvement feel vestigial to the main story and add a spiritual component that... well, it doesn't come out of nowhere, but to me feels extraneous, unsatisfying after all that had come before; the story already feels finished before he even sets foot in it. And it all leads to a mystical finale which I honestly could have done without.

 As with all of these old martial arts movies, I'm kind of grading it on a curve (I feel a bit silly saying this of what's widely considered a classic; but there's a lot here, especially the action and a lot of acting choices, that feel decidedly old-fashioned). But I genuinely enjoyed it even as it dragged a bit in its last third; It's a very entertaining movie that's undeniably influential (Ang Lee is obviously a fan) and has some stand-out, beautiful action and fun characters. Well worth a watch.