Lauri Blaine, a beautiful young girl in New York City's Greenwich Village gets mixed up with hippies, drug dealers, Eurotrash models and Mafia assassins when her boyfriend upsets a Mafia hood by giving away free marijuana, cutting into the gangster's drug sales.
"In my film I suggest that there is no greater mystery than that of the protagonists. War and Love are simply equated for what they are; the aftermath is inevitable, and a normal human condition, for which like the ancients one can only have pity and understanding.
Anthony Steffen, as a young gunman who works as a circus performer, witnesses the killing of some outlaws, carried out by their leader and is credited with the deed.
Centring on the legend of the four ancient Chinese heroines, the film was a novelty for audiences at the time, as the singing performance was in Cantonese and used huangmei operatic rhythms—a popular trend in the 1960s, yet it retained traditional flavours by using operatic luogu percussion in the battle scenes.
Three identical prints of a single 100 foot fixed-camera take are shown from beginning to end-roll light-flare, with a few feet of blackness preceding/bridging/following the rolls.
There's nothing like a good, opulent, gaudy musical to lift the spirits, but when it's a 1960's Hong Kong musical orchestrated by a Japanese director and composer, it breaks through the ranks as a classic of campy kitsch.