Though it single-handedly rebooted the Asian action film, director King Hu’s gloriously poetic, two-fisted 1966 martial arts spectacle “Come Drink With Me” is finally reissued on DVD as part of the Shaw Brothers Classic Collection, a long-overdue American series initiated under the auspices of the Weinstein Company, Genius Products, and the current Shaw catalog copyright holders, Celestial Pictures.

By the mid-1960s, the Shaw Brothers Studios had been churning out period action dramas for decades alongside scores of comedies, musicals, and dramas. But prior to “Come Drink With Me,” the Chinese wuxia pan film, a unique homegrown genre of magical sword-fight movies based upon popular novels, had been rather bloodless and stately affairs.

In the late 1950s, Beijing-born King Hu (1931-97) joined Shaw as an actor before moving behind the scenes as an art director, then into the role of assistant director, and finally into the director’s chair. After taking the reins, in 1965, of a World War II drama called “Sons of the Good Earth,” Hu infused his sophomore directorial outing, “Come Drink With Me,” with a personal vision that was absent from much of Shaw’s assembly-line filmmaking. He had studied Chinese history and design, and his attention to period detail in costumes, settings, and lighting were a marvel. From the rough-hewn, Ming Dynasty-era rural tavern in which the first half of the film primarily takes place, to the set-bound fairy-tale wonder world in which it climaxes, “Come Drink With Me” is a visual feast.

As an admirer of period films from elsewhere in Asia, Hu (aided immeasurably by the fight choreographer Han Yingjie) steeped the gravity-defying sword fights and bloody, kinetic massed attacks of “Come Drink With Me” in the athletic theatricality of the Peking Opera and the ruthless sword-point camera dances of ’60s-era Japanese “chanbara” (or samurai films) of director Kihachi Okamoto and others, then in the midst of their own golden age.

The film’s story smuggles a mystical knight’s spiritually mandated fight with the renegade Buddhist abbot who trained him inside a more conventional and coherent kidnap, ransom, and rescue intrigue. After a group of outlaws, led by the villainous Jade-Faced Tiger (Chen Hung Lieh), kidnap her brother, Golden Swallow (Cheng Pei Pei), a combat prodigy, arrives masquerading as a man to ensure her sibling’s safe return and preserve the sovereignty of the government her family represents. Just as the outlaws are about to put her fighting abilities to the test, a vagabond identified as Drunken Cat (Yueh Hua) arrives on the scene. A series of spectacular fights, assassination attempts, and intrigues eventually exposes the truth about Golden Swallow’s gender and Drunken Cat’s supernatural fighting prowess.

Unlike most of Shaw’s contract directors, Hu indulged a meticulous on-set diligence and attention to every aspect of the film. Actors and technicians worked from unsparingly specific storyboards and production sketches he had prepared and distributed. The film’s gloriously loopy beauty (especially in the latter portions) was a revelation to Asian filmgoers when it was released. An aspiring Taiwanese filmmaker, Ang Lee, was so taken with “Come Drink With Me” (and the films that followed it, such as “Dragon Gate Inn” and 1971’s “A Touch of Zen”), that he eventually created a valentine to Hu’s chaste, high-flying romanticism with “Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon,” with Ms. Cheng as the villainous Jade Fox.

But Hu’s single-minded perfectionism and inflexibility led him into conflict with Shaw Brothers production chief Run Run Shaw. The director’s disinterest in maintaining a Poverty Row shooting pace and acceding to Mr. Shaw’s creative dictates ended his tenure at Shaw Brothers soon after “Come Drink With Me” was released. Unlike his contemporaries Zhang Che and Lau Kar-Leung, as well as acolyte Tsui Hark (who provides an interesting, though guarded personal reminiscence about working with King Hu on the DVD’s extras), Hu made fewer than a dozen films before passing away in 1997 while hunting for backers on what would have been his 12th feature in Los Angeles.

An extravagantly talented visual stylist with a gift for illuminating the borderland where myth, history, magic, faith, heroism, and regret intertwine, Hu found that his career, unfortunately, paralleled that of the equally brilliant and equally unbankable 20th-century screen romantic Josef von Sternberg. One hopes this new release will put the work of a filmmaker whom the film scholar David Bordwell declared “probably Hong Kong’s finest director of the 1960s and 1970s,” closer in reach to American audiences who have some catching up to do.