Xie Jin's powerful and colorful film tells the story of a young woman who escapes indentured servitude on Hainan Island in the 1930s to become a soldier fighting for revolution on the battlefield. A rousing potboiler that quickly became a classic, the film derives from a novel indirectly inspired by an actual women's battalion. The success of this version gave birth first to a 1964 ballet that was one of the eight so-called "model operas" and a film of the ballet made during the Cultural Revolution in 1971 (but not directed by Xie). It may well have been the success of this film that led to Xie’s rehabilitation by Jiang Qing. Despite—or perhaps because of—its revolutionary fervor, the film also reveals Xie to be a “poet of the libido,” in Tony Rayns’ phrase; the critic calls Red Detachment a “sexy tropical-gothic,” like the Powell-Pressburger Black Narcissus (1947).