Kung Fu flick with Yojimbo-style plot

[Neville]

OK, I know this is gonna be a long shot... ages ago I was sick so I skipped high school, and I watched this one on TV. It seems to me it was a more or less classic kung fu film, so it must be from the 1970s - 1980s. It starred a sort of bounty hunter that captured a wimpy, not very threatening criminal. A counterfeiter maybe? However he escapes and when the bounty hunter finds him again he is in a village with not one but two criminal gangs that protect him.

I also seem to remember that the film opened and ended with the bounty hunter dragging the captured criminal through the mud.