The alluvion of martial-arts films during the year 1972 would bring the Hong Kong film industry to the notice of the West, in a way that sporadic screenings of films from Hong Kong's film festivals failed to be able to. Generally, the history of film-making in Hong Kong had been intimately bound up with that of China. Genres structured around classical literary sources, stories from myth and folklore or from cycles of tales of Knight-errantry, low-brow comedies, melodramas and subjects inspired from opera and history which was their signature since the silent days. The key events in China's history - the marathon struggle that commenced in the late-Twenties between the nationalist ruling party, the Kuomintang (Chinese National People's Party), and the Communist Party, the long and winding and bitter war with Japan, the Communist victory of 1949 and the subsequent changes in the political line - were equally decisive in the history of the colony island. For one thing, the disruption of China's film industry and of cultural production resulted, from the Twenties onward, in an of intellectuals, writers and performers into Hong Kong.
The very first Hong Kong production company was founded in the year 1921. A decade after, there would be five more major companies in operation, surrounded by a host of smaller ones. But Hong Kong as a producer remained under the shadow of Shanghai - which was lovingly referred to as the Hollywood of the East - that would be until the city was occupied by the Japanese come the year 1937.
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| 1967's The Story Of A Discharged Prisoner was a watershed moment for Cantonese cinema. |
The situation is complicated by the existence of two Hong Kong cinemas. Their arrival of sound took place towards the latter Thirties which inspired the development of a (northern Chinese) Mandarin language cinema alongside the local Cantonese-dialect one. Mandarin cinema secured its own market until 1954 - on the mainland and then increasingly in South-east Asia, nearly obscuring Cantonese cinema by the mid 1960's. But it was within Cantonese cinema that Hong Kong's first important and popular series of martial-arts films were produced.
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| The old Tianyi studio -Shanghai, 1925 |
It was during the Sino-Japanese War, Tianyi, one of Shanghai's major studios which was founded in 1925, would set up shop in Hong Kong. The studio manager was one of the Shaw brothers, Shaw Runde. The company began turning out popular Cantonese-genre films before switching to Mandarin around 1950 to enable it to service the chain of Shaw theaters in South-east Asia. Its main rival during the late Fifties and early Sixties was an offshoot of the Singapore-based Cathay Organisation Holdings Limited, Motion Pictures & General Investment (MP & GI) - which of late has been historical as being the hosts of the first THX and digital cinemas in Singapore. By 1965, the Shaws had comfortably taken over operations after emerging as Shaw Brothers, a new corporation headed by media mogul Sir Run Run Shaw (who is still very much among the living and teetering on the age of 106), in 1957. They moved their small Kowloon studio to Clearwater Bay Peninsula, completing their legendary Shaw Movietown studio in 1958. Their objective was to be able to maintain a large output of productivity, initially 50 films were expected to be made each year,(a figure that was reduced significantly to half in the 1970's) - whilst establishing superior Shanghai-style production values.
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| It's a Shaw thing. |
The Shaws were prescient in making their move just in the nick of time. By the early 1960's, Hong Kong had recovered from Imperial Japan's wartime occupation and the cinema was now a full-fledged boom industry. By the mid-Sixties, mainland production virtually ceased all operations. Shaw brothers would now produce musical and romantic drama fare that both MP & GI reaped lucratively from - and in fact what would prove something of a specialty was the historical drama, a genre that Mandarin cinema with its vaster market and therefore larger budgets could mount with similar authenticity. Films were made in color and then onto widescreen. A number of noted directors worked for the Shaws during this period, including Chin-ch'uan (King Hu) and Chang Cheh, whose bastion of martial arts films have achieved a measure of exposure in the cinemas of the West.
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| She'll have a G&T no ice - from the gender defying Come Drink With Me (1966) |
It was the sensuous sophistication of the films of Li Han-hsiang that provided the Shaw brothers with the money-spinners that facilitated their reputation. A graduate of the Peking Art Institute, Li was attracted to Hong Kong in 1948; aware of the possibilities in the colony's fumbling attempts to rival mainland production and signed on as a contract director at Shaws in 1955. He turned gradually from small-scale socially-oriented themes to decidedly more classical subjects - to which he devoted increasingly lavish and epic dimension. His major box-office success was Liang Shan Bo yu Zhu Ying Tai (The Love Eterne,1963) a Mandarin musical which was adapted from an operetta to screen and co-directed by King Hu, who three years later was to revivify the martial-arts film with his celebratory Ta tsu hsia (Come Drink With Me, 1966), also produced for the Shaw brothers.
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| Beauty was eternal for Hsi shi (Pak Yan) |
The apogee of the historical drama reached a plateau during Li's time. Li would part ways with the Shaws in the year 1963. Taiwan's situation as a film production center has been very much a direct function of its political situation with a very stringent code of production in operation and an equally as stringent censorship. Production has been dominated by the output of the government-owned Central Film Studio. Escapist contemporary melodrama had proved to be the most substantial genre. But Taiwan has also operated as something of an offshoot of Hong Kong, as in Li's case. Li returned to the Shaws in 1971, but not before such films as Hsi Shi (Hsi Shih: Beauty of Beauties,1965) and the remarkable Ti Ying (The Girl Who Saved Her Father,1970), with their quite extraordinarily expressive use of landscape and performers, would reveal the limitations inherent in the studio system as it operated in Hong Kong.
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| Original Movie Poster for 1979's The Last Tempest |
Although the martial-arts film dominated production from about 1966 for the next ten years to follow, any list of key films of the Seventies must not preclude the works of Li-Han hsiang. Undeniably the most industrious of the decade's films were those comprising his two-part epic Ch'ing-kuo ch-ing, ch-eng (The Last Tempest,1976). The two films respectively examine the declining years of the Ch'ing dynasty and the rise of the Reform movement; ever so hypnotically and with resonance. They draw gorgeously modulated performances from a number of Shaws' key actors. Other central works, however in a more humble vein, are in two-part satire on the subjects of power and corruption consisting of Ta-chain-fa (The Warlord,1972) and Ch' ou-we(Scandal,1974) and a number of compendia of erotic fables such as 1974's Golden Lotus (Jin ping shuang yan), a voluptuous and entertaining version of the Chinese erotic novel, and Feng hua hsueh yueh (Moods of Love,1977). In the 1980's he made two more films; historical epics of Empress Dowager Tz'u-Hsi, concentrating on the Empress mother's early life.
Distinctive balletic interpretations of martial-arts movies appeared in the works of King Hu, including Hsia nu (A Touch of Zen,1969). Ying-ch'un-ko-chi feng po (The Fate of Lee Khan,1973) and 1975's The Valiant Ones (Zhong lie tu). The superlative philosophical swordplay thrillers would be produced fast and furiously courtesy of Ch'un Yuan during his Shaws days.
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| Scare-a Bruce, Scare-a-Bruce will you do the Fandango? |
The martial-arts films that are best acknowledged on an international scale, star the charismatic Bruce Lee, who died at the age of 32, a death which caused great speculation, albeit was ruled as a fatal allergic reaction to painkillers. It would be a triune series of comedies that pointed to the development of brand new distinctive cinema for Hong Kong, Hsu Kuanwen (Michael Hui), a television personality and ex-Shaw Brothers actor-cum-director, would bring a fresh wrinkle to the low-life Cantonese comedy in Kuei ma shuang hsiang (The Last Message,1976) and Ban jin ba liang (The Private Eyes,1976), starring Wong Yuk-see, which centered humorously on the problems of survival in contemporary Hong Kong.
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| A montage of various scenes from Cheh Chang's The Angry Guest (1972) |
Hui, with his studio experience, forms a bridge between the Hong Kong cinema's veterans with their mainland backgrounds and a spate of new filmmakers, many of whom had abroad film-school and television experience. These younger set of filmmakers found that the economic climate of the mid-Seventies and the concomitant unadventurousness on the behalf of major studios curtailed any hope of entry into the industry. Directors such as Allen Fong and Foo Ji Ching (Father and Son,1981) and Hsu An-hua (Ann Hui On-Wah), with the Sylvia Chang Ai-Chia vehicle; Feng chieh (The Secret,1979) T'ou pen nuhai (Boat People,1982) and Fong's Wu nui ( Dancing Bull,1990) attempted films that spoke with some urgency to the situation of life in Hong Kong while acknowledging both the island's legacy of Chinese culture and the lively grassroots industry where drug and embezzlement scandals thus become instant thrillers.