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March 8, 2014 |
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The early 1970s saw the wuxia (martial arts swordplay) movies of the late 1960s giving way to a related martial arts genre, the kung fu movie, which came to dominate Hong Kong film through the decade and into the early ‘80s. Kung fu films were generally grittier and less mythical, their action sequences emphasizing more realistic, unarmed combat over the swordplay and supernatural powers of wuxia films. Seriously trained martial artists became some of the top stars of the decade as increasing proportions of running times became devoted to combat setpieces. Once again, at the vanguard was the Shaw Brothers studio, especially in the person of director Chang Cheh. His Vengeance (1970) was one of the first trendsetters and his dozens of contributions included The Boxer from Shantung (1972), The Five Venoms (1978) and Crippled Avengers (1979). Chang's only competitor as the genre’s most influential filmmaker was his long-time action choreographer, Lau Kar Leung (aka Liu Chia Liang in Mandarin (linguistics)|Mandarin). Lau began directing his own movies for Shaws in 1975 with The Spiritual Boxer, a progenitor of the kung fu comedy. In subsequent titles like Executioners from Shaolin (1977), The 36th Chamber of Shaolin (1978), and Legendary Weapons of China (1982), Lau emphasized the traditions and philosophy of the martial arts and strove to give onscreen fighting greater authenticity and ever greater speed and intricacy. (Logan, 1995) The kung fu boom was partly fueled by enormous international popularity, and not just in East Asia. In the West, kung fu imports, dubbing|dubbed and often recut and retitled, shown as "B" films in urban theaters and on television, made Hong Kong film widely noticed, although not widely respected, for the first time. African-Americans and other racial minorities particularly embraced the genre, perhaps as an almost unprecedented source of adventure stories with non-white heroes, who furthermore often displayed a strong streak of racial and/or nationalistic pride. No single figure was more responsible for this international profile than Bruce Lee, a San Francisco-born, Hong Kong-raised actor and martial artist. As a young man in America, Lee assayed a few small roles in Hollywood movies and a supporting part on the The Green Hornet|Green Hornet TV series, as well as working as a noted martial arts instructor whose students included stars like Steve McQueen. In 1971, frustrated by the lack of opportunities for performers of Asian descent, he came back to Hong Kong . Unwilling to settle for the standard starting contract offered him by Shaws, Lee was snatched up by Golden Harvest. The deal proved to be the making of the upstart studio launched the previous year by former Shaws executive Raymond Chow. (Logan, 1995; Teo, 1997) He gained a small role in a kung fu film titled The Big Boss (1971) which was to star one of Hong Kong's most popular actors, James Tien. However, Lee's on-screen presence and physical abilities led to Tien's character being killed off mid-way through the film, with Lee being billed as the lead. The film was not only wildly popular in Hong Kong but gained distribution in the U.S. and Europe, a rarity in Hong Kong cinema at the time. On the basis of this, he starred in Fist of Fury and Way of the Dragon (both 1972), making his directing debut with the latter. Both were also immensely successful worldwide. This international success did not go unnoticed by Hollywood. Wishing to bring Bruce Lee to a mainstream American audience, Warner Brothers launched the first-ever U.S. co-production with a Chinese film company. Enter the Dragon (1973) was made entirely in English with American director Robert Clouse. Lee died just three weeks before the release, but the film went on to become the most internationally successful Chinese film to that date, grossing about US$90 million around the globe. After the death of Bruce Lee, Hong Kong suddenly found its biggest hope yet for global success gone. But Westerners, given their first taste of kung fu movies, had a huge appetite for more and Hong Kong tried to provide. A number of performers adopted similar-sounding screen names, including Bruce Li, Bruce Le, Bruce Lei (a.k.a. Dragon Lee) and Bruce Lai. Their Chinese screen names were also chosen to echo Lee's. A major "Bruceploitation" film was The Clones of Bruce Lee (1977), wherein a professor makes three Bruce Lee clones using cells from the star's body and trains them in martial arts to be sent out to fight crime. In another example, Enter the Dragon director Robert Clouse took the footage from Lee's unfinished Game of Death and added new footage featuring several doubles to form a new film released in 1978. The many Bruce Lee clones were lampooned by Sammo Hung in his 1978 film Enter the Fat Dragon. Hung's character idolises Bruce Lee and when he hears of a film being made with a Lee imposter, goes onto the set and uses his own kung fu skills (with some of Lee's traits thrown in for humour) to beat up the imposter. Arguably the only Chinese performer who has ever equaled Lee's global fame is Jackie Chan. He had worked as a stuntman on Fist of Fury and Enter the Dragon. According to one story, Lee accidentally hit Chan in the face with a weapon on the set of Enter the Dragon (Chan & Yang, 1998); after apologising for this, he offered to use Chan for all of his following films, but died before he could keep this promise. However, after Lee's death, Chan was directed by Lo Wei, director of The Big Boss and Fist of Fury, in several movies including New Fist of Fury (1976). Lo's attempt to make Chan a Lee clone was no more successful than many similar efforts. In 1978, Chan teamed up with action choreographer Yuen Woo-Ping on Yuen's directorial debut, Snake in the Eagle's Shadow. The resulting blend of physical comedy and kung fu action provided Chan with his first hit and the rudiments of what would become his signature style. Chan's follow-up movie with Yuen, Drunken Master (also 1978), and his directorial debut, The Fearless Hyena (1979), cemented his popularity. (Logan, 1995) Although these films were not the first kung fu comedies, they launched a vogue for the subgenre. Especially notable in this regard was Chan's childhood Peking Opera Academy classmate Sammo Hung, who also quickly made a career of this specialty, starring in titles like Enter the Fat Dragon (1978) and Magnificent Butcher (1979). Chan's clowning may have helped extend the life of the kung fu wave. For all that, he had become a star towards the end of the boom, and would soon help move the colony towards a new type of action. In the 1980s, he and many colleagues would forge a slicker, more spectacular Hong Kong pop cinema that would successfully compete with the post-Star Wars summer blockbusters from America. Jackie Chan and the modern kung fu film By 1983, Chan branched out into action films which, though they still used martial arts, were less limited in scope, setting and plot. His first film in this vein, Project A, added elaborate, dangerous stunts to the fights and typical slapstick humor (at one point, Chan falls from the top of a clock tower through a series of fabric canopies). The new formula grossed over HK$19 million. Chan continued to take the approach - and the budgets - to new heights in hits like Police Story (movie)|Police Story (1986). Here was Chan dangling from a speeding bus, sliding down a pole covered with exploding light bulbs, and destroying large parts of a shopping centre and a hillside shantytown. The '88 sequel called for explosions on a scale similar to many Hollywood movies and seriously injured leading lady Maggie Cheung - an occupational risk Chan had already grown used to. Thus Jackie Chan created the template for the contemporary urban action-comedy of the '80s, combining cops, kung fu and all the bodybreaking potential of the modern city with its glass, metal and speeding vehicles. Tsui Hark and Cinema City Chan's move towards larger-scale action films was parallelled by work coming out of Cinema City, the production company established in 1980 by comedians Raymond Wong, Karl Maka and Dean Shek. With movies like the spy spoof Aces Go Places (1982) and its sequels, Cinema City helped make modern special effects, James Bond-type gadgets and big vehicular stunts part of the industry vernacular (Bordwell 2000). Director/producer Tsui Hark had a hand in shaping the Cinema City style while employed there from 1981-1983 (Teo, 1997) but went on to make an even bigger impact after leaving. In such movies as Zu: Warriors from the Magic Mountain (1983) and A Chinese Ghost Story (1987, directed by Ching Siu-tung), he kept pushing back the boundaries of Hong Kong special effects. He led the way in replacing the rough and ready camera style of '70s kung fu with glossier and more sophisticated visuals and ever more furious editing. John Woo and the gangster film As a producer, Tsui facilitated the creation of John Woo's epoch-making heroic bloodshed movie A Better Tomorrow (1986). Woo's gangster saga combined fancifully choreographed (and extremely violent) gunplay with heightened emotional melodrama and broke another all-time box office record. It also jump-started the faltering career of co-star Chow Yun-Fat, who overnight became one of the colony's most popular idols and Woo's favorite leading man. (Logan, 1995) For the remainder of the '80s and into the early '90s, a deluge of films by Woo and others explored similar territory, often with a similar visual style and usually with a particularly Chinese emphasis on the fraternal bonds of duty and affection among the criminal protagonists. The most notable other auteur of these themes was Ringo Lam, who offered a less romanticized take in such films as City on Fire, Prison on Fire (both 1987), and Full Contact (1992), all starring Chow Yun-Fat. These filmmakers were accused in some quarters of cravenly glorifying Triads, or Chinese organized crime figures, whose involvement in the film business was notorious (Dannen, Long, 1997). The wire fu wave As the gangster film petered out in the early '90s, period martial arts returned as the favored action genre. But this was a new martial arts cinema that took full advantage of technical strides as well the higher budgets that came with Hong Kong's dominance of the region's screens. These lavish productions were often adapted from the more fantastical wuxia novels, which featured flying warriors in mid-air combat. Performers were trussed up on ultrathin wires to allow them to conduct gravity-defying action sequences, a technique known, sometimes disparagingly, as wire fu film|wire fu. As so often, Tsui Hark led the way with The Swordsman (1990), from the works of Jin Yong, and Once Upon a Time in China (1991), which resurrected oft-filmed hero Wong Fei Hung. Sequels and a raft of imitations followed, often with Mainland martial arts champion Jet Li, who had become the biggest new superstar with his portrayal of Wong. The other signature star of the subgenre was Taiwanese-born actress Brigitte Lin. She made an unlikely specialty of androgynous woman-warrior types, epitomized by her villainous, sex-changing eunuch in The Swordsman 2 (1992). All of these developments not only made Hong Kong the dominant cinema in East Asia, but reawakened Western interest. Jackie Chan and films like Tsui Hark's Peking Opera Blues (1986) were already building a cult following when Woo's The Killer (movie)|The Killer (1989) had a limited but successful release in the U.S. and opened the floodgates. In the '90s, Westerners with an eye on "alternative" culture became common sights in Chinatown video shops and theaters, and gradually the films became more available in the mainstream video market and even occasionally in mainstream theaters. Western critics and film scholars also began to take Hong Kong action cinema seriously and make many key figures and films part of their canon of world cinema. From here, Hong Kong came to define a new vocabulary for worldwide action cinema, with the aid of a new generation of North American filmmakers. Quentin Tarantino's Reservoir Dogs (1992) drew inspiration from City on Fire and his two-part Kill Bill (2003-04) was in large part a martial arts homage, borrowing Yuen Woo-Ping as fight choreographer and actor. Robert Rodriguez's Desperado (1995) and its 2003 sequel Once Upon a Time in Mexico aped Woo's visual mannerisms. The Wachowski brothers' The Matrix trilogy (1999-2003) borrowed from Woo and wire fu movies and also employed Yuen behind the scenes. Due to the new-found international success of Hong Kong films during the 1980s and early 1990s and the quest for bigger budgets, many of the leading lights of Hong Kong cinema left for Hollywood with budgets and pay which could not be equalled by Hong Kong production companies. John Woo left for Hollywood after his 1992 film Hard Boiled. In his 1997 film Face/Off, he brought his unique style to Hollywood. This effort was immensely popular with both critics and public alike (it grossed over US$240 million worldwide). Mission Impossible 2 grossed over US$560 million worldwide but was critically maligned. Apart from these two films, Woo has struggled to revisit his successes of the 1980s and early 1990s. After over fifteen years of success in Hong Kong cinema and a couple attempts to crack the U.S. market, Jackie Chan's 1995 film Rumble in the Bronx finally brought him recognition in the U.S. Since then, he has made several extremely successful films for U.S. studios including Rush Hour (movie)|Rush Hour (1998), Shanghai Noon (2000), Rush Hour 2 and Shanghai Knights. Between his films for U.S. studios, he still makes films for Hong Kong studios, sometimes in English (Mr. Nice Guy and Who Am I?), often set in western countries like Australia or the Netherlands, and sometimes in Cantonese (New Police Story). Because of his enormous U.S. popularity, these films are usually released in the U.S., a rarity for Hong Kong films, and generally attract respectable audiences. Jet Li has, for the large part, ceased his Hong Kong output since 1998's Hitman and worked in Hollywood since. After a minor role in Lethal Weapon 4 (1998), he has gone on to star in several Hollywood films which have performed respectably and made a name for him with American audiences. So far, he has returned to Chinese cinema for only one film: Hero (film)|Hero. Chow Yun-Fat has also moved to Hollywood. After his 1995 film Peace Hotel, he has made four films in Hollywood which have not seen as much success as Jet Li's: The Replacement Killers, The Corruptor, Anna and the King and Bulletproof Monk. He returned to China just for 1999's Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon.
category:Cinema of Hong Kong|Action cinema category:Kung fu films| category:Action films| This article is licensed under the GNU Free Documentation License. It uses material from the Wikipedia article "Hong Kong action cinema".
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