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Bruce Lee in a still from The Big Boss . The 1971 film broke Hong Kong box office records and changed martial arts movie history. Photo: Criterion Collection

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Explainer | From One-Armed Swordsman to The Big Boss with Bruce Lee and Drunken Master with Jackie Chan, the films that built Hong Kong martial arts cinema

King Hu’s Come Drink With Me brought artistry to martial arts cinema, Chang Cheh’s One-Armed Swordsman a year later added modern camera angles and gore
Angela Mao paved a path for Bruce Lee to become a legend, Jackie Chan added comedy to the genre, and Jet Li and Tsui Hark updated it for the ‘90s generation

Asian cinema: Hong Kong film

Richard James Havis

Published: 6:15pm, 25 Dec 2022

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Hong Kong’s martial arts films have a long and distinguished history. We look at some classic films that contributed to the development of the kung fu cinema tradition.

Rooted in local culture

Since 1949, around 100 films have been made that depict the life of Cantonese martial arts legend Wong Fei-hung – they make up the world’s longest-running film series.

The films show Wong as an honourable individual steeped in Confucian values, and would only resort to violence when discussion, humility and compromise failed.

Kwan Tak-hing (right) in the title role in The Story of Wong Fei-hung, Part One: Wong Fei-hung’s Whip that Smacks the Candle (1949).

Kwan Tak-hing, a dignified actor who also knew martial arts, played Wong on screen some 77 times, and revered him as “a man of substance”.

In spite of their ingrained Confucian values, the Wong Fei-hung films featured many fight scenes, most of which were based around the southern Chinese kung fu fighting style known as hung ga.

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They also espoused a kind of Cantonese nationalism which made them popular in Hong Kong, documenting Cantonese folklore and celebrating southern Chinese traditions such as the lion dance.

The stirrings of a new wave

Shaw Brothers studio rightly gets the credit for launching the new wave of modern martial arts films (see below) but they certainly didn’t come out of nowhere.

In the early 1960s, filmmakers working in Cantonese – Shaw Brothers released its films in Mandarin Chinese – had raised the production values of sword-fighting films and made the action tougher.

Chen Si-si in a still from The Jade Bow (1966).

The Jade Bow had a well-wrought, multilayered storyline and more grounded fight scenes choreographed by legends-in-the-making Lau Kar-leung and Tong Kai – who were quickly poached by Shaw Brothers after the film’s release.

Other exceptional films from the period include The Story of Sword Sabre parts 1 and 2, and Temple of the Red Lotus, which has “realistic swordplay sequences depicted with a fair amount of blood and gore”, according a critic at the time.

Bringing artistry to the genre

Shaw Brothers had been working on modernising martial arts films since the early 1960s – the studio was impressed by the international success of the James Bond films, and decided its action movies needed an upgrade.

Cheng Pei-pei in a still from Come Drink with Me (1966).

But it didn’t get this right until 1966, with King Hu’s hit Come Drink With Me. The elegant film, which featured former dancer Cheng Pei-pei as a heroine wielding twin daggers, was an unlikely movie to lead a martial arts revolution – the literary Hu regarded his work as an extension of Chinese art and literature.

Hu said he knew nothing about martial arts, and adapted Beijing Opera techniques for the beautifully composed action sequences. He said this approach proved a “disaster” at the start of the shoot, and that the film was saved by Cheng’s lucid folk dance and jazz dance abilities.

Cheng quickly became a superstar.

The film that changed everything

Chang Cheh’s 1967 film One-Armed Swordsman for Shaw Brothers revolutionised the sword-fighting film genre with hard-hitting fight sequences courtesy of Lau Kar-leung and Tong Kai, modern camera angles, and bloody violence.

Jimmy Wang Yu in a still from One-Armed Swordsman (1967).

The film was a huge hit in Hong Kong, partly because it tapped into the anti-authoritarian zeitgeist of the then-colony in the late 1960s. It made the glamorous Jimmy Wang Yu a star, and launched a years’-long wave of similar blood-drenched wuxia movies.

Chang always dismissed his breakthrough film for not being “artistic”. Yet it stands as one of the prolific director’s most highly regarded movies.

Fighting with fists instead of swords

Sword-fighting films were still the big thing in 1970, so when Shaw Brothers’ biggest male star, Jimmy Wang Yu, went to studio head Run Run Shaw and asked to direct a kung fu film, his boss was not enthusiastic.

Jimmy Wang Yu in a still from The Chinese Boxer (1970).

Firstly, actors acted and did not direct, and secondly, fist fighting films were not what audiences wanted to see.

But Wang used his star power to convince him, and The Chinese Boxer, a film which pitted Chinese martial artists against murderous Japanese karate experts, was a smash hit in 1970, opening the way for the kung fu fighting of Bruce Lee.

“My idea for Chinese Boxer was karate against the iron fist of kung fu,” Wang told Grady Hendrix.

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“I wrote a script, but Run Run Shaw said, ‘No, you have no experience – you’re a big star, don’t try and be a movie director.’ I told Run Run to let me do it, or I would quit. He did, and it broke box office records. Shaw gave me a HK$200 bonus.”

Girl power!

Everyone knows that it was Bruce Lee who turned the Americans on to kung fu – except that it was actually Angela Mao Ying.

After Five Fingers of Death, which starred Lo Lieh, unexpectedly topped the US charts in early 1973, Mao’s Hapkido and Lady Whirlwind arrived to enthral the American public.

Angela Mao in a still from Lady Whirlwind (1972).

The latter was mind-bogglingly renamed Deep Thrust to capitalise on the popularity of the mainstream porn film Deep Throat, even though there were no sex scenes in Mao’s films.

Mao’s success was well deserved, as she could really fight – she was a Chinese opera star in Taiwan, where she performed roles using weapons, and she had studied hapkido in Korea alongside Sammo Hung Kam-bo.

Mao is still revered by martial arts film fans in the US.

The Man, the Myth, the Legend

Bruce Lee’s martial arts debut, 1971’s The Big Boss, was highly anticipated in Hong Kong – the star had visited to promote the Chinese television release of American TV series The Green Hornet, in which he played the Hornet’s sidekick Kato.

Bruce Lee in a still from The Big Boss (1971). Photo: Criterion Collection

Lee broke some boards on the popular show Enjoy Yourself Tonight, and was quickly snapped up by Golden Harvest. The Big Boss followed, and quickly broke box office records. The rest is history, myth and legend in equal parts.

Just for laughs

Hong Kong filmmakers were always looking for a new take on a genre, and when choreographer/director Yuen Woo-ping and producer Ng See-yuen thought of combining kung fu with comedy, they realised Jackie Chan, whose career was then languishing, would fit the bill.

The resulting Snake in the Eagle’s Shadow (1978) was a big hit with local audiences, and the trio followed up the same year with the classic Drunken Master, which featured a Chan as a young Wong fei-hung whose martial arts improved when he drank alcohol.

Jackie Chan in a still from Drunken Master (1978).

Ng said the idea for the film arose during a visit to some Taiwanese film distributors: “Everybody was drunk and playing guessing games, but me and Yuen were sober and we got to taking about how they looked like they were doing kung fu in a drunken fashion.”

Drunken Master made Jackie Chan a superstar.

Back to their roots

Martial arts films gradually fell out of fashion in the 1980s until they were reinvented in the early 1990s by producer-director Tsui Hark with the Once Upon a Time in China series.

Making use of fast cuts, mainland Chinese actor Jet Li Lianjie’s flashy wushu, and elaborately choreographed fight sequences, the films recast Wong Fei-hung as a Chinese nationalist torn between modernisation and the need to uphold tradition.

Jet Li in a still from Once Upon a Time in China.

“I got to thinking that Chinese history in the early part of the [20th] century was a very turbulent period, so why would Wong remain a placid traditionalist?” Tsui said. “That was the engine that drove the picture.”

Tsui’s films single-handedly started the martial arts film boom of the early 1990s.

In this regular feature series on the best of Hong Kong cinema, we examine the legacy of classic films, re-evaluate the careers of its greatest stars, and revisit some of the lesser-known aspects of the beloved industry.

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