Films of Fury: The Kung Fu Movie Book Read Online Free PDF

1950s and early 1960s, the Huang Fei-hong movies practically monopolized the market. By 1956, twenty-five of the year’s twenty-nine kung fu pictures starred this hero.
    These films were in the cinemas practically every month, and there were some years when the only kung fu movies were the Huang Fei-hong ones. Just about the only other film series that was any kind of competition at all concerned the aforementioned Fan Shiyu (aka Fang Shih Yu aka Fong Sai-yuk ), an eighteenth-century, fiery-tempered master swordsman and bare-handed fighter who was trained at the Shaolin Temple. There were about sixteen films concerning this legendary young man over the same two decades the Huang movies reigned.
    The reason why the genre didn’t flourish sooner is obvious. Just like the great dance movies of Fred Astaire and Gene Kelly , great kung fu is not easy to fake. It can, and has, been done, but it is rarely convincing unless the actor is also, not coincidentally, a good dancer. It takes years of dedication and discipline to perform kung fu well on-screen, no matter whether you are a martial arts student, a Peking Opera alumnus, a gymnast, an acrobat, a dancer, or an actor. And if you don’t perform kung fu well it is painfully evident to the audience.
    Still, the Hong Kong film industry wasn’t very artistic during the 1950s and 1960s. Seemingly, just about the only man who seemed to know what to do with a camera was King Hu — an epic filmmaker who toiled in Taiwan. He probably was the best action filmmaker China had ever seen, but far from the best moviemaker. This is not as fine a distinction as it might first appear. The “film” aspect of entertainment is technical. The “movie” is emotional. King Hu’s films, including his masterpiece, A Touch of Zen (1966), concentrate far more on character interaction and cinematic technique than on the niceties of the kung fu.
    “I have no knowledge of kung fu whatsoever,” the director said in a 1989 interview. “My action scenes come from the stylized combat of Peking Opera .” To Hu, kung fu was dance, and was treated as such.
    There’s hardly any action in A Touch of Zen , but plenty of mood and symbolism — not to mention three distinct endings — within its three-hour running time. Rumor has it that the studio was so impressed with the first ninety minutes, but so unhappy with its inconclusive ending, that they asked for a more fight-oriented finale. King Hu showed what could be done cinematically with what the Chinese movie industry had to work with, but essentially his films were magnificent visual elaborations of legends and stage plays.
    But one of the most important reasons kung fu films did not flourish earlier is a fascinating sociological one. The Hong Kong Chinese had their hands full with surviving. After the turbulent dawn of the 20 th century, they contended with the Boxer Rebellion, Japanese invasion, civil war, and World War II. Once the Communists took over the mainland and the somewhat supercilious British took over Hong Kong, movies were the last thing on the breadwinners’ minds.
    As far as 1950s Hong Kong society was concerned, the only people who had any free time would be spoiled housewives, and their hard-working husbands didn’t want them ogling handsome hunk heroes at the local cinema. So the local movie industry felt inclined to have women playing their male movie action heroes (which is something, considering that they hadn’t allowed women to even play women’s Peking Opera roles for quite some time).
    The result were cute, interesting, but hardly convincing tales of heroic chivalry that held back Hong Kong action cinema for nearly a decade, as the rest of the world produced stirring masterpieces. By the 1960s, the South China audience was finally ready for real kung fu action, and a few folk were ready to give it to them … with a vengeance.

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