The Origins of Kung Fu Cinema, Part 6: A New Beginning

By Jean Lukitsh | Published January 15, 2008

In the immediate aftermath of World War II, the people of Hong Kong slowly began to put the pieces of their lives back together. The local film industry had been hard hit, and many actors and filmmakers either joined the anti-Japanese resistance or simply dropped out of sight. After the war, waves of refugees continued to pour into Hong Kong. Alliances were forged, deals were struck, and production resumed.

Wu Lizhu in LADY ROBIN HOOD (1947), image courtesy David Wells.

Flyer for LADY ROBIN HOOD, directed by Ren Pengnian.

As might be expected, the nimble martial arts movie-makers Ren Pengnian and Wu Lizhu were among the first to deliver product to theaters. Ren, now known in Cantonese dialect as Yam Pang-nin, had a long history of turning out low budget crowd pleasers. His wife, known as Wu Lai-chu in Cantonese, remained his favorite feisty leading lady, although she was pushing 40. (She may have been even older – I’m suspicious of 1910 as her date of birth, because it means she was only 15 when her daughter was born. That’s not impossible, but she wouldn’t have been the first actress to shave a few years off her age. And she looks older in the post-war period, although certainly those years took a toll on many people.) Ren and Wu collaborated on two films released early in 1947. LADY ROBIN HOOD, which pairs the prolific martial arts actor Walter Tso Tat-wah with Wu, retells the classic story in a traditional Chinese setting. It’s also notable for marking the Hong Kong debut of Shanghai opera expert Yuen Siu-tin, father of Yuen Wo-ping. The older Yuen had worked with Ren and Wu at the Yueming studio in Shanghai fifteen years earlier. Now he rejoined their production team.

Magazine ad for THE LADY ESCORT AND THE KNIGHT WITH A WHIP (1949).

The other martial arts film directed by Ren in 1947 was a sequel to an earlier film he had made with his wife immediately before the war. THE LADY ESCORT, PART 2 also featured Tso Tat-wah as the male lead. It was made for the Shaw brothers’ Nanyang studio. Over the next two years, Ren directed several other films in both Cantonese and Mandarin. The traditional martial arts stories, like NEO-NORTHEAST HERO (1949), a remake of Yueming’s hit series from the early 1930s, and THE LADY ESCORT AND THE KNIGHT WITH A WHIP (1949), which cast early action hero Kwan Tak-hing opposite Wu, were in Cantonese. The Mandarin language productions, which may have been intended for distribution on the Mainland, were contemporary dramas of spies and resistance fighters during the just-concluded war. The one thing all of Ren’s films had in common, though, was action. And Wu Lizhu was the whirlwind at the center of the brawls.

It’s often assumed that no kung fu movies were made in Hong Kong before the seminal THE STORY OF WONG FEI-HUNG was released in the summer of 1949. But WONG FEI-HUNG didn’t arise out of a vacuum. Besides Ren and Wu and Yuen Siu-tin, many other talented martial artists were working in the Hong Kong film industry at the end of the 1940s. Both Kwan Tak-hing and Tso Tat-wah were making action films, as was Shek Kin – soon to become the premiere villain of the Wong Fei-hung series, as well as just about every other martial arts film made in Hong Kong over the next 20 years – and a young opera performer named Sek Yin-tsi, who would make a career of playing the hero Fong Sai-yuk throughout the next decade. Shanghai opera actress Yu So-chow, daughter of Jackie Chan’s martial arts teacher Yu Jim-yuen, starred in THE KUNG FU COUPLE, which was released around the same time as THE STORY OF WONG FEI-HUNG, and then was taken on as a protege of Chin Tse-ang and Hung Chung-ho, starring in their FONG KONG HEROINE series in the early 1950s. Chin was also responsible for setting up Yu’s father as a teacher, making a space for his China Drama Academy in her own home, and enrolling her grandson Sammo Hung as one of the first students.Before Wu Pang directed THE STORY OF WONG FEI-HUNG, he made a film called WORLD OF FISTS in 1948 with Tso Tat-wah which, with its story of rival boxers, seems like a practice run for the later kung fu series. And martial artist Leung Wing-hang, choreographer of the early Wong Fei-hung films (before Lau Kar-leung’s father stepped into the role), was credited as martial arts director of the 1947 anti-Japanese resistance drama HOT-TEMPERED LEUNG’S ADVENTURE IN HONG KONG. So in the two years preceding the release of THE STORY OF WONG FEI-HUNG, all the elements were in place for a kung fu movie boom. And THE STORY OF WONG FEI-HUNG was the spark that would put Hong Kong on the way to becoming the action film capital of the world.

Flyer for BLOODSHED IN A BESIEGED CITADEL (1948).

The 1948 drama BLOODSHED IN A BESIEGED CITADEL (aka ALL THE PEOPLE OF ONE MIND), directed by Ren Pengnian and starring Wu Lizhu, has recently become available on DVD. It’s probably a good example of the kind of low budget action film that was made in the immediate post-war period. Wu plays a village woman whose husband is killed by the Japanese, inspiring her to join the resistance. Her fighting skills are never explained, but the other guerillas defer to her as a natural leader. In this clip, she has allied with the town’s prostitutes to lure the Japanese into an inn, where she single-handedly defeats them in hand-to-hand combat. The choreography is dynamic, funny, and inventive. Although Yuen Siu-tin isn’t credited on this production, it’s tempting to wonder if he was involved. The gags and reactions are, to my mind, reminiscent of the early work he and his son did with Jackie Chan. Ren and Wu also showed this kind of fluidly paced physical action in their only other surviving collaboration (that I know of), GREEDY NEIGHBORS (1933). If more of this early work by martial arts pioneers shows up on video, maybe we can continue to trace influences across the generations of filmmakers.